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Sights of Elsinore


Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival

3rd August 1980


Devised by Roger Pringle



A programme of poems and other writings inspired by Hamlet



Readings by:


Jane Lapotaire


Tony Church


Michael Pennington

from Twisted Tales of Shakespeare
Richard Armour
from Outlines of Everything
Stephen Leacock
A Limerick
Anon
Hamlet in Russia
Boris Pasternak, trans. Robert Lowell
They all want to play Hamlet
Carl Sandburg
from Some Reflections on Hamlet
John Martin-Harvey
Prayers at Elsinore
John Cotton
A Flourish for the Prince of Denmark
Seamus Heaney
Hamlet’s Soliloquy, Imitated
Richard Jago
from Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
An anecdote by John Barrymore
from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
W. S.  Gilbert
Tragic Error
Richard Drain
from Table Talk
S. T. Coleridge
from Wilhelm Meister
J. W. Von Goethe
from the introduction to The Marowitz  Hamlet
Charles Marowitz
Hamlet
Wole Soyinka
Hamlet
Bertolt Brecht, trans. J. Willett
from Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 4
William Shakespeare
from the Diary of Edward Thomas
Inside Yorick’s Skull
Anthony Edkins
Atropos to Ophelia
Alun Lewis
Dialogue - Hamlet/Conscience
Marina Tsvetayeva, trans. V. Markov
Ophelia
Peter Huchel, trans. H. Beissel
Melancholy Prince
Dom Moraes
Ophelia
Dom Moraes
Hamlet the Poet
Nizar Qabbani, trans. A. Al-Udhari
Ballad of Another Ophelia
D. H. Lawrence
Some theatrical anecdotes
from The Poet at the Breakfast Table
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Visitor
Brendan Kennelly
from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard
from Théâtre Complet
Francois M. A. De Voltaire
A description of David Garrick’s Hamlet
Georg Lichtenberg
Elsinore
Jorge de Sena, trans. S. Macedo
from Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
The Five Hamlets
Roy Fuller
Polonius
Walter de la Mare
Polonius
Miroslav Holub, trans. I Milner and G. Theiner
Hamletism
Antoni Slinomski, trans. C. Milosz and P. D. Scott
On an Icy Day
Iain Crichton Smith
from Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
from Life of Shakespeare, 1709
Nicholas Rowe
Abdication December 1936 - June 1972
Michael Burn
Another Hamlet Monologue
Rui Knopfli, trans. S. Macedo
from the Mysterious Affair at Elsinore
Michael Innes
Elegy of Fortinbras
Zbigniew Herbert, trans. S. Milosz
from Shakespeare and the Ghost in Hamlet
Sidney Lee
Hamlet
Vachel Lindsay

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