1 00:00:00,270 --> 00:00:05,580 OK. Let's get started. Today's lecture is on Hamlet. 2 00:00:05,580 --> 00:00:13,560 Hamlet is probably first performed around sixteen hundred and it's a play, as you probably know, with an interesting textual history. 3 00:00:13,560 --> 00:00:22,900 There are three distinct editions in six, you know, three and sixteen, four in quarter Texas and then in the Folio of sixteen twenty three. 4 00:00:22,900 --> 00:00:29,220 I'm going to talk much about the textual differences in the play, but I think if you're studying it and writing about it, 5 00:00:29,220 --> 00:00:36,060 it's well worth having a sense whether the things you're writing about are the same in all three tax or whether they're different. 6 00:00:36,060 --> 00:00:44,400 One way to do that is to look at the Ardern three Hamlet, which prints all three texts, but they're also online versions. 7 00:00:44,400 --> 00:00:48,900 The enfolded Hamlet, which is probably one of the easier ways to look at textual differences. 8 00:00:48,900 --> 00:00:56,430 But that's not something I'm going to talk about today. Telling the plot of Hamlet might seem unnecessary, but let's do it anyway. 9 00:00:56,430 --> 00:00:57,330 In outline, 10 00:00:57,330 --> 00:01:06,360 Hamlet is a revenge plot in which the ghost of Hamlet's father tells him that his death was murder and reveals that the murderer was his brother, 11 00:01:06,360 --> 00:01:12,290 Hamlet's uncle Claudius. Claudius has now married Gertrude Hamlet's mother. 12 00:01:12,290 --> 00:01:22,260 That follows a long period of testing the ghosts information via a performed play and some soul searching about the morality of killing Claudius. 13 00:01:22,260 --> 00:01:30,420 Hamlet mistakenly kills an old courtier, Polonius, whose daughter Ophelia goes mad with grief and whose son Laertes comes to claim revenge. 14 00:01:30,420 --> 00:01:36,930 Meanwhile, 14 brass, a foreign prince, is marching through Denmark in a climactic scene. 15 00:01:36,930 --> 00:01:43,440 Laertes and Hamlet fight a fencing match. But Foyles, which are poisoned by the king, take both their lives. 16 00:01:43,440 --> 00:01:47,550 Not before both Claudius and Gertrude have also been poisoned. 17 00:01:47,550 --> 00:01:54,940 The entrance of 14 brass into the shattered kingdom brings the play to a sombre conclusion. 18 00:01:54,940 --> 00:02:02,110 So I've said before that some of my focussing questions for this series of lectures seem very naive and perhaps this is the worst one yet. 19 00:02:02,110 --> 00:02:08,650 The question today is, why is Hamlet called Hamlet? Well, depending on how you're hearing the question, 20 00:02:08,650 --> 00:02:16,120 we could say that it's clear that the play Hamlet is called Hamlet because it's named after its main character, who is called Hamlet. 21 00:02:16,120 --> 00:02:25,720 Tragedies, after all, signal their interest in the singular self largely by naming themselves after their protagonists, 22 00:02:25,720 --> 00:02:31,300 unlike comedies, which tend to be named for moods or for phrases. 23 00:02:31,300 --> 00:02:38,140 This is so dominant a convention that of play titles where only the title survives from this period. 24 00:02:38,140 --> 00:02:44,950 There are a large number of lost plays from this period. In fact, probably only about a six or something of the plays performed. 25 00:02:44,950 --> 00:02:52,000 Do we now have such a large number of plays where only the title exists in records if the title is a name? 26 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:58,900 We tend to assume it's a tragedy or a history. So it it's a very strong convention in this period. 27 00:02:58,900 --> 00:03:03,910 So that answer Hamlet is named after its main character because it's a tragedy only prompts the next question. 28 00:03:03,910 --> 00:03:09,640 Why is Pentathlete called Hamlet? Another easy answer? 29 00:03:09,640 --> 00:03:14,410 Presents itself as very often in Shakespeare's work works here. 30 00:03:14,410 --> 00:03:19,710 He takes both plot and character names from his sources. 31 00:03:19,710 --> 00:03:26,350 So very often Shakespeare imports the names of characters as well as the outline of plot from the sources he's reading. 32 00:03:26,350 --> 00:03:29,890 He doesn't always do that. It's interesting when he doesn't. 33 00:03:29,890 --> 00:03:37,940 But here he does. The sources of Hamlet are themselves slightly oblique. 34 00:03:37,940 --> 00:03:46,580 We know that Shakespeare used the history of the Danes by Saxa Grammaticus, in which he found the story of armless, 35 00:03:46,580 --> 00:03:56,600 a prince who feigns madness after his uncle kills his father, who is sent away to Britain and who returns to take revenge on the king. 36 00:03:56,600 --> 00:04:05,450 So we know that the main armless comes from this story, probably via a French translation from the 15 seventies. 37 00:04:05,450 --> 00:04:13,250 What confuses the source study of this play is the apparent existence of a phantom play related to this one, which we do not, 38 00:04:13,250 --> 00:04:24,200 in fact have an earlier version of Hamlet known to scholars as the or Hamlet or the prefix meaning earliest or original. 39 00:04:24,200 --> 00:04:30,980 So it's important to be clear that we don't have the or Hamlet, even though people talk about it often, critics talk about it as if we do. 40 00:04:30,980 --> 00:04:37,620 We don't have it. And to my mind, it's dubious whether it actually existed at all. 41 00:04:37,620 --> 00:04:44,180 But if it did exist, it may have been by Shakespeare or by Thomas Kidd, author of the era's most popular revenge play, 42 00:04:44,180 --> 00:04:49,910 The Spanish Tragedy and the planning to come back to later in the lecture. 43 00:04:49,910 --> 00:04:55,160 The issue is that there are references to a Hamlet play early in the 15 nineties. 44 00:04:55,160 --> 00:04:59,930 It's uncomfortable for scholars to think that Shakespeare might have written Hamlet earlier in the fifty nineties because of course, 45 00:04:59,930 --> 00:05:05,150 we know Hamlet is a very useful play for arguing about the way Shakespeare's career develops. 46 00:05:05,150 --> 00:05:09,500 And if Hamlet said it out to be an earlier play, it would really spoil that narrative. 47 00:05:09,500 --> 00:05:13,580 So there is that there's a little resistance to the idea that Shakespeare might have written an earlier 48 00:05:13,580 --> 00:05:20,870 Hamlet and that references which pre-date the date we think the play is may actually be to this play. 49 00:05:20,870 --> 00:05:27,980 But there are references to a Hamlet play in the early 50 nineties and even apparent quotations from it in work by Thomas Nash, 50 00:05:27,980 --> 00:05:33,110 who quotes the phrase is Blood is a beggar and Hamlet revenge. 51 00:05:33,110 --> 00:05:37,530 The second one we might think is in our play, but in fact, it never occurs. 52 00:05:37,530 --> 00:05:45,380 And this may suggest that, as he did with King Lear and with Henry, the fifth Shakespeare here rewrites an earlier play, 53 00:05:45,380 --> 00:05:53,300 whether by himself or someone else, and transfers the name of its characters wholesale. 54 00:05:53,300 --> 00:06:01,700 So that means that Hamos is called Hamlett, because that's what he was called in the earlier play or in the other sources. 55 00:06:01,700 --> 00:06:09,410 So what's the issue with this question? Well, I want to try and use it to talk about two particular critical approaches. 56 00:06:09,410 --> 00:06:11,810 One is biographical. 57 00:06:11,810 --> 00:06:24,050 Is there, as many critics have asserted, a connexion between the character Hamlett and the name of Shakespeare's son, CamNet, who died in 15 '96? 58 00:06:24,050 --> 00:06:34,720 The second issue is a more thematic one. How does the name of Hamlet help to construct the plays characteristically nostalgic mode? 59 00:06:34,720 --> 00:06:41,870 And how might we understand the implications of Hamlet being such a nostalgic play? 60 00:06:41,870 --> 00:06:50,880 I don't start with the second point. First. So thinking about Hamlet is a nostalgic play may seem wilful, 61 00:06:50,880 --> 00:06:59,790 given that in so many ways it has seemed the work in which Shakespeare is most modern for Sigmund Freud and for Karl Marx. 62 00:06:59,790 --> 00:07:05,920 Shakespeare was the textual exemplar for their theories of psychological and economic modernity. 63 00:07:05,920 --> 00:07:19,020 And they turned to Hamlet to illustrate that Lacan nature, Adorno, Prufrock all used Hamlet to theorise ideas of modern selfhood. 64 00:07:19,020 --> 00:07:26,850 In his landmark study, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, translated into English in 1965, the Polish state director, 65 00:07:26,850 --> 00:07:37,110 Young Kott imagined Hamlet wearing the black sweater of the European intellectual and reading Sartre and Beckett every 66 00:07:37,110 --> 00:07:45,540 age from David Warner at Stratford in the 1960s to David Tennant at Stratford in the first decade of the 21st century, 67 00:07:45,540 --> 00:07:53,950 has rediscovered Hamlet himself as a modern individual, most at home in the modern world. 68 00:07:53,950 --> 00:08:02,530 For us, Hamlett soliloquies have come to represent a completely overdetermined articulation of fraught or reflective consciousness. 69 00:08:02,530 --> 00:08:12,300 So Hamlet seems like a modern man caught in the process of emotional and intellectual formation. 70 00:08:12,300 --> 00:08:21,150 So what I'm suggesting is that we're completely attuned to seeing Hamlet as a play that anticipates modernity, that looks forward, 71 00:08:21,150 --> 00:08:30,800 and it's absolutely clear that Hamlet is a play which is much more popular and influential now than it ever was at the beginning of the 17th century. 72 00:08:30,800 --> 00:08:34,980 So it's come into its own in some way that didn't really register. 73 00:08:34,980 --> 00:08:44,040 I think with audiences at the time and one way of explaining its apparent lack of popularity at the time, 74 00:08:44,040 --> 00:08:51,900 if its writing is to say that it was it's too ahead of its time, its to eat something which only the modern world can come to terms with. 75 00:08:51,900 --> 00:09:00,030 So because of all that weight of feeling that Hamlet is modern, that Hamlet anticipates us, that Hamlet writes the modern self in some way. 76 00:09:00,030 --> 00:09:08,280 It's quite hard for us to think about the ways the play is deeply retrospective, looks backwards rather than forwards. 77 00:09:08,280 --> 00:09:15,690 But what I want to try and talk about today is a hamlet that's backward looking and caught up in its own history. 78 00:09:15,690 --> 00:09:23,280 That's to say for a play which has had so vital an afterlife, it is itself deeply mordant. 79 00:09:23,280 --> 00:09:28,960 And that's, I think, where the name of Hamlet starts to echo rather differently. 80 00:09:28,960 --> 00:09:32,570 So we've already established that the name Hamlett comes from the place sources. 81 00:09:32,570 --> 00:09:39,980 But one thing which is absolutely distinctive about Shakespeares naming in this play is that he doubles the name Hamlet, 82 00:09:39,980 --> 00:09:50,240 both for the dead father and for the living son. So in none of the sources is that overlap between the generations registered by them 83 00:09:50,240 --> 00:09:58,040 sharing a name in Saxa Grammaticus Armless Father has the wonderful name whole when Dale, 84 00:09:58,040 --> 00:10:01,510 for instance. 85 00:10:01,510 --> 00:10:11,620 In case we do not spot the significance of this, Shakespeare repeats the repetition for breaths to his son, to a father who has the same name. 86 00:10:11,620 --> 00:10:20,530 Clearly, there are plenty of names for Shakespeare to choose from. The play chooses to duplicate them. 87 00:10:20,530 --> 00:10:26,800 This also means that the first time we hear the word Hamlet in this play, it refers not to the living prince but to the dead. 88 00:10:26,800 --> 00:10:36,760 Former King Horatio's speech in Act one scene one names Valiante Hamlet as the man who slew 14 brass. 89 00:10:36,760 --> 00:10:45,280 So there's a strange sort of anticipatory version of the story in which two characters who are going to go on to encounter each other 90 00:10:45,280 --> 00:10:55,270 later in the play have already had their decisive encounter in which Hamlet SLU 14 brass to the play's first Hamlet is a ghost. 91 00:10:55,270 --> 00:11:02,620 Hamlet really is a play of the undead. And it's tempting, perhaps, to speculate that this might be the hamlet. 92 00:11:02,620 --> 00:11:13,540 The play is named after the overshadowing Hyperion, who is so idolised by his son that it is impossible for the son properly to succeed, 93 00:11:13,540 --> 00:11:21,430 either in the political sense or in the sense of being fulfilled when he encounters the ghost for the first time. 94 00:11:21,430 --> 00:11:29,790 Hamlet addresses it with his own name. I'll call the Hamlet King father Royal Dane. 95 00:11:29,790 --> 00:11:33,470 Oh, answer me. I'll call the Hamlet King. Father Royal Dane. 96 00:11:33,470 --> 00:11:41,020 Oh, answer me. And that strangely anticipates a more famous assertion of what it is to be Hamlet, which comes later in the play. 97 00:11:41,020 --> 00:11:50,530 It is I, Hamlet, the Dane. So these words have already been sort of occupied or allocated to the dead king. 98 00:11:50,530 --> 00:11:55,900 So the ghost pulls the beginning of the play backwards from the outset. 99 00:11:55,900 --> 00:12:00,010 Hamlet, the play is preoccupied with the past. 100 00:12:00,010 --> 00:12:07,770 In the tense opening scene on the Ellsinore battlements, Marcella's asks, Has this thing appeared again tonight? 101 00:12:07,770 --> 00:12:13,510 Tough. This thing appeared again tonight. So the action tells us that the play is doubly reiterative. 102 00:12:13,510 --> 00:12:24,040 A ghost is always a recollection of the past, and the ghost that has appeared before is doubly recollected, as Horatio informs us. 103 00:12:24,040 --> 00:12:31,540 The ghost represents both a more martial Denmark, a nostalgic world of sledding, poleaxed. 104 00:12:31,540 --> 00:12:39,850 One of the textual cruxes in the play don't quite know what it means, but it's very brave, whatever it is, and other feats of daring do. 105 00:12:39,850 --> 00:12:43,300 But later, descriptions of the ghost which describe as murder murderous he lay sleeping 106 00:12:43,300 --> 00:12:48,320 in his orchard evoke a more a sort of broader sense of a lost golden world, 107 00:12:48,320 --> 00:12:50,920 a kind of prelapsarian past. 108 00:12:50,920 --> 00:13:00,310 The serpent that that stole my crown is obviously a kind of DenTek reference in the murder of a brother pushes Eden beyond reach, 109 00:13:00,310 --> 00:13:12,280 as Claudius admits when he tries unsuccessfully to pray in the middle of the play, recollecting that his crime hath the primal eldest curse upon it. 110 00:13:12,280 --> 00:13:21,100 A brother's murder, the primal eldest curse clearly is the curse of Cain, who killed his brother Abel. 111 00:13:21,100 --> 00:13:29,260 So father and son share a name, and thus they cannot be properly distinguished in the hourly economy of the play. 112 00:13:29,260 --> 00:13:34,870 When we hear the name, we don't immediately know who it refers to. 113 00:13:34,870 --> 00:13:41,950 And one consequence of that is that young Hamlett cannot form an independent identity for himself. 114 00:13:41,950 --> 00:13:47,650 These repeated names link humbler more closely than we sometimes allow to. 115 00:13:47,650 --> 00:13:55,570 Those concerns with succession, both political and psychological, of the history plays. 116 00:13:55,570 --> 00:14:02,890 In some ways. Hamlet's nearest neighbour in the cannon is not another tragic protagonist like Othello or Macbeth. 117 00:14:02,890 --> 00:14:13,150 But the Prince, Henry and Henry, the fourth part one, another prince trying to escape the burden of a father with whom he shares the same name. 118 00:14:13,150 --> 00:14:13,780 We can see Henry. 119 00:14:13,780 --> 00:14:24,670 The fourth part one goes to considerable several automatic lengths to disguise this fact by calling Prince Henry how Harry Young Wagh, 120 00:14:24,670 --> 00:14:32,060 all those kinds of things, this ceasing to be ways that the play has tried to evade the fact that he and his father have the same name. 121 00:14:32,060 --> 00:14:39,350 Michael Sheen's recent performance of a psychiatric ward hamlet, in which he plays all of the characters, 122 00:14:39,350 --> 00:14:47,900 all Laurence Olivier's uncredited voiceover of the ghosts role in his 1948 firm, in which he also plays the main character. 123 00:14:47,900 --> 00:14:53,960 These are both liberalisations of the overlap between father and son. 124 00:14:53,960 --> 00:15:01,490 And this is something that's missed by the more conventional way of doubling the ghost in the play with Claudius or with the grave digger. 125 00:15:01,490 --> 00:15:06,800 For instance, both interesting ideas about where the ghost might come back in the play. 126 00:15:06,800 --> 00:15:13,290 But those two versions. Think about Hamlet, father and son, as being in some sense doubled. 127 00:15:13,290 --> 00:15:20,090 So the appearance of the ghost pulls Hamlet into a past and away from the future in Act one. 128 00:15:20,090 --> 00:15:27,110 Scene two. When we first meet Hamlet, Young Hamlet, that's to say we see a distinction between Laertes, 129 00:15:27,110 --> 00:15:33,110 the son of Polonius who requests permission to go back to France and is granted it. 130 00:15:33,110 --> 00:15:40,460 The contrast between that and the situation of Hamlet himself for your intent in going back to school in Whittenberg, 131 00:15:40,460 --> 00:15:45,050 it is most retrograde to our desire, Claudius tells Hamlet. 132 00:15:45,050 --> 00:15:51,650 Hamlet allows himself, therefore, to be persuaded to stay at home rather than to return to university. 133 00:15:51,650 --> 00:15:57,890 And in that decision, he fixes himself as forever a child. Perhaps this is connected to the old critical chestnut. 134 00:15:57,890 --> 00:16:07,220 How old is Hamlet? And Greg Doran's production of 2009 with David Tennant has Hamlett available now on film. 135 00:16:07,220 --> 00:16:11,410 The scene in which the ghost appears in Gertrude's chamber is played. 136 00:16:11,410 --> 00:16:18,260 Lesser's the sort of psychosexual drama that we've often seen it, as in, for example, Mel Gibson's film version, 137 00:16:18,260 --> 00:16:25,790 where Hamlet is more or less having sex with his mother and more a kind of affectionate family portrayed. 138 00:16:25,790 --> 00:16:31,010 The parents sit companionably on the bed. The ghost stroke's Gertrude's hair. 139 00:16:31,010 --> 00:16:40,580 Their young son sits happily at their feet. It shows that his development is, in some sense, arrested the ghosts encouragement. 140 00:16:40,580 --> 00:16:49,040 Remember Me is a command for the son to join him in the past, a past that is shown by the play structure. 141 00:16:49,040 --> 00:16:51,020 Of course, old Hamlet is already murdered. 142 00:16:51,020 --> 00:16:59,930 By the time the play begins to be completely unreachable, that past is already beyond the play's theatrical world. 143 00:16:59,930 --> 00:17:07,250 So when Claudius tells Hamlet that mourning for his father's death is unnatural, he is not just callous, 144 00:17:07,250 --> 00:17:14,030 but really articulating a quite different world view or a quite different direction of travel, we might say. 145 00:17:14,030 --> 00:17:18,590 Nature's common theme, says Claudius, is the death of fathers. 146 00:17:18,590 --> 00:17:22,780 You must know your father lost a father. That father lost. 147 00:17:22,780 --> 00:17:27,110 Lost. His stuff happened, says Claudius. Time moves on. 148 00:17:27,110 --> 00:17:31,760 Sons live longer than fathers. Claudius is pragmatic. 149 00:17:31,760 --> 00:17:37,850 Approach to succession and progress, therefore, is quite different from the impeded and circular. 150 00:17:37,850 --> 00:17:43,400 Remember me, which structures Hamlet's role in the play? 151 00:17:43,400 --> 00:17:51,020 What Hamlet does in the play tends to be about undoing and negation rather than about doing and progress. 152 00:17:51,020 --> 00:17:55,700 You'll see that he undoes a lot of things which might actually be plot themes. 153 00:17:55,700 --> 00:18:01,010 He breaks off his relationship with Ophelia. Case is not in a kind of courtship plot. 154 00:18:01,010 --> 00:18:09,380 He does not return to university, so it doesn't move on. The play flirts with a different location when Hamlet is sent to England. 155 00:18:09,380 --> 00:18:13,280 But of course, Hamlet comes back from that and never takes the play with him. 156 00:18:13,280 --> 00:18:16,900 There are all kinds of ways that a plot might move things along. 157 00:18:16,900 --> 00:18:21,320 New things ahead are frustrated by the way the play works. 158 00:18:21,320 --> 00:18:25,730 Hamlet's primary attachments, of course, after the dead, not to the living. 159 00:18:25,730 --> 00:18:33,680 The skull of Yorick gives rise to one of the play's most famous lines and clearly its most iconic visual moment. 160 00:18:33,680 --> 00:18:42,240 Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest of excellent fancy. 161 00:18:42,240 --> 00:18:46,860 They often reproduced image of Hamlett face to face with the skull. 162 00:18:46,860 --> 00:18:51,570 It's a kind of cataclysmic reverse of the graphic we use to illustrate evolution 163 00:18:51,570 --> 00:18:56,220 with those primates gradually straightening up into Homo sapiens here. 164 00:18:56,220 --> 00:19:03,700 Progress collapses. We look straight into the past, but also with it, the future. 165 00:19:03,700 --> 00:19:11,560 Now, since at least Freude, the idea that Hamala cannot make progress in this play has been understood psychologically. 166 00:19:11,560 --> 00:19:22,420 This is a psychological impediment to do with mourning and melancholia, Freud tells us that prevents him from making progress. 167 00:19:22,420 --> 00:19:24,190 But I think there are other ways, too, 168 00:19:24,190 --> 00:19:34,150 to see it less as an individual or a personal property and more as a as a cultural one bound up with the specific moment of the play's composition. 169 00:19:34,150 --> 00:19:39,850 I guess throughout this these lectures, I'm sort of stepping back from psychological explanations of why characters do 170 00:19:39,850 --> 00:19:45,010 what they do and trying to think more about traumatic ones or historical ones. 171 00:19:45,010 --> 00:19:52,680 I've already indicated that Hamlet is written around sixteen hundred shortly after As You Like It, which I discussed in last week's lecture. 172 00:19:52,680 --> 00:19:58,870 Unlike like that play, I think Hamlet registers the anxieties of that particular moment. 173 00:19:58,870 --> 00:20:02,770 The comparison I made earlier with Henry The Forth makes clear, I think, 174 00:20:02,770 --> 00:20:10,720 how much Hamlet shares with the English history plays of the earlier fifty nineties now censored by the bishop's ban, 175 00:20:10,720 --> 00:20:15,400 which banned satire and history that I talked about last week. 176 00:20:15,400 --> 00:20:23,780 Again, in relation to us. You like it? Like those earlier history plays, that's to say Hamlet has, as part of its charge, 177 00:20:23,780 --> 00:20:31,910 issues of regime change and political stability that arose from uncertainty over the tuda succession. 178 00:20:31,910 --> 00:20:39,350 The question of the next monarch preoccupied lately is debating society as we know, but could not be discussed directly. 179 00:20:39,350 --> 00:20:47,480 And the theatre was one, perhaps the dominant environment in which different scenarios about the transfer of power could be rehearsed, 180 00:20:47,480 --> 00:20:51,530 as in the deposition of Richard the second. The reign of Henry. The fourth. 181 00:20:51,530 --> 00:20:55,640 The rise of Richard. The Third. The challenge to singular kingship in King John. 182 00:20:55,640 --> 00:21:05,480 These are all place. I've already lectured on. So Hamlet then exists as a kind of belated history play and in that a rather apocalyptic one. 183 00:21:05,480 --> 00:21:12,170 In some ways this is the kind of end of history, in a Fukuyama's sense, mysteriously. 184 00:21:12,170 --> 00:21:18,710 Hamlet himself, despite being evidently old enough, does not inherit the throne. 185 00:21:18,710 --> 00:21:20,480 And the play itself does not, I think, 186 00:21:20,480 --> 00:21:28,520 adequately explain why they should be given the cultural atmosphere of its first performance when succession was such a hot topic, 187 00:21:28,520 --> 00:21:34,070 it's hard to think that this oversight would have gone unnoticed. It's hard to think that this just doesn't matter. 188 00:21:34,070 --> 00:21:38,120 In sixteen hundred one, what matters more than anything is who is going to succeed. 189 00:21:38,120 --> 00:21:48,320 Here we have a kingdom which has in some ways what England really wants, an intelligent young male heir. 190 00:21:48,320 --> 00:21:53,330 But it doesn't give the throne to him. And that's I think that's something important about the play. 191 00:21:53,330 --> 00:21:59,090 Instead, the Danish royal family and Hamlet destroys itself without outside interference. 192 00:21:59,090 --> 00:22:09,620 And the kingdom itself is left to fall into foreign hands, fought in brass marches on into Denmark and is able suavely and without shedding a 193 00:22:09,620 --> 00:22:15,230 single drop of his own soldiers blood to enter the throne room and take over with. 194 00:22:15,230 --> 00:22:17,420 Soros has fought in Brussels and Brussels the best, 195 00:22:17,420 --> 00:22:25,010 I think of these characters who comes in and kind of cashes in on what's happened at the end of of a tragedy with sorrow. 196 00:22:25,010 --> 00:22:30,620 I embrace my fortune, but I have some rights of memory in this kingdom. 197 00:22:30,620 --> 00:22:36,170 Memory again, which now to claim my advantage doth invite to me. 198 00:22:36,170 --> 00:22:39,920 Interesting comparison maybe with at the end of Julius Caesar. 199 00:22:39,920 --> 00:22:46,640 Similar highly political review of what's happened. 200 00:22:46,640 --> 00:22:48,420 In my lecture, I'm Richard the Third. 201 00:22:48,420 --> 00:22:57,690 I talked about the way in which that play never invests much dramatic energy in its eventual winner, Richard's nemesis, Richmond. 202 00:22:57,690 --> 00:23:04,740 Richmond wins the battle for the kingdom, but he barely even figures in the battle for the play. 203 00:23:04,740 --> 00:23:12,600 We might say something similar or for Tim Brass, a figure often and in fact very easily cut from Hamlet. 204 00:23:12,600 --> 00:23:21,630 So much so that some critics feel photographs was added in. It's so easy to take him back out again that he was never integral to the play's design. 205 00:23:21,630 --> 00:23:27,990 So he's is rather easily cut from the play and won with whom it is very hard to take much interest. 206 00:23:27,990 --> 00:23:32,430 The future is hardly presented in Hamlet as something to look forward to. 207 00:23:32,430 --> 00:23:36,690 We're almost inclined to agree with Hamlet's own solipsism. 208 00:23:36,690 --> 00:23:40,490 The rest is silence, as if it really is all over once. 209 00:23:40,490 --> 00:23:48,450 Hamlet is dead. So as an image of late Elizabethan anxieties, then Hamlet has an extremely bleak ending. 210 00:23:48,450 --> 00:23:55,170 But like Elizabethan culture more widely, the play prefers to look backwards rather than forwards. 211 00:23:55,170 --> 00:24:04,200 To think forwards was, after all, a crime now connected to this backward looking must be the issue of religion. 212 00:24:04,200 --> 00:24:10,320 We all probably know that one of the big issues about Hamlet is what this Catholic ghost coming 213 00:24:10,320 --> 00:24:18,940 back from Catholic purgatory is doing in an apparently Protestant play in a Protestant London. 214 00:24:18,940 --> 00:24:22,330 The ghost's description of his imprisonment, quote, 215 00:24:22,330 --> 00:24:31,810 confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burned and purged away, 216 00:24:31,810 --> 00:24:42,790 describes an outlawed doctrine of purgatory just as the ghost very presence is anathema to Protestant theology. 217 00:24:42,790 --> 00:24:52,960 Horacio, the alumnus of a distinctly Protestant university, Wittenburg, associated ineluctably with Martin Luther, is more Orthodox. 218 00:24:52,960 --> 00:24:55,030 He questions what the ghost intends. 219 00:24:55,030 --> 00:25:05,280 Warning Hamlett not to follow it in case it might, quote, deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness. 220 00:25:05,280 --> 00:25:14,880 Taking up suggestions that Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, who was fined for represent C, that's the crime of not attending church, 221 00:25:14,880 --> 00:25:20,190 taking up suggestions that that meant that John Shakespeare was an adherent of Catholicism, the old faith. 222 00:25:20,190 --> 00:25:29,310 Stephen Greenblat has memorably described Hamlet as a Protestant son haunted by the ghost of a Catholic father. 223 00:25:29,310 --> 00:25:35,190 And in that, he represents a peculiarly, peculiarly Elizabethan predicament. 224 00:25:35,190 --> 00:25:43,540 A child of the reformation over whom is cast the long shadow of the Catholic past. 225 00:25:43,540 --> 00:25:49,690 I think seeing the murder of old Hamlett as some sort of allegory for doctrinal change is too stark. 226 00:25:49,690 --> 00:25:54,190 Shakespeare happily is not writing the fairy queen, 227 00:25:54,190 --> 00:25:59,800 but seeing something of the play's nostalgic pull as the unquiet remnants of a shared Catholic 228 00:25:59,800 --> 00:26:06,740 past gives us a specific religious historiography for the play's structure and tone. 229 00:26:06,740 --> 00:26:14,630 One of the things you'll be aware of in in Shakespeare studies of the last decade or so has been that turned to religion 230 00:26:14,630 --> 00:26:21,610 and a new sense of the importance of religious identity and religious controversy to all the culture cultural products, 231 00:26:21,610 --> 00:26:31,040 including the drama of this period. Now, one final aspect of the play is nostalgia, I think is theatrical. 232 00:26:31,040 --> 00:26:42,310 Hamlet draws extensively on kids blockbuster play the Spanish tragedy he takes from that earlier play the name Horatio, the appearance of the ghost. 233 00:26:42,310 --> 00:26:47,110 The image of a woman running mad. The murder in the garden. 234 00:26:47,110 --> 00:26:54,820 And the device of the play within the play. These all come, I think, wholesale from the revenge play predecessor. 235 00:26:54,820 --> 00:27:01,130 They're not in sacks. So Grammaticus. And the story of armless. 236 00:27:01,130 --> 00:27:09,520 Now, we're used to seeing Shakespeare as someone who routinely transforms the dross of his sources into his own pure gold. 237 00:27:09,520 --> 00:27:16,480 So whenever we talk about Shakespeare, sources were saying he makes a very flabby, kind of boring story into something really dramatic. 238 00:27:16,480 --> 00:27:21,120 He cuts and shapes it and makes it something which is just awful, really, really brilliant. 239 00:27:21,120 --> 00:27:26,270 That's I mean, that's a very common way. We only ever really talk about Shakespeare sources in that way. 240 00:27:26,270 --> 00:27:30,040 But we might try and think here in the relation between the and between Hamilton, 241 00:27:30,040 --> 00:27:38,500 the Spanish tragedy about a relationship to previous plays, which is less effortlessly superior. 242 00:27:38,500 --> 00:27:44,350 Harold Bloom's influential account of literary history, The Anxiety of Influence, 243 00:27:44,350 --> 00:27:54,730 introduced a paradigm that saw poets forever wrestling with their strong, poetic predecessors in a creative but violent Oedipal rivalry. 244 00:27:54,730 --> 00:27:59,140 Bloom says that the poet is always struggling against the father poet who is stronger 245 00:27:59,140 --> 00:28:04,490 than him and who he must kind of overcome in order to gain his own poetic strength. 246 00:28:04,490 --> 00:28:16,120 Shakespeare is the only significant poet that Bloom exempts from this paradigm, saying that Shakespeare alone had no strong predecessors. 247 00:28:16,120 --> 00:28:25,630 I think he must be wrong and that kids Spanish tragedy is perhaps the father figure in this Partick Hougan here. 248 00:28:25,630 --> 00:28:31,450 The Spanish tragedy is a huge influence who might even say a haunting of Hamlet. 249 00:28:31,450 --> 00:28:40,030 This most popular of Elizabethan plays. This is the play. This really is the play that everybody knows the Spanish tragedy in Elizabethan England. 250 00:28:40,030 --> 00:28:44,560 And I've sometimes used the comparison to say this is like this is the Elizabethan England Star Wars. 251 00:28:44,560 --> 00:28:47,440 Everybody knows what it looks like and what it's about. 252 00:28:47,440 --> 00:28:50,910 Even if they haven't seen it or it's so long since they saw that, they've kind of forgotten about it. 253 00:28:50,910 --> 00:28:59,260 It hasn't it has a kind of currency and a recognisability, which nothing else has, and particularly not Hamlet. 254 00:28:59,260 --> 00:29:04,480 So this most popular of Elizabethan plays is ever present in Hamlet from its structure to its language. 255 00:29:04,480 --> 00:29:10,570 Even the word stalking, which is used of the ghosts distinctive movement across the stage, 256 00:29:10,570 --> 00:29:16,180 is one which is very strongly associated with descriptions of the stage presence of Edward Alleyne, 257 00:29:16,180 --> 00:29:21,970 the chief actor with the Animals man and quite likely the first actor to play Hirani Mo. 258 00:29:21,970 --> 00:29:30,610 Stalking seems to have been a slightly recognisably earlier kind of stage movement, non naturalistic stage movement. 259 00:29:30,610 --> 00:29:37,780 Stalking is associated very much with Allen and not with later actors, but in wrestling with the past. 260 00:29:37,780 --> 00:29:45,220 And I think it's quite useful to try and push the Oedipal theme in Hamlet away from a sort of tired cliche about whether Hamlet wants to sleep with 261 00:29:45,220 --> 00:29:53,320 his mother and towards a more textual sensibly the pull rivalry that this might be a play which which is in a kind of struggle with parental figures, 262 00:29:53,320 --> 00:29:59,030 parental textual figures, rather than parental character figures in wrestling with the past. 263 00:29:59,030 --> 00:30:03,910 That's to say Shakespeare makes a crucial change. The grief that motivates kids. 264 00:30:03,910 --> 00:30:08,650 Geronimo is, of course, the death of a son, Horatio. 265 00:30:08,650 --> 00:30:19,530 But Hamlet is mourning his father. The dynamic of past and a future is quite distinctly altered. 266 00:30:19,530 --> 00:30:25,780 The play's theatrical, not nostalgia, though, I think looks back further than the decade or so to kids play, 267 00:30:25,780 --> 00:30:35,680 which probably dates from the early 50s, nineties back to the mid century, Tudor interludes such as sackful and Norton's score baduk, 268 00:30:35,680 --> 00:30:45,730 which typically separated out the particulars, separated out action and words by having a dumb show which performed action and then a kind of verse, 269 00:30:45,730 --> 00:30:51,820 formal verse presentation which gave that the accompanying script. 270 00:30:51,820 --> 00:31:01,870 This, you'll see immediately, is the dramaturgy of the mousetrap, the play that the players bring to Elsinore dumb show plus Verst presentation. 271 00:31:01,870 --> 00:31:10,000 So in Hamlet, the players come to Elsinore and Hamlet shows himself a connoisseur of their performances together. 272 00:31:10,000 --> 00:31:16,090 They recall a heroic repertoire that Priam and Under Siege of Troy is. 273 00:31:16,090 --> 00:31:21,670 That is the speech that Hamlet is struggling to recall, just as Polonius recalls Julius Caesar. 274 00:31:21,670 --> 00:31:28,870 There are heroic figures in the background of Hamlet and the heroic dramatic figures. 275 00:31:28,870 --> 00:31:34,620 The players enact a closely paralleled version of old Hamlet's murder. 276 00:31:34,620 --> 00:31:40,810 An extended stage direction spells out in considerable detail how this how this action is mimed. 277 00:31:40,810 --> 00:31:44,710 The dumb show enters. Enter a king and queen very lovingly. 278 00:31:44,710 --> 00:31:52,390 The Queen embracing him. She kneels and makes show protestation, and to him he takes her up and declines his head upon her neck. 279 00:31:52,390 --> 00:31:59,650 He lays him down on a bank of flowers. If you've been trying to look at Shakespeare's stage directions for actions within plays, 280 00:31:59,650 --> 00:32:05,590 you'll see that she has been never gives us that kind of detail. But the dumb show is all choreographed for us. 281 00:32:05,590 --> 00:32:11,320 The descriptions continue with the king's poisoning and the wooing by the poisoner of the Queen, 282 00:32:11,320 --> 00:32:17,680 who seems loathe and willing a while, but in the end accepts his love. 283 00:32:17,680 --> 00:32:21,670 The play then repeats this mimed action, but this time verbally. 284 00:32:21,670 --> 00:32:30,570 And it's when the verbal retelling of the story comes out that Claudius interrupts the performance, calling for light on the play. 285 00:32:30,570 --> 00:32:40,410 It's over. So we might observe in passing that there's dramaturgical split between doing and saying is rather apt for the whole play of Hamlet, 286 00:32:40,410 --> 00:32:46,200 in which the relationship between doing and talking about doing is famously fraught. 287 00:32:46,200 --> 00:32:51,800 But more importantly, I think what I'm trying to think about here, which is the issue of retrospection, 288 00:32:51,800 --> 00:32:59,670 is that these nuggets of theatre that come out when Hamlet is engaged with the players come out as affectionate tributes, 289 00:32:59,670 --> 00:33:04,560 nostalgic fossilised versions of earlier forms of drama, 290 00:33:04,560 --> 00:33:14,490 which are being implicitly distinguished from what Hamlet sees as a very modern and rather regrettable development. 291 00:33:14,490 --> 00:33:18,750 But development of the boys companies. So you remember when Hamlet is talking to the players, 292 00:33:18,750 --> 00:33:28,980 he says that they talk about how bad it is that a group of little ISIS of small people, small children have taken over the theatre scene. 293 00:33:28,980 --> 00:33:38,580 So instead of this kind of modern theatre world, Hamlet is thinking back to an old theatrical culture in Kenneth Brunner's film of Hamlet, 294 00:33:38,580 --> 00:33:47,460 The Mouse Trap and the other flashbacks in the play to the players repertoire are filled with cameo roles by older actors. 295 00:33:47,460 --> 00:33:52,350 It's a kind of blacklist on Marge to the cinematic and theatrical past. 296 00:33:52,350 --> 00:33:57,300 Here we see John Gielgud, Charlton Heston, Judi Dench. 297 00:33:57,300 --> 00:34:02,190 These are these are figures from a previous theatrical or cinematic generation. 298 00:34:02,190 --> 00:34:10,710 And it's a modern version of how the particular form of theatre in its staging and its stilted language are deeply nostalgic. 299 00:34:10,710 --> 00:34:25,510 In Hamlet. Like the time of old Hamlet of Yorick, of Priam of Hirani, Mo, things the play says were better in the past. 300 00:34:25,510 --> 00:34:34,750 So far then, I've been suggesting that Hamlet is called Hamlet because it's one of the ways the play pulls him backwards into previous plays. 301 00:34:34,750 --> 00:34:45,330 And previous generations. So the naming becomes an emblem of the play's frustrated teleology and its difficulty of moving forward. 302 00:34:45,330 --> 00:34:55,590 So I think the name Hamlett thus enacts something of the dramatic treading of water that are discussed in as you like it in the last lecture. 303 00:34:55,590 --> 00:35:01,560 And therefore, I think this structure is related to historical and cultural factors about the end of the Elizabethan era. 304 00:35:01,560 --> 00:35:09,210 The nostalgia that made history such a popular genre in the theatre and beyond. 305 00:35:09,210 --> 00:35:14,610 So it results in a play that resists its own movement to annihilation by looping back on 306 00:35:14,610 --> 00:35:21,330 itself into a parallel and doomed universe in which Hamlet is always and already dead. 307 00:35:21,330 --> 00:35:25,410 Hamada's is like one of those characters in a time travel film who has to go backwards 308 00:35:25,410 --> 00:35:31,080 to the moment of his own death in order to rewrite his own history that he can't. 309 00:35:31,080 --> 00:35:37,850 So this cumulative nostalgia provides a reading which thinks about Hamlet as a symptom of its own move moment, 310 00:35:37,850 --> 00:35:45,840 his own historical moment, rather than as his more usual one that thinks about Hamlet as an anticipation of of us. 311 00:35:45,840 --> 00:35:48,210 And one which resists the movement to update the play, 312 00:35:48,210 --> 00:35:54,870 which has been such an insistent and such a fruitful project of theatre, particularly of cinema in our own era. 313 00:35:54,870 --> 00:36:00,570 So Hamlet's name can connect him to the past of his own play and hobbles him from moving forward. 314 00:36:00,570 --> 00:36:11,300 It condemns him to a life of remembering, revenging and all those other re prefixes which suggest repetition and redundancy. 315 00:36:11,300 --> 00:36:18,680 So how might we fit this reading into my other point, something which is more obviously connected with Shakespeare's own individual biography, 316 00:36:18,680 --> 00:36:25,100 not with a kind of broad brush stroke sense of what what was it like to be kind of fun to Seattle Elizabethan? 317 00:36:25,100 --> 00:36:33,800 But what was it like to be William Shakespeare? The idea that Hamlet actually recalls the young Hamlet. 318 00:36:33,800 --> 00:36:38,840 Shakespeare's twin children, Hamlet and Judith, were named after their neighbours, 319 00:36:38,840 --> 00:36:47,630 Hamlet and Judith Sattler and scholars have been quick to notice that when Hamlet Sattler is mentioned in Shakespeare's will, 320 00:36:47,630 --> 00:36:52,340 his name is spelt Hamlet Hamlet. 321 00:36:52,340 --> 00:36:59,130 Shakespeare died in 15 Ninety-Six, aged nine. 322 00:36:59,130 --> 00:37:04,110 As Freud put it in the interpretation of dreams with considerable certainty, 323 00:37:04,110 --> 00:37:11,010 it kind of course, only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. 324 00:37:11,010 --> 00:37:16,470 I observe that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father. 325 00:37:16,470 --> 00:37:19,980 That is under the immediate impact of his bereavement. 326 00:37:19,980 --> 00:37:25,890 And as we also may assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived, 327 00:37:25,890 --> 00:37:34,610 it is known to that Shakespeare's own son, who died at an early age, bore the name of Hamlet, which is identical with Hamlet. 328 00:37:34,610 --> 00:37:38,290 Modern greens are unclear whether Hamlet and Hamlet are, in fact, identical. 329 00:37:38,290 --> 00:37:45,580 But you can see how the association arises in this as in much else of his work on Shakespeare. 330 00:37:45,580 --> 00:37:54,970 Freud is heir to Victorian notions of biographical criticism in the 19th century, invented a narrative of Shakespeare's plays on his 19th century. 331 00:37:54,970 --> 00:37:58,720 Critics were completely preoccupied by was what was the right order of Shakespeare's 332 00:37:58,720 --> 00:38:03,500 plays because they wanted to make a kind of intellectual biography of the playwright. 333 00:38:03,500 --> 00:38:12,120 And if you look at late Victorian books on Shakespeare, they almost always move, try to move chronologically or in a perceived chronology. 334 00:38:12,120 --> 00:38:16,290 This is a reading which sees the turn from comedies to tragedies as a consequence 335 00:38:16,290 --> 00:38:22,020 of his own moods and the character of Prospero in The Tempest as a self portrayed. 336 00:38:22,020 --> 00:38:26,040 So there are lots of ways which we haven't quite let go of that critical paradigm. 337 00:38:26,040 --> 00:38:28,950 We still think the early works are less sophisticated than later ones, 338 00:38:28,950 --> 00:38:35,170 which is essentially a kind of biographical narrative about how our writer develops. 339 00:38:35,170 --> 00:38:41,260 As a corollary, 19th century biographical scholarship also invented, although I think it didn't intend to, 340 00:38:41,260 --> 00:38:47,560 the so-called authorship controversy, a feeling that, in fact, Shakespeare's life did not adequately map onto the plays. 341 00:38:47,560 --> 00:38:53,890 It couldn't explain the play and that into that gap. There was a kind of interpretive dissonance which meant that Shakespeare couldn't 342 00:38:53,890 --> 00:39:02,380 have written Shakespeare because he hadn't been to Italy or haven't studied law. He hadn't had a life which gave rise in a proper way to the plays. 343 00:39:02,380 --> 00:39:09,870 The idea that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare was a view that Freud also espoused at certain points. 344 00:39:09,870 --> 00:39:14,670 So in some ways, this is between Hamlet and Hamlet is not. 345 00:39:14,670 --> 00:39:19,140 It's part of Freud's kind of own backward looking ness towards Victorian criticism, 346 00:39:19,140 --> 00:39:25,590 Freud as a Victorian rather than Freud as as a modern inventing modern psychoanalysis. 347 00:39:25,590 --> 00:39:31,260 But it's an idea that the idea that Hamlet derives from its author's grief for his dead son has been 348 00:39:31,260 --> 00:39:36,730 revived recently and an extremely influentially by Stephen Greenblat and a bestselling biography, 349 00:39:36,730 --> 00:39:44,400 Will in the World or How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. The Renewed Popularity of Shakespearean biography in Our Own Period. 350 00:39:44,400 --> 00:39:51,120 So even as we are self professional entry, critics say we shouldn't read literate literature by biographically. 351 00:39:51,120 --> 00:39:57,910 Literary biography is one of the biggest growing literary genres in our own period. 352 00:39:57,910 --> 00:40:00,960 You know, there's a huge appetite for literary biography, for writers, 353 00:40:00,960 --> 00:40:04,630 biographies in the marketplace, and particularly for biographies of Shakespeare. 354 00:40:04,630 --> 00:40:08,250 So it's the kind of mismatch between a critical piety which says biography is not 355 00:40:08,250 --> 00:40:14,070 relevant to literary study and the kind of narrative appetite for literary biography. 356 00:40:14,070 --> 00:40:17,340 So the renewed popularity of Shakespearean biography in our own period means that the 357 00:40:17,340 --> 00:40:22,890 search for points of putative emotional connexion between the plays and the life, 358 00:40:22,890 --> 00:40:32,430 or rather the invention of an emotional life as a back projection from the plays has been returned to the critical table. 359 00:40:32,430 --> 00:40:38,310 One of the problems about Shakespeare's biography, as you knows that there is no detail whatsoever about what he thought, 360 00:40:38,310 --> 00:40:46,860 what he felt, what he believed in, only these very stark details about financial transactions and so on. 361 00:40:46,860 --> 00:40:52,920 And it's only biographies have always been struggled to know how much of the emotion in the plays. 362 00:40:52,920 --> 00:40:57,840 It is permissible to kind of suck back into the life. 363 00:40:57,840 --> 00:41:00,780 So Cumbo Graphy help us with Hamlet. 364 00:41:00,780 --> 00:41:11,940 Clearly, this is a play which is preoccupied by grief and by mourning, a play which looks back backward to something it knows to be unrecoverable. 365 00:41:11,940 --> 00:41:19,320 And clearly, the name the idea that Hamlet's name registers Hamlet encourages us to see that lost thing as something personal rather than, 366 00:41:19,320 --> 00:41:24,770 as I've been arguing so far as something cultural. The gains of this reading. 367 00:41:24,770 --> 00:41:30,990 Okay. The gains of thinking that Hamlet and permanents are in some way connected are twofold. 368 00:41:30,990 --> 00:41:38,670 Firstly, the reading authenticates the play's emotional landscape by connecting it to familial grief. 369 00:41:38,670 --> 00:41:46,920 Many people, I think reading Renaissance literature feel ethically a bit at sea by the difficulty of 370 00:41:46,920 --> 00:41:52,510 understanding the emotions expressed in that literature as coming from some real experience. 371 00:41:52,510 --> 00:41:59,540 If you think about how we worry about sonnets, whether sonnets, a literary exercises or whether they're biographical, that might be an example. 372 00:41:59,540 --> 00:42:09,840 So so one gain is that it's so to authenticates the emotional landscape of Hamlet by saying this comes from a really experienced grief. 373 00:42:09,840 --> 00:42:13,560 The second game, I think, is that it helps to humanise Shakespeare, 374 00:42:13,560 --> 00:42:21,090 whose apparent abandonment of his young family in Stratford to pursue his career in London has always been a problem to biographers. 375 00:42:21,090 --> 00:42:28,620 How should we how should we take this this apparent carelessness about its children? 376 00:42:28,620 --> 00:42:34,980 In fact, we don't know whether Shakespeare even attended Hamlet's funeral in August 15, 96, 377 00:42:34,980 --> 00:42:43,710 but the idea that the grief produced this literary masterpiece goes some way to excusing Shakespeare from any charge of neglect. 378 00:42:43,710 --> 00:42:53,830 Both Hamlet would play and Shakespeare the writer. That's to say, take a kind of benefit from the association of Hamlet and Hamlet. 379 00:42:53,830 --> 00:42:57,240 And I guess I've been thinking about that because one thing is one of the questions I think is 380 00:42:57,240 --> 00:43:01,810 most interesting about Shakespeare criticism is why do people want to believe what they believe? 381 00:43:01,810 --> 00:43:05,370 What's at stake in arguing one thing or another? 382 00:43:05,370 --> 00:43:11,190 But there's also counter evidence to this counter evidence that Hamlet and Hamlet are not, in fact, connected. 383 00:43:11,190 --> 00:43:17,970 From his earliest plays long before Hamlet's death, Shakespeare envisages that bond between father and son is crucial. 384 00:43:17,970 --> 00:43:27,270 In the third part of Henry the Sixth, a famous stage direction introduces us to a sort of distilled a kind of microcosm of how terrible civil war is. 385 00:43:27,270 --> 00:43:37,470 This is the stage direction. Enter a son that's have killed his father one door and a father that has killed his son at another door. 386 00:43:37,470 --> 00:43:46,320 Shakespeare's most famous depiction of grief for a dead child comes from King John, where Constance laments her son, Arthur. 387 00:43:46,320 --> 00:43:52,290 Grief fills up the sorry, but I've made a mess of this wonderful first line. 388 00:43:52,290 --> 00:44:01,710 I'll start again. Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, 389 00:44:01,710 --> 00:44:11,840 remembers me of all his gracious parts, stuffs out his vacant garments with his form, then have a reason to be fond of grief. 390 00:44:11,840 --> 00:44:17,690 We're so invested in the Phantom of Shakespeare's own emotional biography that many critics date King John the play in which 391 00:44:17,690 --> 00:44:24,410 that speech occurs at fifty nine to six solely because they think it could only have been written after Hamlet's death. 392 00:44:24,410 --> 00:44:30,950 Of all, the other evidence about the place suggests it's written earlier than that. Shakespeare. 393 00:44:30,950 --> 00:44:37,160 I think the answer to that is that Shakespeare can access grief without the immediate stimulus of Hamlet's death. 394 00:44:37,160 --> 00:44:43,490 That shouldn't really be surprising to us, because one thing we know about writers is they make things up. 395 00:44:43,490 --> 00:44:51,710 So the association of Hamlet and Hamlet may actually work to underestimate the inventive or creative powers of the dramatist on the one hand, 396 00:44:51,710 --> 00:45:00,750 and to overestimate the claims of confessional writing on the other, writing to alleviate inner personal torments. 397 00:45:00,750 --> 00:45:03,890 Isn't romantic construction of the mind of the artist, 398 00:45:03,890 --> 00:45:10,010 which hardly exists in this earlier period the most authentic source of writing in the Renaissance? 399 00:45:10,010 --> 00:45:22,310 Is previous writing not personal experience? Shakespeare doesn't, I think, write autobiography much as me might want him to do. 400 00:45:22,310 --> 00:45:27,440 So I've been talking about Hamlet as a nostalgic play and emphasising the strange echo 401 00:45:27,440 --> 00:45:33,590 of Hamlet's name for the play's recursive structure and for its habit of retrospection, 402 00:45:33,590 --> 00:45:38,180 rather than seeing this as the play in which modernity is most fully anticipated. 403 00:45:38,180 --> 00:45:45,680 I've tried to stress the ways it seeks a kind of comfort in the past and then to suggest that this registers less 404 00:45:45,680 --> 00:45:53,930 person Shakespeare's own personal inner landscape and more the cultural position of the Elizabethan fantasy. 405 00:45:53,930 --> 00:45:58,770 Next week I'll be talking about the comedy Much Ado about Nothing. 406 00:45:58,770 --> 00:46:08,184 And the question I want to ask is why does everyone believe Don John.