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Non fiction

Tempo e vinganza

By Anxo A. Rei Ballesteros

About this book

This is an original and daring analysis of the conception of time in contemporary times through Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rei Ballesteros approaches Hamlet in a very personal and extremely rigorous way. He interprets the expression of a new conception of time and life as a symptom, a conception that separated traditional society and culture from a world in which measuring and counting were becoming the main subjects. This book goes back to the heart of the 21st century, and at the same time presents a passing of time that is “harmonious”, natural and local, and another one that is primarily urban, cosmopolitan and tries to ignore the restrictions of nature, where there is linearity, acceleration and speed. Once this is stated -- and it s the conceptual unit of this essay -- Rei Ballesteros reflects on some suggestive approaches to fundamental topics in our society, such as love, death, family, origin and community.

Book fragment

Let us go back to Act I, Scene II. For the first time young Hamlet appears on stage. The prince has not had his meeting with the spectre of his death father. He does not know, therefore, a crucial and decisive fact for him and the future evolution of the play; that it was his uncle Claudio, the second and current husband of the queen, who -- with cowardly premeditation -- murdered his own brother. He ignores that crime so far. His bitterness, the disgust that he claims that he feels for his life, his suicidal thoughts, etc, do not have anything to do, yet, with any revenge plot.

What happens to him? Why does he suffer so much? Because of the sorrow for the still recent death of his father? Of course. But there is something else, something that provides Hamlet's suffering with his never ending melancholy, that peculiar sarcastic and outspoken character. There is something else, namely, that indecorous speed, that interrupted urgency with which, in Elsinor, two opposite events, the burial and the wedding, happened one after the other.