Hamlet by William Shakespeare

21:52Jeff:Okay, so the king of Denmark has been dead for a couple of months. Like body is barely cold in the ground. His son Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is furious that his mother Gertrude has already gotten married again. And he has married his dead father's brother Claudius. So the ghost of the dead king appears to two of Hamlet's friends. It won't talk to them, though, but they summon Hamlet, and the ghost reveals to Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius, who poured poison in his ear. Hamlet vows to avenge his father's death. It does not go well. Along the way, Hamlet accidentally attacks somebody else.

22:31Jeff:There's a sword fight where the tips of the swords are poisoned, but the swords get switched during the fight, kind of a princess bride feeling moment. So both Hamlet and the person he's dueling with end up poisoned. There's a cup of poison that the wrong person drinks. And by the end, everyone is dead. Hamlet's girlfriend, Ophelia, commits suicide because Hamlet is driven mad by grief. But one of the people he has accidentally killed is her father. So she's also driven mad by grief and by having been abandoned by her lover. There is a lot going on here. The body count starts at one with the dead king in the ground.

23:06Jeff:And then seven more people die along the way. Is it seven? So Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. I guess those are the seven, right? Oh, well, yeah, yeah, and Hamlet. Oh, and Hamlet. I forgot. The Hamlet. Let angels sing thee to the rest, sweet prince. Okay, so a couple things I want to say just about this. This idea, there was this story, the tragedy of Amleth that was kicking around before. also Thomas Kidd's The Spanish Tragedy was probably the pinnacle of the more formulaic version of this. What to say about the fact that Shakespeare's son's name is Hamnet?

23:48As far as I can tell, there is no direct correlation, right? Everything that we know is that this is maybe a more common name than we think. It's just one of those things. However, it's also there. So it just is and I think one of the great pleasures of Shakespeare one of the great pleasures of having a canon there are many downsides but then you can refer to canons and you can play with it like Maggie O 'Farrell does in Hamlet or as Stephen Coogan does in Hamlet 2 or that Tom Stoppard does in Shakespeare in Love or something like this so but in terms of what we actually know we don't know much we just don't know much it's a fertile mystery what the relationship is that's all I've got to say about this at this point.

24:33There's really not much else to say.

24:35Jeff:And all we can glean from Maggie O 'Farrell's Hamnet is just based on timelines lining up that around the time that Hamlet goes into production is within a few years of Hamlet, not Hamlet, of Shakespeare's son Hamnet dying during the plague. And so we know that Hamnet died while Shakespeare, or that becomes the background. It's happening while Shakespeare is writing this play. He's clearly, this is a fathers and sons man play on so many levels yeah uh that's happening but we only really know that because timelines line up what what more is happening in shakespeare's life or what more is going on in culture at the time that informed this is a mystery and i think you could drive yourself nuts trying to ground that or you can just let it be part of it doesn't really matter The work is so good on its own.

25:28Another strategy for understanding Shakespeare, dealing with Shakespeare, is something that John Keats wrote about Shakespeare himself, which is this idea of negative capability. He said, Shakespeare's great genius was negative capability, which is the ability to hold more than one conflicting idea in your head at one time and not go crazy. So let them exist as possibility fields to be explored. And you don't have to choose a truth or what you think happened because it can't be known. So you get this really evocative and generative suspension of certainty, which is a lot of fun if you can allow yourself to have fun with it.

26:04Suspension of certainty that is fun for Hamlet is not the way he interacts with the world, but ergo the problem there is your father's death. I want to linger here on something that when I was reading it to Rowan the other day, I was struck by is how compelling the opening is. you know we get these these foot soldiers on the wall and they're they see a ghost and it's come back multiple times and they're trying to decide should we tell hamlet about it won't speak to us so we shall we tell the prince who's back it looks like his dad we should probably mention this right and then hamlet's own interrogation of it that's a very sort of it feels very modern to have a hook this is a plot what is this ghost this is a ghost story what does the ghost want what is the ghost want.

26:48And I was listening to a podcast I like recently sort of bemoan a modern algorithmically driven tactic, which is to have a murder in the first five minutes and then a flashback. And I was like, even 600 years ago, we were trying to figure out how to hook people's attention to the beginning. And this is a way to do that. And then what you come back is, Hamilton has all this knowledge and his journey is one of consciousness and understanding because he knows pretty quickly that Claudius did what he was afraid he was going to do. And so the drama of the plot, one of the great interventions here, is the drama of the plot is not how is Hamlet going to get revenge, is how does Hamlet deal with the truth of what has happened?

27:33And his investigation is a moral and one of conscience that it is a sort of fact because it's actually very simple, right? There's a very simple morality here. It's like Claudius killed his dad. He should be killed. But Shakespeare's like, that's too simple. That's too easy here. Let's see. So do we want to do, let's do Shakespeare stuff. Who wrote it? Let's do what we can say about Shakespeare. I think it is interesting to think about who Shakespeare was through the reality, which is people think he didn't exist. I think that's an interesting way of understanding what we're dealing with here in a couple different ways.

28:14Jeff:You know you've made it when a conspiracy theory exists about whether you were real or not. Yes. Yeah. There's sort of the anti-Stratfordians. These are a group of people that really go back. Mark Twain was one of these people, weirdly. Mark Twain was inventing typewriters and believing Shakespeare didn't exist. What an odd guy. Like this is not a fringe theory so much as it is a persistent and strange one. And it comes out of really two veins is the best of my understanding. I'm not an expert in the anti-Stratfordian. So I'm sort of paraphrasing what I've understood and what I've looked up a little bit over the last couple weeks.

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29:59Find it all on ollie.com. That's O-L-L-Y dot com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Two things. One is a paucity of direct Shakespeare, I wrote this stuff. We just don't have it. We just don't have it. and the second is and i think this is more interesting a fundamental disbelief that these things exist that these plays exist that shakespeare could be this good as he was right rebecca like that's kind of the two veins this comes out of that i think that's it that those

30:39Jeff:are the two that are going on and then there was an interesting note in the intro to the folger edition that i read that was like also shakespeare seemed to be a pretty conventional guy yeah and And the language of these plays is unruly and creative and artistic. And maybe people have a hard time with that guy. Like, really? That guy could do this? Yeah. And Stoppard builds a little bit of that into the invention of... Sorry, I'm getting confused. That's a different Stoppard play. Shakespeare in Love. But I think people with their heads screwed on mostly right say, yeah, Shakespeare wrote it. And he was just really good.

31:19I think that's the Occam's razor, right, Rebecca? I agree. He just was that guy. One of the ironies is a lot of the people that argue against the anti-Stratfordians think that it needed to be someone more well-educated, like Francis Bacon or somebody, because Shakespeare couldn't have been that smart. What's funny is in Ben Johnson's inscription for the first folio, he kind of makes fun of Shakespeare for not being that educated. He has a little Latin and less Greek because he doesn't make Greek reference. He doesn't make very little where a more traditionally highly educated playwright would have a lot more Greek shit in it.

31:50Shakespeare just doesn't. So right at the beginning, people, his contemporaries are saying, it's amazing he's doing all this stuff even though he's unlearned, unlettered.

31:58Jeff:If you try to think about the books today that ring both bells, that do really well commercially. That's a really interesting. That people like, that they engage with, that they have fun with, the books that sell. and that get critical and commercial acclaim. Those exist in a sweet spot that is not super highbrow. It's not dropping references to the most difficult classical texts you've ever read. It's not the author on every page reminding everyone how educated they are. Those books exist and they serve their own purposes, but Shakespeare lives in that sweet spot. And my impression of how the plays landed at the time that they were new is that they landed in that sweet spot as well, that you could be an educated person who was pretty literary and pick up a lot of these references.

32:46Jeff:He is making like, he's dropping stuff from the Aeneid and you can enjoy that. But if you're somebody who like, I just want a good story, you're also going to get that from Hamlet. And that to me is a further piece of evidence that this could have been a pretty normal guy who had an extraordinary mind and a very creative way with language and was able to do something nobody else had done. But the idea of like that these plays would have needed to be produced by someone coming down from the ivory tower doesn't work for me. Like folks coming down from the ivory tower cannot reach the common reader very successfully.

33:23I'm also going to do a very poor job of summarizing multiple centuries of evolution here in the next 60 seconds, but I'm going to give it a go, which is that one of the other things we wrestle with as a modern reader of Shakespeare is that Shakespeare seems amazing is because we've been taught that things like Shakespeare are amazing because Shakespeare is essential to the canon. Like there's a self-reinforcing thing that's happened over the decades and centuries. From the jump, Shakespeare was very well regarded, even by his peers. But to the point where he's become this sort of secular saint of Western art, you know, number one draft pick for writers of the English language was not obvious from the beginning.

34:06He's fallen more or less out of favor at various points. And there was a point, especially after he died for, I don't remember now, but some period of time where he needed to be taken up and reclaimed. And some of what's going on is contingent historical strangeness, but some of it is also this, which is at this particular moment we're in, we're in sort of the Renaissance, right? We're in one intellectual period to another. And the period that would follow Shakespeare especially would be increasingly towards humanist thought, increasingly towards the Enlightenment, the Great Awakening, and other things like this, where thinkers in the academy and the arts were especially interested in non-Christian-based art and reference points.

34:54Who can we look to? Like, where do we look to? and Shakespeare emerges at a very interesting time in the history of England and the history of the West and I should say here that thing we say here are my understanding of Western literature specifically and English literature even more specifically still all those caveats still apply is it was an interesting time in which art could for a long time theater wasn't allowed in England which is very strange and then as it was becoming allowed it was these even not evangelical ecclesiastical plays they were christian plays like representation of stuff from the bible that turned into these big guild festivals that then turned into representations of classical antiquity and then turned into well we can tell different kinds of stories here at the same time elizabeth herself was an interesting person but our philosophical moment science is starting to become a thing rebecca the world is not just god said so or maybe it isn't.

35:55And any epistemological change is a very, kind of like when the river goes into the ocean, where those things mix, you get a lot of generative stuff happening. And Shakespeare is a time when a secular theater is possible and an intellectual tradition of maybe there's more to human life than just the Bible is possible. And Hamlet, I think, is in a lot of ways at the spear that is the tip of the spear of this kind of thinking at this moment education and public

36:28Jeff:access to reading material are really shifting here as well like we're a couple hundred years after gutenberg we're getting the discovery of a lot of classical texts or the rediscovery of classical texts that are being printed and distributed for the first time in a very long time or printed for the first time distributed in a new way among folks and access to those stories And to have a like, oh, we have not the realization that we have not always understood life through the lens of Christian philosophy and ideology, that there were the Greek and Roman myths, that there are stories that are much older than that.

37:03Jeff:And Shakespeare seems interested in all of those as well. And in the common threads of humanity and very human problems and behaviors that people have been doing for from the beginning of time. So so why is Shakespeare so great? Some of it is because we say Shakespeare is great, and there's no way to quantify that, but I wanted to get that into the air. That's one of the things that happens, right? Because so much literary tradition since has edified Shakespeare, we come to it and we sort of get it. Like, this feels great because that's what we told stuff like this is great. But to be a little bit more specific, this is my experience of teaching.

37:38Also, my experience of reading as well, I'll say personally, is if you teach texts from classical antiquity, they are quite good. but the characters do not feel modern, right? Achilles feels like a character. You know, you go read Dante or the great Roman works. They feel like interesting characters, but they don't feel recognizables as people. And here's one thing that Hamlet is a great example of for Shakespeare is that these tend to feel recognizable as characters. They have flaws. They have desires. They're not formulaic. They have inner lives. They don't, many of them, some of them do, but many of them don't map neatly onto archetypes.

38:17They may be playing with them, but they tend to feel more real in that particular way. And emotionally real.

38:25Jeff:Ophelia is a great example of this and like really the only female character that gets notable stage time, notable screen time. But it's like, this is the 1600s and she's an unmarried woman. So she has to be concerned about like courting the right guy, but also protecting her purity and her reputation. And Hamlet has made some promises to her. You get the sense that maybe there have been a few rolls in the hay and that she went into that space with him because he has made some promises to her. And now her boyfriend has gone nuts because he's found out that his father has been killed and he's pushing her away.

39:03Jeff:And she's like, but we had a deal here, dude. And then he accidentally kills her dad. and so she's in grief as well she's lost her father and she's lost her boyfriend and in 1623 men were the way that women got access to power so she sees no hope for herself and she goes and drowns herself in the river and there is nothing more human and more like believable and relatable to like think about that as a dramatic teenage relationship like hamlet is 30 we i'm gonna assume Ophelia is around the same age. We're not told how old she is. So these are young adults, like early young adults. But this maps on to like teenage melodrama and the kinds of romance stories that we've been telling for as long as we've been telling stories of you made me promises and why are you ignoring me and don't you love me anymore and get yourself away from me.

40:02Jeff:I'm too like, I'm too much now. I'm in too much pain. I can't deal with you. You should get thee to a nunnery where you'll be safe. You and your virginity will be protected. It's so, it is so real. We're still telling those kinds of stories now. People are still living those kinds of stories now. And, you know, to connect a couple of the threads to Hamlet is not sitting around Elsinore, which is the place, the location within Denmark, this castle in which we, all of the action that we see takes place, he's out in Germany studying. He's a 30-year-old heir to the throne, and he'd rather be in Germany doing plays and reading philosophy.

40:40If that's not a good example of where we are historically, I don't know what is. He is more interested in books than the throne, right? That there is something other than these ready-made ways for Hamlet to be, he'd rather be somewhere else. And does Ophelia kill herself or does she drown because she's not paying attention. Even that is kept in suspense, right? We don't get a specific, totally clear answer about what happened to Ophelia other than she's been so subject to the machinations of the crowned that it happens here. So that's one thing. So also, and the reason that these, not only do they have recognizable thoughts and feelings, we get access to them.

41:20And Shakespeare did not invent the soliloquy or a monologue, but he did perfect. It goes back to sort of Roman theater. There are monologue soliloquies in Seneca, but in Hamlet especially, and this happens for, I think, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing as well, the soliloquy as a place for the character to work out how they're feeling, to articulate the complexity of what's going on inside is new. Again, I don't know. I'm not a scholar. I shouldn't say. But these are the high points, right? You kind of come for these great soliloquies, and there's some other stuff here too. But the great to be or not to be, which is a cliche at this point that's even so hard to see is what Hamlet is doing there is working through multiple morality systems to figure out how to be in the world.

42:07Frankly, whether or not he should commit to what's that.

42:08Jeff:I mean, he's basically writing in his journal out loud is what is happening in those scenes. And this is something that goes away a little bit in the theater and art as we look for more psychological realism. But I would tender upon to you, a listener, and Rebecca as well, that anytime you hear a voiceover in a movie or you listen to a pop song that's told from a point of view, those are all in the Shakespeare soliloquy traditions. They all flow from a character speaking to us directly about what's going on inside. Especially, you know, musical theaters are maybe the best extent. You know how they say dinosaurs don't exist, but birds are still the best, like the most recognizable dinosaurs?

42:51The one song in a musical theater is the bird to the Shakespearean syllogically dinosaur. It's still around. It looks a little bit different, but the narrative function or access to interiority is the same because you can't have them talking to someone else because these are private thoughts. These are internal thoughts. You can't have internal thoughts on the stage. So what do you do? You give these people these weird theatrical moments of sort of talking into the air about what they're saying, like no one would actually do. It's a fascinating, and it's so familiar. It's hard to see the strangeness and wonder of it at the same time.

43:23Let's see what else to say. Just the greatest wielding of the English language ever to do it. I have one example here. This is not a soliloquy, but I found myself struck by the play, the mastery of form. This is Hamlet talking to someone, and he's using the metaphor. It's like, you don't understand me. You can't deal with me, much like you couldn't just pick up that flute and play it, right? And like, well, I can't play this. Nor should you play with me because he is so frustrated with people trying to think they can work him. That's one that makes him more angry than anything is someone else thinks they could do something.

43:59They could do something with words to Hamlet. He's like, you have no idea who you're dealing with here. It's like, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music. Excellent voice in this little organ. yet ye cannot make it speak to blood. Do you think I am easier to be played upon than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will. Though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. So like that double fretting. Bars. Just like, that's just this part.

44:33That's not even like the top 15 thing people reference in that. And it's like amazing. Like that's just in there. That's just sitting around. It's just unnecessarily amazing for what he's saying there, which is I'm smarter than you. That's essentially all he's saying.

44:46Jeff:I mean, and I think that's one of the things also to remember just about the experience of reading Hamlet is there are so many more words to say the thing than are necessary. And most of them are pleasurable. But also this is permission to not have to parse every single word because Shakespeare is just having fun with the language. And in Hamlet, Hamlet is having fun with the language as well. But we as readers can like you can get what is happening in that scene from like the first sentence that he says. And then he goes on for five more just to like really rub it in and make his point because he's having a good time hearing himself speak and making them listen to him.

45:25Jeff:But that like that comes back to me every time I read Shakespeare is there are so many more words than are actually necessary here. And it's very rare for that to be enjoyable. It's for me, it's enjoyable in Shakespeare. In a lot of other experiences, you're like, why do we have so much going on here? You could edit this way down. I don't need Shakespeare to be shorter, though, because the language is such a part of it. It's such a pleasure. Yeah. And so if you have experience of reading it or listening to it, give yourself permission to linger now and then. Go back and spend a little time. You don't have to do a full close reading.

45:56But like in this particular, just look at the layeredness of musical metaphors here and look at what he's actually saying about, you know, this is also about making art too, right? Like you have to have the ability to play the thing to get the most out of the thing.

46:11Jeff:And there's something to be said, if you're not going to listen to it on audio, like read sections of it out loud. I think if you get stuck, read it out loud to yourself or to, you know, whoever is around your house with you. And in doing that and having to figure out like, where should I put the emphasis in this sentence? What is the cadence and the rhythm here? Some of that. Or what are the possibilities? Right. A couple different ways out loud. It makes itself more legible, which is also one of the pieces of magic of how Shakespeare works. So what's your first time with this piece of magic?

46:42Jeff:With Hamlet? It was sometime in high school. Or any of it. Yeah, any Shakespeare. My first reading of Shakespeare was Much Ado About Nothing, that high school freshman experience. And I just did the math. I would have seen Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet in the theater before I had that experience. I had not read Romeo and Juliet. I didn't read that until later in high school. So I think that the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet might have been my first real experience with Shakespeare. and I loved it. What a wonderful one for a teenager. What a wonderful one. We've read it and we've revisited that film together at least once in the history of Book Riot and it holds up.

47:22Jeff:So I feel great about that actually as a first Shakespeare experience and they're talking fast. They're running through the language quickly and really they're just hitting the points that you really need to pick up to know what's happening there and I think in some way that might've primed me for being able to go into Shakespeare without stressing out so much about getting every last word of it, but being there for the vibe. Yeah, even there is a caricature of sort of a moldy version of Shakespeare performance that I think Robin Williams makes fun of in Dead Poets' side. He's like, alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio, with like the skull, right?

48:01And then there's a more rat-a-tat-tat Lerman where you get sort of the, there's energy from rapidity that comes what's funny about Shakespeare adaptations is all people adapting or performing Shakespeare are doing unto Shakespeare what Shakespeare was doing unto other stories which is doing a version of them putting their own spin on them so the layers of interpretation adaptation um and transfiguration are are dizzying yeah and and can be overwhelming and a and a put-off but if you can sort of go around the corner to how exciting the possibilities these are, that's where maybe some of the treasure was.

48:38What was yours? I was telling, I don't remember. I know I saw the Mel Gibson Hamlet in the theater and I would have been 13. I was looking at the calendar when that came out. And so already a book nerd, I don't remember if I had done any Shakespeare before then. I do know that I went out and bought this very same copy, this mass market paperback after seeing that.

49:00Jeff:That book has been through some things with you. It's been, I would have been carrying around in my pocket all week. Maybe I should make a necklace like Flava Flav style. You and Jacob Elordi carrying around books in your back pocket. I know. Well, I'm a large man, so I can kind of hold it on to me in some particular way. And it's well trodden, well traveled. I mean, I don't know. I think my own experience is sort of indicative to a lot of people how they experience Shakespeare. It's like always have been something you know is a big deal. Yeah. Maybe that's the best way to put it. It's in the water.

49:29Jeff:You know, and it's interesting you talking about how Shakespeare is riffing on other things, because I think one of the big reasons to read Shakespeare, and especially one of the big reasons to read Hamlet, is that so many other works draw on Hamlet. And if you like listening to music and being like, oh, I know the song they're sampling here, you can think of so much modern literature is sampling from Shakespeare or sampling elements from Hamlet. I was watching the premiere of The Lowdown last night and texting you like there's a very exciting text to a Hamlet kind of storyline in one moment. And like, maybe that's not what Sterling Harjo is doing there.

50:06Jeff:And I'm just looking through Hamlet goggles right now. But it it looks familiar. And those things are all over the place. And that's fun. That's a fun part of reading culture to be like, oh, this goes back to this thing. Yeah. And so our current and that's all informs our current reading of it. For me, every time I have an occasion to experience Shakespeare again, especially read, I should say, this is just for me, especially read, I have a moment. I have an intrusive thoughts. Maybe that would be a good format to have. Maybe we should have a what intrusive thoughts section. I'm sad that we didn't think of this until after the Thomas Pynchon recording.

50:45My intrusive thought here is why do I read anything else? And I don't believe that. but I find the experience to be so great and so stimulated. I think stimulating is a good word. It's so stimulating for many of the reasons we've said. And then just on the level of the line that I'm like, why do I do anything else? But I have that same experience when I go to Morrison. I have that same experience when I go to Homer. I have that same experience when I go to Whitman. So this is not the only, this is not the only tinfoil I can chew on and get that kind of a buzz, but I do have it here and maybe in its most concentrated form.

51:27Jeff:I think that's such a useful feeling to identify because people can tie themselves in knots trying to argue intellectually about what makes art great. Yes. But I think you know it when you feel it or you know it when you see it and something gets crowned as one of the greats when a lot of people have that same feeling about it that like this is the best it gets. This is the like epitome of a reading experience. why would I want to do anything else and like all of the caveats in the world about how the canon was originally formed by pretty specific groups of people who were pretty homogenous but as we like we still come to that we still have like a book of the summer or a book of the year or an agreement when something wins the national book award that like yeah that was the one this year it doesn't always happen but when that happens it's really magical.

52:23Jeff:And I think that that's the feeling that we're all calling on when we have some sort of agreement about a work being excellent, is that it inspires that, like, why would I want to spend my brain time with anything else? And Shakespeare certainly evokes that. So what's like to read this? What is this all about? I think I still, I find both pleasurable and frustrating that a lot of it I can't get on a first read and even a second or third read. There's just some stuff that eludes me in terms of word choice or illusion. And honestly, sometimes just that doesn't need a footnote. I'm like, I'm not really sure what's going on right here.

53:04I do think that that's to be expected. And some people might find that very frustrating. And I find it frustrating to a point. I think the other thing that it does for me is the play feels then inexhaustible because I can never get my, my hand around it. Even something like never let me go, which we, we love and we've, we've recorded about. I kind of feel like I get it, Rebecca. I kind of, I kind of, there's not a lot of mystery mysteries left to uncover. I mean that more in like a Ellusian mysteries than sort of a Agatha Christie mysteries, but here it's always going to be out ahead of me and I'm the kind of person that likes that but not everyone does yeah so that's one that was maybe my my thing to that I would notice

53:54Jeff:again this time yeah I think it's disorienting to sit down and read Shakespeare in the way that reading anything that's 400 years old is disorienting and that when you can go in with that expectation of like, I'm not going to get it. If that's just the water we're swimming in, I'm not going to get everything. I think that makes it much more enjoyable than a version that is like beating yourself up or stressing out about not getting everything. People have dedicated entire lifetimes to studying these works, and they have died saying that there was more left to do. And the thing that blows my mind then as way of transition is what's amazing to me, and it could not have been intended by Shakespeare, I don't think, but who knows, man.

54:41I'm not going to pretend to be able to play the stops of that particular recorder. The play itself is about the limits of understanding. The play itself is about what's beyond death. What is the right way to do this thing? What should I be feeling? And how can I know things? Because as I say here in the notes, the word question itself appears 17 times in the play. And I didn't even count the question marks. A lot of Hamlet's soliloquies are sort of a series of questions.

55:12Jeff:Yeah, a lot of his, I mean, he's thinking out loud, trying to decide how to feel about things. And then once he has maybe got a beat on how he feels about things, what he should do with those feelings, how he should act. What does he owe his father as vengeance for this death? How should he enact that vengeance? What does it mean about him? And then how is this spinning out to touch everybody else? It's kind of, it's all questions. It really is grounded in that feeling of being a person that is constantly having to figure out what to do next. Right. I'm Glenn Washington, host of Snap Judgment from KQED.

55:50Every week, Snap drops you inside someone's biggest decision. The kind of decision you can only make once. With everything on the line, what do you believe? What do you want? And what would you risk to get it? Find out. Tap to listen now to Snap Judgment from KQED on Spotify.

56:17Do you hear that? sounds like breakfast is ready because Quaker's coming in hot with morning nutrition 100 % whole grain oats and a good source of fiber to fuel the rhythm of your morning and kickstart your day and that sounds absolutely delicious fuel to start whatever's next Quaker, official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26 I, O, let's go Got a Sam's Cafe pizza order up you know the best part about this spicy italian sausage i voted for this topping yeah just another perk of being a member come join us sam's club so you know one way is to see this and one of the reasons it has been deified and i think that's a secular deification is what's happened to hamlet and shakespeare is as the the first full-throated interrogator of the human condition, which is to have reason, to have knowledge, to be the greatest of all animals.

57:21How perfect is the human understanding? He waxes rhapsodic about what a noble thing and what an amazing thing humanity is. And yet, it's still not enough to know what happens after death. It's still not enough to cut the Gordian knot of wanting to avenge your father and loving your mother and hating her, of how to deal with someone that you've wronged, what does justice look like, the imperfectibility of human life is central here. Because he gets as clear a cut, a sense of wrong as anyone has ever gotten in art. Like, he gets a ghost, he does the play, he overhears the confession, and yet that is still not quite enough to feel whole.

58:10He cannot bring his father back. Even the revenge play is not a mousetrap that can work in arrears to recreate the dead mouse. He cannot bring his father back. And that's the central sadness of Hamlet is loss and imperfection and not knowing all that one would want to know. So Hamlet, as it is most verbally unarmed in trying to have a feeling about his father, sort of with the ghost and what to do about that feeling. And so I think that's really important to say. And you can even see, we get a bit of a hybrid being here too, even if we look at the question of suicide. I had this in my notes. At one point he says, oh, at the divine had not fixed itself against self-same slaughter.

58:56Oh, basically saying, I wish it wasn't a sin in the church to kill yourself. But that's not actually the reason he doesn't want to kill himself. Because in the to be and not to be soliloquy, it's because you don't know what the hell's going to happen. You're afraid. You're a coward because you're fundamental. So we get really a transition from the reason not to commit suicide as well as a sin. No, really for Hamlet, it's because he doesn't know what the hell's going to happen. That's the limit of his understanding. So that's a real transitional thing you can see in the bigger thing here. Also, as happens, the church and understandings of the church, but also understandings of the court and traditional stories of kings and queens, Hamlet is fighting against expectation, ceremony, tradition.

59:35He would, as I said, rather go plays and study in Wittenberg in Germany than come be a member of the court, right? He's gone. It's like how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. All these red-to-mead things that kind of suck. I don't want anything in this. And then you can see in a way of understanding the play is then all the other characters are possible ways of Hamlet being that he rejects. Laertes' mode, Fortinbras' mode, Horatio, who's this antique Dane or Roman, a different kind of understanding from the classical world. But he's like, none of those are interesting.

1:00:09I'd rather play all the parts. And that's why I think Hamlet is probably the greatest role for people to try to play is you get to do it all. You get to be the fool and the lover and the fighter and the pontificator and the wronged son. It's an amazing part. I can only imagine what it's like to play.

1:00:25Jeff:It is an amazing part. And he's just he's rejecting conventionality. He's rejecting all of the roles that he sees the people around him playing and all of the boxes that his position in life has put him in. Like that he should be lined up to be the king someday, that he should be comporting himself in a certain way. He should be concerned about what people think about him. And he lets himself be completely unhinged. He's just bananas all over the place. He and his girlfriend are fighting in public. He's yelling at people. He's like sneaking around watching grave diggers. He gets on a pirate ship at one point.

1:01:02It's one of those stranger things that he's taken captive by pirates and then out duels them all. Dread Pirate Robert style.

1:01:09Jeff:There's a really like mythical quality to a lot of what he's doing. But I think you're right on that an actor playing this role gets to have a great time. and gets to flex a lot of muscles and just exist in so many different modes. And as a reader, as a viewer, as someone attending a play, it's really, really fun to watch someone who's doing that and doing it well. It's enlivening and exciting anytime you watch somebody having a ball doing something. But I think a great performance of Hamlet is it's so up there with one of the best things that you can watch someone do well and when they know they're killing it.

1:01:49it's just it's excellent it's all it's dizzying to think about what's actually happening when you're watching someone perform hamlet you're watching someone act someone acting like they're acting mad but they're actually not yeah because it is that antic disposition is a way for him to basically i don't know like dance all over the court it gives him permission to be weird it's cover things that yeah it's cover it's cover but also then it gives him access to different kinds of encounters and spaces that normally would he wouldn't have access to right he couldn't say the things he was saying to these people if they he thought they were playing it straight it would give too much away yeah so like the acting gives him your cover is the right way to put it there's no there's nothing good or bad, but thinking make it so?

1:02:39What morality is that except that humans get to make our own meeting for good and for ill, right? One of the more famous lines that this comes from. I'll say this, you may have had this experience, not you, Rebecca, but other people, and may have this experience with Hamlet of getting frustrated for his quote unquote indecision because it takes him four hours and multiple thousand lines to do the revenging. And even And that is sort of compromised. And my students often brought this to the tables. Like, why didn't he just do the thing? And I answer with this. So this is my own. Oh, and even I have the note here that even Lawrence Olivier's famous film of Hamlet begins with this.

1:03:16This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.

1:03:18Jeff:I've never read it that way. This is so interesting to me. Yeah. But like, and I answer with this. Does that really hold up? He does not immediately killed Claudius. True. But what he does is he conducts a moral investigation of Elsinore. Yeah, he springs right into action. Yes. And the moment he does act rashly, once he gets confirmation that Gertrude really didn't know, and the ghost says, leave your mom alone, which is really interesting, by the way, for the gender politics of the ghost and whatever else is happening here. When he doesn't act rashly, it's terrible because of the limits of his understanding.

1:03:52So this, I think, if you think of this as a revenge play, yeah, it takes a lot to get there. But if you think of it more of an investigation of Elsinore, of extant representations of morality, he's trying to figure out how he feels and what he knows more than what he should do. I've always made the case that Hamlet doesn't really want to kill Claudius. Or let me put it this way. He's not ultimately interested in killing Claudius because what he knows is that doesn't bring his dad back. And then he has to be king? He doesn't want to be king.

1:04:21Jeff:Yeah, I mean, he knows from the get-go what he's going to do. He comes out of the encounter with the king's ghost like, well, I got to take vengeance now. And the rest of it is I've never read him as indecisive about it. It's really fascinating to me. But the rest of it is, how am I going to do this? What does it need to look like? And maybe some of it is feet dragging about not actually wanting to do it because he knows, as you're saying, that that won't it won't fill the hole that he's really trying to fill there. I mean, Hamlet is very emo. as yes like there there is that and so i think if you and this really depends on the actor if you're seeing it performed like there is a version of hamlet performed that like could you just stop whining already like stop to get out of your feelings we get it get over it and there's a point where one of the characters says this basically says to him like just get over it already and do something.

1:05:19Jeff:But then like his dad's only been dead for two months. You're allowed to be emo. Yeah. Yeah. I said to Rowan, like, you know, if you want to tell your friends Hamlet's the first sad emo boy, that's not the worst way of understanding this. But I think on the other hand, it's hard to remember now in 500 years of retrospect, how his expressions were almost revolutionary and blasphemous nearly in its humanism. Like what a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god. So like, there's something else going on here than, boy, we actually really kill the laertes because that's the quote-unquote just thing to do.

1:06:01And he's not quoting scripture. No, he's not. And especially when in a moment in history where the monarch is, you know, a manifestation of God's will. To say that, by extension, how like a man, how apprehensively, that's not just man, but any man. You don't have to be the king or queen, right? You don't have to be a priest here. The Protestant Reformation is in Germany. Like, that's within his father's lifetime that that's happened. We are rethinking the relationship of divinity and humanity, and it's not looking great for the

1:06:34Jeff:divine in that in that re-estimation okay is this for you this is for you this is for everybody just try it right just yeah just try it and if you are worried like one of the reasons that i feel comfortable saying just try this in a way where we've couched most of our other recommendations for like maybe it's not for you is that people have worked really hard to make shakespeare accessible for in so many different ways. So if the language is a problem for you, no fear Shakespeare translations exist that are page like side by side of. That's what I have. Yeah. They have the quotations right on the other side.

1:07:15Jeff:The Shakespearean language and then the whole thing translated in just like plain today English. That is a great resource. Listening to it on audio is a great resource. Norton Critical editions are always a great resource, but that's like a ton of footnotes. If you are a person who wants to understand everything or get like the Folger annotated edition that I used is really wonderful, go to a library and look at a bunch of different versions of this and find one that feels accessible to you. And then I think make part of your plan be to either listen to it or to watch one or two of the movies afterwards.

1:07:52Jeff:Like have the experience of watching some people perform it. If you can go to a performance, that's ideal. And then I think you get an extra layer of the unruliness of Shakespeare when you get to see performances that so often are set in places that aren't Elsinore. They're not Elsinore Castle in the year 15, something. We move Shakespeare around into all kinds of contemporary settings and into all other modes. And that flexibility too is one of the things that makes it so magical. But give yourself a way in that feels doable and then just try it. I mean, if you really have never done any Shakespeare before, which we welcome all here, if you can find a production of literally anything close to you, go see something live first.

1:08:37Just see. I think it makes it more accessible to see real humans saying the words, and you're not going to understand it all, but you're going to get some of it. And some of it could be very tantalizing to you. It could lead to other things. Immortal Questions aren't asked. All of them? I mean, yes.

1:08:55Jeff:What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? This is all right there in the text.

1:09:10Any, I mean, there's some of what do I, that's probably the least of these, the least of the apostles here. Though it is there because Laertes and Polonius and Ophelia and, And I mean, he is as self-centered as Hamlet is. He is not only self-centered.

1:09:25Jeff:He's not, right. And one of the things that I think makes this a great work of literature and that makes other works that are great, great, is that it's not just addressing some of these questions, but it's trying to understand where these questions sit, like in priority with each other. Once you've figured out what you owe your neighbor and what the good life is and how to deal with the certainty of death, or you started to answer some of those questions, which ones? the answers to them are not all going to work with each other. They're not all compatible. So which ones do you give priority to?

1:09:57Jeff:If you know that death is certain and you feel like it's that murder is evil and you think you owe your father vengeance for his death, how do you do the math? And you won't bring your father back. Right. How do you do the math there? Right. Yeah. That's a really good point is that you can get true and useful answers to these questions that are logical opposites or in conflict or undermined. Yeah, they do compete with each other. That's very true. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? You say here, the text is not really concerned with itself on that level. I will say there's a lot of theater stuff happening here that having studied a little bit and looking at the concordance, like our direct work, there's like, this is, Shakespeare is also a good example of why putting contemporary cultural references into your plays dates them because there's stuff about like, internal actors versus children's guild war stuff that's in the play that's very strange I think that the way this is mostly about art is mostly about theater and I have a I have a conspiracy theory tell me or no put on your tinfoil hat let's do it I don't know if this is intrusive thought I love to think about the possibility of Hamlet realizing he's in a play oh where he his attitude changes considerably after he rashly kills Polonius he says there's greater purpose going on here.

1:11:19And I like to think that he is such a student of the theater that he could realize that I am actually in a revenge play.

1:11:28Jeff:Do we think that 2025 Hamlet would believe that we're in a simulation? I think I would like to see a version of Hamlet where he sort of breaks the fourth wall and walks out into the audience when he does this line about, he appeals directly to the mute actors and audiences that there's bearing witness to the end that he's talking to them. And when he does special providence, there's special providence in the fall of a sparrow. He's like looking at the lights and like the rigging to see like, this is all a design that I am trapped within. Anyway, that's my favorite thing, but it's about theater and language.

1:12:01Jeff:So there's like a Truman Show element to your head canon. Yeah, or more of Luigi, or more of Luigi Perindello, seven actors in search of a play where they break the fourth wall and they realize they're in a play and once the curtain falls, they'll be gone and into oblivion. But like there's something that Hamlet exceeds the trappings of the theater and play so much that I kind of like the idea that maybe his realization about the limits of his understanding is I am not the playwright. I am the great actor and I'm the great character, but I am still not the playwright here anyway. That's fun. Let's see.

1:12:33Best in words. I mean, good lord. I mean, there's so. You need to go here. I think this is where you need to go because.

1:12:38Jeff:Yeah. There's so many. The phrases you collected that you just know that come from Hamlet. Not just Shakespeare, but Hamlet. Yeah, this is an incomplete. Well, these are all from Hamlet. Yeah, this is an incomplete list of phrases that you know, but you might not have realized came from Hamlet. Frailty, thy name is woman. This above all to thine own self be true, which, by the way, largely taken out of context. Yes, it's ironical. Yeah, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. A murder most foul. There are more dreams in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Brevity is the soul of wit.

1:13:07Jeff:Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. What a piece of work is man. the plays the thing get thee to a nunnery the lady doth protest too much me thinks alas poor york good night sweet prince this next chunk of them are all in the one to be or not to be soliloquy to be or not to be that is the question to sleep perchance to dream i there's the rub what dreams may come and shuffled off this mortal coil it's unbelievable like those those last five are all in like half of a page of text. My favorite to note here are the ones that are cited unironically in which Polonius says them, who is the kind of the courtly fool.

1:13:54He is so reasonable and so adroit in his manipulation of the court and understanding of its goings on that he is a fool. So like brevity is the soul of wit. That's Polonius. Hamlet does not, Shakespeare and Hamlet do not believe that brevity is the soul of wit. They believe in a maximalist witticism mantra. And that to thine own self be true. He's giving Claudius a series of useful aphorisms of just sort of like getting along, right? Of just sort of like playing along and keeping up appearances. But yeah, it's tremendous. It's hard to know what to do with it.

1:14:29Jeff:There is so much. And then there are so many works that have been inspired by Hamlet. We were talking off mic yesterday. You were saying we get a new Hamlet adaptation like roughly every 10 years. So there are a ton of films that you can pick from. But there's also Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. The Lion King is an adaptation of Hamlet. I had forgotten that until you put that in. That's my favorite. There's a film from the 90s called What Dreams May Come. That's not really a Shakespeare adaptation, but the line is taken from there. Also big in the 90s when we were first discovering that teenage girls had a psychology of their own, Mary Pifer wrote a book called Reviving Ophelia that directly pulls from her reading of what is happening with Ophelia here.

1:15:11Jeff:The play that won the Pulitzer for drama in 2023 is called Fat Ham. It's by James E. James, and it's a spin on Hamlet set at a black family's southern barbecue. And the Hamlet character is a black gay man. And I got to see a production of that a year or two ago that was really terrific. So if you can see Fat Ham, go see it. But to watch how adaptable these stories and ideas are. Bob Dylan wrote a song about the assassination of JFK called A Murder Most Foul. Nick Lowe wrote a song called Cruel to be Kind, which comes from a line in this play, I must be cruel only to be kind. Book titles, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

1:15:52I mean...

1:15:52Jeff:The phrase infinite jest exists in Hamlet and I was this week years old when I learned that. Oh, really? Was that your first time? I was like, oh, that's in here. That's Yorick. He's describing Yorick. And The Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange's book from last year. That is also a phrase that comes straight out of Hamlet. All over the place. If you need us an hour and 15 minutes into this podcast to sell you further on go read Hamlet, But it's to pick up on this kind of stuff and to be able to say from your own reading and experience, that's what that's from. And let's put this in the hammer spot.

1:16:28The lead single off Taylor Swift's new album is called The Fate of Ophelia. And she's talked about, apparently, and I haven't seen the interview, about like, it's not that's not just a reference. Like, it's about, you know, it's another interpretation of Ophelia and what she means and how she's caged and done wrong. I yeah I mean it's just it's just all there waiting for you to experience hot takes you go

1:16:51Jeff:first I think Shakespeare is actually not snobby we talked about this a little bit at the top but what is happening in these plays is actually a really great antidote to annoying writerly stuff that bothers people about highbrow literature the silliness the bodiness there's a lot of that there's a lot of bodiness there's a lot of wordplay there's a lot of like people sort of elbowing each other and raising their eyebrows and like there there's dirty jokes there and there are like so much double entendre they're having a good time the first light i saw in rowan's eyes that she like kind of she kind of saw the matrix of what shakespeare could do was he says i am too much in the sun and you know when he's being told to come out underneath his clouds but like he's double sunned right because he's son of gertrude and now of claudius and like she's like oh wow wow, that's really smart enough.

1:17:38Yes. Yes, it is. And that is the Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb I'm going to try to feed you to get you to burn in the witch's oven of Shakespeare nerddom. My hot take is if you can at least appreciate this, I really don't know how to talk to you about art. I don't save to love it like I do.

1:17:54Jeff:Yeah. But I think you've got to see, like I kind of get what's going on. I can kind of see why this is a thing. And maybe more than anything else we're going to read and talk about this season, Hamlet exists in the zone of like, I don't really care if I like it. I don't really care if you like it. I don't care if anybody else likes it. Liking it is beside the point. This is so foundational to modern literature that if you want to engage with... If you care about that project. Right. If you care about that, which you're listening to this podcast, so we're making some assumptions. It's just one of those.

1:18:28Jeff:And that great books, they're not about your enjoyment of them. They're about what they do, what they mean in the body of literature writ large. Yeah, that's right. Let's see, where we go? Cocktail party crib sheet. So I have Shakespeare himself probably played the ghost in The Player King, i.e. the father figures to Hamlet, cue crying. My favorite anecdote that I'd watch a one-act play of by itself is the story of Daniel Day-Lewis playing Hamlet. He did an eighth-month run at Hamlet, and in the middle of one of the scenes where he's playing Hamlet, talking to his father's ghost, he was so overcome and said, this is something that was reported that he said he saw his own father's ghost he walked off the stage mid-performance and never has acted on the stage again oh my god i've never heard that that's incredible it's an amazing story totally believable for daniel day lewis too right who when he was playing uh the lead in unbearable lightness of being learned check and didn't speak anything other than check for the whole um yeah he was here in richmond when he was doing the abe lincoln film and the Daniel Day Lewis sightings around town while being a method actor were very interesting.

1:19:36I think we did this before. No one really knows which version of this was performed. There's sort of a cloud of possibility around Hamlet and all that we have for it. The first filmed edition was a short scene starring Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet in a Breaches role, meaning she was playing a man.

1:19:52Jeff:Which is super interesting because when these were performed on stage, originally all of the parts were played by boys. and the first gender bent screen version of hamlet was a 1921 german silent film in which the adaptation was hamlet was actually a woman pretending to be a man to sort of protect her identity so that's a hundred years just from now of playing with this stuff i thought that was interesting there all right our final thing um zero well-read score each one gets one to ten with ten being the highest no we have to do the muppets jeff oh i'm sorry this is a new thing In addition to intrusive thoughts, which I think we actually need to bring into the future, this is, would this be watchable as a Muppet version where a human plays the main character?

1:20:35Jeff:Okay, first I need to ride hard for just a moment for Hamlet 2000, which is the adaptation with Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles. You can get what you need from Hamlet from one of the Signal adaptations, and that's a great one. You previewed this Muppets question for me yesterday, and I spent a lot of time last night thinking about who the human should be. And I have a few pitches. All right, let me hear. My number one draft pick is Adam Driver. I want to watch Adam Driver be an emo Hamlet on stage with a bunch of Muppets. I couldn't love that idea more. Right. A little more obvious might be somebody like Josh O 'Connor.

1:21:14Jeff:Chalamet would get kicked around if this were getting cast today. Jacob Elordi would get kicked around. I don't think Tom Holland necessarily. I think the bigger you are, the funnier it is. Yeah, yes. Driver's a big guy. Adam Driver was the winner for me. And then also maybe like a Texas Muppets version with Jesse Plemons. But Adam Driver is my A number one draft pick. I think that's very good. I think this is sort of a meme that gets kicked around. And of course, it comes from there are Muppet versions of Christmas Carol, Treasure Island, where there's like one human character, they tend to be considerably less murdery than what they pick for those.

1:21:50Because this would require Adam Driver to like kill multiple Muppets.

1:21:54Jeff:Yeah, I don't know, how do you like feel okay poisoning a bunch of Muppets at the end of this? But I love the idea of Adam Driver, you know, sort of just talking trash to all these Muppets about how stupid they are. I sounded like a crazy person last night, just like sitting on the couch thinking about this and cackling to myself and trying to explain to Bob what I thought an Adam Driver version of Hamlet with the Muppets would be. I think if we gender bent it, Florence Pugh would be hilarious as Hamlet with a bunch of Muppets. Yeah, I mean, the immortal question, should we just put Zendaya in this movie?

1:22:27I think she'd be great. I think she'd be great as Hamlet. There'd be some interesting, his name is Hamlet, but Ophelia is Miss Piggy. There'd be some weird sort of puns and things going on there. We could enjoy it. Okay, zero to well read score. E score one to 10, 10 being the highest. The categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance, essential questions, book, nerd, read, credit, no damn factor. Historical importance, 10. 10. There is no, I think there are only three 10s. There's Odyssey, well, there's four if you count Iliad and Odyssey as different. But the Bible, Iliad and Odyssey, and Hamlet, I think are the 10s.

1:22:59I agree. Is there anything else? Yeah. Readability is tricky. This is going to be its lowest score. It is, like you said, it's not snobby, but it is arcane.

1:23:07Jeff:Yeah. I have a hard time getting higher than six. Yeah, I was going to say five or six. Like I honestly had a harder time sticking with the language of pension than Shakespeare. Oh, interesting. Because there's just the barrage of it. Like at least there's a rhythm to Shakespeare that you can get into. So I'm good with a six. Yeah, I think also if there's something you don't understand in Hamlet, it's kind of over relatively quickly. Yeah. Right? So current relevant central questions. I mean, this is a 10. 10 forever. Forever, these are eternal. The stuff of the earth, forever 10. Book nerd read card, this is a 10.

1:23:41Oh damn factor, 10.

1:23:42Jeff:Also a 10, yeah. So we're looking at 46 out of 50, only dinged for the readability. I don't see how anything's going to score higher, ever. This is like the highest possible score you can have because if you put the Bible on here, I don't think it's a 10 for oh damn. Maybe it's more readable. I think we will have a good time at Hot Greek Summer next year because I think the Odyssey might outscore this. Because it's more... It's more readable. Well, because reading in translation, I mean, that's also like a cheat. That's true. I don't know. Anyway, but let's just say we're in rare air here. Yeah, as good as it gets.

1:24:18Jeff:The goat for a reason. Did we do something? Did we entertain people? Did we help people today? You can email us and let us know. Zero to wellread at bookriot.com. And if you like the show, please rate or review it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, your podcatcher of choice. And with that, Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwade Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much. What a joy to get to talk. A real delight.