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Table 2. Elements of Carnival in Hamnet Performances.
Feature How Expressed
(1) Valorization of Eros, life force exuberant spirit of Hamnet activities
(2) Concatenation of life and death; Punch-and-Judy-like treatment of death
preoccupation with death, slapdash
treatment of it
(3) Transformations of masking of identity through use of nicks;
identity textual "costumes" for roles; release from RL
identity, license to be and do what you want;
gender-switching
(4) Celebration, preoccupation virtual representation of bodily functions, e.g.,
w the body e.g., "piddling," "farting"
(5) Subversion of established improvised parodization of Shakespeare; validation
power of rules and practices of IRC through mockery
(6) Communitas team spirit; awareness of mutual undertaking; making
history together; celebration; champagne
(7) Valorization of "low" language obscenity; slang; colloquialisms
(8) Rejection of decorum breaches of both theater etiquette and IRC
Netiquette: flirtation; noisy audience; throwing fruit;
stealing nicks
(9) Anticlassical aesthetic multiplicity of improvisational styles, and voices:
juxtaposition of oral/written; old/new; high/low,
(10) Carnival as participatory textual spectacle: event with beginning and end;
spectacle performers vs. audience; blurring of boundaries; sense
of occasion
(11) Sense of abandon the ilinx of wordplay
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