Speakers – James Loehlin, Alan Friedman, and Eric Mallin ENGLISH<\/p>\n
Hamlet\u2019s \u2018To Be or Not to Be\u2019 soliloquy has long been Shakespeare\u2019s most famous speech; but the way in which it has been performed on stage has changed drastically over the centuries. This session will review the history of those performances, from speculation about early modern acting to reviews of eminent Shakespeareans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to some of the most famous film and stage renditions of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speakers – James Loehlin, Alan Friedman, and Eric Mallin ENGLISH Hamlet\u2019s \u2018To Be or Not to Be\u2019 soliloquy has long been Shakespeare\u2019s most famous speech; but the way in which it has been performed on stage has changed drastically over the centuries. This session will review the history of those performances, from speculation about early […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/11\/18-09-14-BSLS.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"62.67M","filesize_raw":"65714186","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[7,50,46,51,14],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-64","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-british","6":"tag-british-lecture-series","7":"tag-dr-roger-louis","8":"tag-hamlet","9":"tag-shakespeare","10":"series-bsls","11":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":877,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-24 16:55:38","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:55:38","post_content":"\n James Loehlin is Shakespeare at Winedale Regents Professor of English and director of the Shakespeare at Winedale program. He is a native Austinite and a Plan II graduate of UT, where he was a student in the Winedale program under founding Director James B. Ayres. He earned an English M.A. at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and a joint Ph.D. in Drama and Humanities at Stanford. He taught in the Drama Department at Dartmouth College for five years, serving as Director of the London Foreign Study Program, before returning to UT in 1999. Loehlin works with the evolving meaning of plays in performance, both from a scholarly and practical perspective. He has published books on Shakespeare's\u00a0Romeo and Juliet<\/em>,\u00a0Henry IV<\/em>, and\u00a0Henry V<\/em>, as well as Chekhov's\u00a0The Cherry Orchard<\/em>. \u00a0He has directed, acted in, or supervised productions of twenty-five of Shakespeare's plays, as well as all four of Chekhov's major plays.<\/p>\n","post_title":"James Loehlin","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"james-loehlin","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 16:55:38","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:55:38","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=877","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":880,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-24 16:57:55","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:57:55","post_content":"\n Alan Warren Friedman holds the Arthur J. Thaman and Wilhelmina Dor\u00e9 Thaman Professorship in English and Comparative literature. He specializes in modern British, Irish, and American literature, the novel and Shakespearean drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He has authored five books, including \"Party Pieces: Oral Narrative and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett;\" and \"Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise,\" which examines cultural and literary attitudes toward death. Edited books include \"Samuel Beckett in Black and Red\" and \"Situating College English: Pedagogy and Politics at an American University,\" which examines cultural and higher educational issues. He has co-edited four special journal issues on Joyce and Beckett.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He coordinates the annual residency program, Actors from the London Stage, and advises the student organization, the Spirit of Shakespeare, which supports the residency and performs scenes from the annual AFTLS play. He has won several teaching awards, including Plan II's Chad Oliver Teaching Award (2003), and both the English Department's Faculty Service Award (2008) and UT's Civitatis Award conferred annually \"upon a member of the faculty in recognition of dedicated and meritorious service to the University above and beyond the regular expectations of teaching, research, and writing\" (2009-10).<\/p>\n","post_title":"Alan Friedman","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"alan-friedman","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 16:57:55","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:57:55","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=880","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":884,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-24 17:03:21","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 17:03:21","post_content":"\n Eric S. Mallin, Associate Professor of English, has taught at UT since 1987. He has received several teaching awards, including the President's Associates' and the Texs Exes' honors. He is the author of\u00a0Godless Shakespeare<\/em>\u00a0(Continuum, 2007) and\u00a0Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England<\/em>\u00a0(University of California Press,1996). He specializes in Shakespeare, cinema, and the nexus of sexuality and religion in the English Renaissance and beyond.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Eric Mallin","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"eric-mallin","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 17:03:21","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 17:03:21","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=884","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" Studies like this is always a very special occasion.<\/p>\n I’d like just as a prelude to begin by acknowledging a birthday that happened<\/p>\n over the course of the summer. Carl Schmidt is now ninety<\/p>\n six years old. He was born in 1924. Ninety six.<\/p>\n Ninety two years old. Ninety six. Nineteen twenty two. Ninety<\/p>\n six years old.<\/p>\n You. And then why dad said,<\/p>\n oh, Ellen, we<\/p>\n hand this over to you now so that Ellen is the mastermind of all of this. He<\/p>\n is always manages to pull it off. Year by year. One time he even managed to<\/p>\n explain how the actors from the London stage are financed.<\/p>\n If I did, I’d forgotten how we do it. That’s some<\/p>\n bubble gum and rubber bands and things like that.<\/p>\n I want, first of all, to correct the rubric on the announcement for today’s<\/p>\n event. What you see there is not what you’re getting. And the reason<\/p>\n for that is that it was a description that was turned into British studies by David Corn<\/p>\n Haber, who was going to do the talk today. And then family circumstances have prevented<\/p>\n him from being here. And so we fall back on the old standby Shakespeare<\/p>\n panel arrangement of which people seem to like well enough,<\/p>\n or at least they’ll accept it as as an air assaults version of what you were promised.<\/p>\n I will say briefly about actors from London stage. For those of you who may not be familiar with them, it’s<\/p>\n a program that’s been going on since the mid 1970s.<\/p>\n It was started by a professor of English from California,<\/p>\n Santa Barbara. I believe he was wanting to seize back Shakespeare<\/p>\n from the academics who had hijacked him in his view, who would essentially turn<\/p>\n Shakespeare’s plays into works of fiction, works to be read in class, to<\/p>\n be analyzed, to be discussed as if and passed<\/p>\n as if it were fictional prose. He insisted that Shakespeare wrote<\/p>\n scripts for actors for the theater<\/p>\n and that they should be understood that way. So he started taking his own students to England to see plays<\/p>\n at in London and in Stratford. And then he started badgering actors to come<\/p>\n meet with his students and talk about their experiences in translating the work<\/p>\n from the page to the stage. And he found some resistance. Actors felt that they were<\/p>\n uneducated and that quite a number of them felt they were under educated, ill equipped to talk, except<\/p>\n with Shakespeare’s script from Shakespeare script. And he<\/p>\n finally cornered Patrick Stewart, whom you may have heard of subsequently in other context.<\/p>\n And Patrick told him, no way, I don’t do that sort of thing. I wouldn’t have<\/p>\n anything to say. And squander the professor from California would not let go, badgered<\/p>\n him enough that he finally agreed to come around the next morning. I’d just answer a few questions.<\/p>\n He was told and as Patrick Stewart subsequently put it, after an<\/p>\n hour and a half, he discovered that he hadn’t even begun to say all the things he<\/p>\n discovered that he knew and wanted to respond to the students with. So he became<\/p>\n the British end of the operation. He was the founding British director of the program<\/p>\n squandered, decided he wanted to share the experience and to bring the actors to America, to American<\/p>\n campuses. And so that’s the way it evolved.<\/p>\n Their headquarters in London, their headquarters, the American headquarters, are<\/p>\n now at Notre Dame. The actors are all from British companies.<\/p>\n They are they audition and are cast in London. And<\/p>\n then in the summer and over the Christmas break, they rehearse. There are two seasons,<\/p>\n two different troupes, two different sets of plays. They take them to American campuses for a<\/p>\n week’s residency, seven or eight in the fall, seven or eight in the spring, a different<\/p>\n play each semester. So I’ve been bringing them here<\/p>\n to U.T. since nineteen ninety nine. So I guess our 20th year of doing this.<\/p>\n The company consists of five actors. It started out with five<\/p>\n and it stated five. Why five. Because you get five in a car. That was<\/p>\n the reason it was a cheap way of doing it. And almost no props, minimum props.<\/p>\n They they have to get all their props into a single trunk. And they<\/p>\n have no director. So in that regard, it’s like a Shakespearean production from Shakespeare’s<\/p>\n day. They direct each other. It’s the five of them alone in a room in south London,<\/p>\n locked away for a month or so. Then they take it on the road, they bring it over to Notre Dame. They spend a couple of weeks<\/p>\n there continuing to rehearse, get it up on its feet and. Performing they started performing<\/p>\n this week. We will have them here next week. And the schedule of the performances are on that<\/p>\n handout that I passed around. So that’s the background and I feel as if<\/p>\n there are any questions about them later. I’d be happy to to try to answer them.<\/p>\n I’m going to do a brief introduction about Hamlet, the play before we<\/p>\n get into the nitty gritty of what we’re doing together here. James O’LOGHLIN and Eric Malin<\/p>\n and I want to say a couple of things about about the play and then move<\/p>\n into something specific. Hamlet is the Mona Lisa of<\/p>\n literature. That’s not an original notion. With me, that was T.S. Eliot writing an essay<\/p>\n called Hamlet and His Problems back in the 1920s. Why Mona Lisa?<\/p>\n It’s an an enigmatic Mr. Ripley, not in the sense of who done<\/p>\n it. We know that pretty early on. But why and how and to what purpose?<\/p>\n It is not only filled with questions, riddles and enigmas, but it is more in the interrogative<\/p>\n mood and perhaps more unsettling than any other Shakespeare play.<\/p>\n John Dover Wilson in the 1930’s, great Shakespeare critic wrote a book called What Happens in Hamlet.<\/p>\n No other play has or needs such a book.<\/p>\n It is unique to Hamlet. There are seven questions asked in the<\/p>\n first 20 lines of the play. Almost none of which are answered<\/p>\n or at least not answered directly and clearly.<\/p>\n The word question itself or variations on it like questionable<\/p>\n a pair appears twice as many times in this play as in the next most<\/p>\n play, which is all’s well that ends well. Seventeen times, it<\/p>\n appears, from the questioning of the ghost that comes in questionable shape<\/p>\n to Hamlet’s uncertainty about the nature of human existence to be or not to be.<\/p>\n That is the question. And Horatio’s final hopeless determination<\/p>\n to answer this bloody question.<\/p>\n By telling Hamlet’s story right as if anybody could. In the brief time he’s allotted,<\/p>\n when you look back on the experience of Hamlet’s adventures that we’ve<\/p>\n just experienced. Hamlet objects to those who would pluck out the heart<\/p>\n of my mystery. But the play challenges its characters and us to<\/p>\n try to do just that. And then frustrates all our efforts so that I will<\/p>\n say in advance and I hope this doesn’t undermine what my colleagues are going to say. Anything that they or<\/p>\n I say about this play should be viewed skeptically with a question<\/p>\n mark hanging over it and challenged.<\/p>\n You get your own money. And so in his essay,<\/p>\n Eliot went on to call Hamlet extraordinarily, in my view, an artistic<\/p>\n failure. He argues<\/p>\n reasonably enough that Hamlet derives from the tradition of revenge tragedies<\/p>\n in which someone great or good has been murdered. The protagonist seeks revenge,<\/p>\n is thwarted by the king’s guard, feigns madness so that the guard is relaxed<\/p>\n and finally attains his revenge, but dies in the process. And that’s a<\/p>\n fair summary of the kind of revenge tragedy that Shakespeare would have inherited,<\/p>\n as Elliot notes, Hamlet contains all of these elements.<\/p>\n But he adds, they do not cahir fit together. Makes sense.<\/p>\n For example, in Shakespeare’s play, the king is unsuspicious.<\/p>\n After he’s killed his predecessor and his guard is down<\/p>\n until hamlet. harsh treatment of Ophelia and his wild behavior causes Claudius<\/p>\n to feel threatened and to raise his guard against Tamarla.<\/p>\n And hamlet., who has sworn to revenge his father’s death and seems often on the verge of killing Claudius,<\/p>\n especially in the pressing.<\/p>\n Avoids doing so when the opportunity presents itself.<\/p>\n Hamlet is far more than a failed revenge tragedy, far more complex,<\/p>\n problematic, interesting and popular than its source plays.<\/p>\n In fact, it’s probably the most popular shape play of Shakespeare’s that’s been performed on<\/p>\n the stage over the last 400 years. But Midsummer Night’s Dream is catching up quickly.<\/p>\n Unlike revenge, tragedy, conventional events, tragedies in which the nature and embodiment<\/p>\n of good and evil are clearly defined. Hamlet is, I submit, about<\/p>\n in certitude, doubt, ambiguity and equivocation.<\/p>\n OK. So they’re at the very heart of what the play is and does.<\/p>\n Now, I’m going to focus my attention for just a moment on one<\/p>\n speech. This is speech towards the end of Act 1, scene 5.<\/p>\n Hamlet has confronted the ghost who comes in questionable<\/p>\n shape. And he has to decide from this moment going forward<\/p>\n what to make of the ghost. Is it honest? Is it what it seems to<\/p>\n be? Is it some sort of demonic creature<\/p>\n appearing in the guise of his father or what he has? What I take to be a<\/p>\n kind of instinctual, passionate, intense<\/p>\n response to the ghost, to the moment to himself in this experience. And here’s<\/p>\n what it sounds like. What you host iPad. What else?<\/p>\n You couple. Hello, I hope. Oh, my God. And you might think you’ve got an instant old,<\/p>\n but fairly swiftly up. Remember me? That poor ghost.<\/p>\n Well, as memory holds a seat in this distracted globe, remember thee. Yay!<\/p>\n From the table of my memory, I’ll wipe away all trivial fun<\/p>\n records, all sorts of books, all forms, all pressures past that youth and observation<\/p>\n copied there by commandment. All one shall live within the book and volume of<\/p>\n my brain. Unmixed with basner matter. Yes, by heaven.<\/p>\n Most pernicious woman. Oh, Villon.<\/p>\n villans smiling. Damn it, really? My tables<\/p>\n melted, it is I set it down. That one may smile<\/p>\n and smile. And be a villain. At least<\/p>\n I’m sure of it. So in Denmark. So, uncle, there<\/p>\n you are. That’s my word. It is a deal.<\/p>\n Remember me?<\/p>\n I have sworn.<\/p>\n Thank you, Austin. It’s a it’s a wonderful speech. It’s powerful speech,<\/p>\n and what it does for me especially is to represent a dilemma.<\/p>\n I think what most people tend to hear, at least initially in this speech, is the business about memory<\/p>\n and remember and to read that as impelling action going forward toward<\/p>\n revenge. For me, the speech is more about something else. It’s more about<\/p>\n looking back. Hamlet talks about wiping away from his memory<\/p>\n all trivial, fond records, all sorts of books, all forms, all pressures<\/p>\n past everything Hamlet has known and been up until now.<\/p>\n He must sacrifice if he is it, to give himself over to becoming<\/p>\n the instrument of another person, another person’s or spirit’s<\/p>\n purpose. And I think he finds that extremely hard, as<\/p>\n would any of us. And<\/p>\n that this is, as I suggested, is is recurs.<\/p>\n It seems to me in the couple that he speaks towards the end of<\/p>\n end of the scene when unlike Shakespeare’s other tragic protagonists, a<\/p>\n fellow Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet says the time is out of<\/p>\n joint o cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.<\/p>\n So he inherits his tragic burden, unlike the other tragic protagonists<\/p>\n who are essentially responsible for creating them. He inherits his,<\/p>\n and that’s an enormously crushing onus that is placed upon him. And<\/p>\n how does he how do you how do you begin to carry that and cope with it and enacted? You have to<\/p>\n break with everything that’s come before. It seems to me and he he knows that he’s<\/p>\n sort of kind of accepts it, but he also fights against it. And that’s the conflict that,<\/p>\n it seems to me, emerges during the course of the play and that we see repeated over and over again<\/p>\n in various ways. The first the very first deed that Hamlet performs, the very<\/p>\n first act he commits after the battlement scene. And we don’t see it. We hear about<\/p>\n it. He goes to Ophelia. With a kind of hail and farewell,<\/p>\n because what he must do, first of all, is to break off from the one he loves<\/p>\n most intensely. He cannot bring her along on this terrible journey<\/p>\n that he has had imposed upon him. And I think<\/p>\n it begins to destroy him from within as that goes forward.<\/p>\n Thank you, Alan. That was great. And actually it was that it was a great introduction for whenever I<\/p>\n wanted to say, I wanted to start out with an anecdote that I just remembered,<\/p>\n which was my Mike’s my first sort of a scholarly experience<\/p>\n with Hamlet. It was one of my dissertation chapters and I<\/p>\n was performing and performing. I was writing my dissertation on a very old computer back<\/p>\n when computers had just started to become computers. And<\/p>\n was as a step above the typewriter bit, but not much. And I had finished<\/p>\n a very long chapter on handling a hit Save and<\/p>\n the disk drive started spinning. There was a disk drive and it was spinning, spinning. After about<\/p>\n five minutes, I realized I was in trouble. It kept spinning. It wasn’t going to say what I’d written about Hamley<\/p>\n after 20 minutes. All of a sudden, every character that I’d written had converted<\/p>\n to a question mark. I’m not kidding. Proof positive.<\/p>\n I mean, I’m not putting my entire chapter of your wiped out replaced by question marks.<\/p>\n And that’s what you submitted. Yeah, I figured that would be that would be a sufficient scholarly<\/p>\n item of the play I’d taken. Yeah. Thank you.<\/p>\n Speaking of us, speaking of question marks, I’m supposed to talk today about to be or not to be.<\/p>\n And I do want to set the speech in context, which a lot<\/p>\n of people forget to do. Part of the reason they forget to do it is it seems so easily extractable<\/p>\n from the play. It seems like like such a great set piece. And<\/p>\n this goes along with a theory that I have about about Shakespeare, which is that he actually<\/p>\n wrote a bunch of speeches and he just put them in his drawer and he sort of pulled them out occasionally when he needed them<\/p>\n in an interview or not. We didn’t quite fit. But he didn’t let that bother him. So<\/p>\n so. So I wanted to I wanted to talk about that. But<\/p>\n also it also suggests that it is at the same time really crucial to the play<\/p>\n in certain symbolic ways. I believe it was and correct me<\/p>\n is that it was an Olivier. He said that Hamlet was about a man who could not make up his mind. Nobody<\/p>\n was film. Yeah. Yeah. And and the great literary critic Stephen Booth<\/p>\n said that Hamlet was actually that an audience that couldn’t make up its mind, which I think is pretty<\/p>\n clever. I want to steal this those comments and say essentially that I<\/p>\n think that that at its core, Hamlet is actually about a speech that can make up its mind. And the<\/p>\n speech is to be or not to be. And that’s that’s the soliloquy.<\/p>\n To set it up, though, I think I think we need to to put it in context<\/p>\n and to to properly understand the context. I guess you’ve set up the first part of the context.<\/p>\n And I would start with Polonius in Act 2, scene 1. And<\/p>\n we may not remember this, but Polonius begins that that act by giving instructions<\/p>\n to his servant Rinaldo to to spy on his son Laertes,<\/p>\n and not only to spy on him, but to sort of cede rumors about him. So, so<\/p>\n much so that that that renaud’s kind of shocked. No, no. That would dishonor him. And<\/p>\n pillories does not. Or now it will be fine, you know. You know, you can you can say that he’s been out hollering.<\/p>\n That’s all right. He said he says the reason he’s doing this<\/p>\n and this is a fairly famous line, he says by indirection we will find directions out.<\/p>\n So he proceeds indirectly in order to to to find a way forward. One of<\/p>\n the remarkable things that we realized in that moment is how much Polonius is actually like Hamlet.<\/p>\n We tend to think of them as as furious opposites, but they’re really pretty similar that way.<\/p>\n They’re both sneaky and and and indirect. And that’s kind of<\/p>\n it’s kind of shocking in a way. So.<\/p>\n So I wanted to begin the idea of context with Polonius<\/p>\n is surveillance of his son. Because what happens<\/p>\n in in the hamlet that we read that to be or not to be a soliloquy that we know is<\/p>\n that most of us understand it as a soliloquy.<\/p>\n Plain and simple. However, there’s that there’s another version of Hamlet that you may or may not know about,<\/p>\n which is the so-called Bad Korto. The first cuarto version, which is another version that came out in Shakespeare’s<\/p>\n lifetime. Scholarly opinion on it, it seems mixed, actually.<\/p>\n Some people think that it’s not authorial. It’s not by Shakespeare. It was a reconstruction by an<\/p>\n actor. I’m not so sure that’s true. But. But one thing that’s shocking about<\/p>\n the speech and maybe this is the reason that scholars have thought this, is that the speech to be<\/p>\n or not to be in the first quarto actually makes sense. How,<\/p>\n you know, it’s not Shakespeare. It actually makes sense. And part of<\/p>\n the reason it makes sense is, is that it is in a different context. It comes up at a<\/p>\n different point in the play than the famous to be or not to be soliloquy. And I actually<\/p>\n wanted to wanted to rehearse where it where it appears<\/p>\n at the point of the early to be or not to be soliloquy in the so-called bad Korto.<\/p>\n The following things have happened. Hamlet’s father has died. He’s come back. The ghost has appeared.<\/p>\n Hamlet is is distraught. He has.<\/p>\n And we will certainly differ on this interpretation. He has either presented himself<\/p>\n to Ophelia as sincerely miserable or set up<\/p>\n a performance for Ophelia for various reasons. He<\/p>\n again, this is in that this isn’t the first Korto version. He.<\/p>\n Let’s see. So she has told her father that that Hamlet has come. He’s been acting crazy.<\/p>\n But here the following things have not happened. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have not been sent<\/p>\n to Hamlet. The players have not yet showed up. And<\/p>\n he gives this he gives this speech. I don’t know if it if we have a copy available. I<\/p>\n actually don’t have a copy. Thank you. I made<\/p>\n a few copies of of the the version in the first courthouse.<\/p>\n And when you read this with the version that we all know in mind, he’s got it. If you<\/p>\n want to. If you don’t like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is fantastic. Thank<\/p>\n you so much. Yeah, that would be that would be great. This is actually the most fun lecture I’ve ever<\/p>\n participatory lecturer. That’s great. So this is this is this is the version in<\/p>\n in the first quarter. And I think you’ll notice a few differences from from the<\/p>\n version that most of us know. It connects the dots. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.<\/p>\n To be or not to be. There’s the point<\/p>\n to die. To sleep. Is that all? I all<\/p>\n know. To sleep, to dream. Hi, Mary. There it goes<\/p>\n for in that dream of death, when we awake and born before an everlasting<\/p>\n judge from whence no passenger ever returned the undiscovered country<\/p>\n at whose sight, the happy smile and the accursed damned by for this<\/p>\n the joyful hope of this, who would bear the scorns and flattery<\/p>\n of the world scorned by the right rich, the rich Crowfoot of the poor, the widow<\/p>\n being oppressed, the orphan wronged, the taste of hunger or tyrants<\/p>\n reign and thousand more calamities besides to grunt and<\/p>\n sweat. Under this weary life, when he made his full quietus make with a bear<\/p>\n thought can who would this endure? For a hope<\/p>\n there’s something after death which puzzles the brain and death confound the<\/p>\n sense which makes us rather bear those<\/p>\n evils. We have to find others that we know not of.<\/p>\n I owe this. Conscience makes cowards<\/p>\n of us all. Maybe my autism is beyond my<\/p>\n students love. Thank you.<\/p>\n That was, I think, really beautifully and smoothly delivered, which is exactly the opposite of the way I would read<\/p>\n it. Which is not a critique at all. Try to do it some justice. I think that<\/p>\n I can’t. That was that was much better than I could possibly read it. But what I would<\/p>\n I would actually say about this speech is that it comes early enough in the play that it seems more or less continuous<\/p>\n with his earlier visit to Ophelia, which is to say in some ways, the way this speech<\/p>\n makes sense is that it’s not supposed to make sense. It’s supposed to be a bit daffy.<\/p>\n And so it has sentence fragments in it. He breaks off. He doesn’t seem to realize<\/p>\n that Ophelia is there. Of course, that’s true of both speeches. And and unlike the to be<\/p>\n or not to be speech that we that we know, he actually says the reason<\/p>\n that he doesn’t kill himself is for the hope of something after death, not<\/p>\n for the fear of what may happen after death. So this is that once is so much more<\/p>\n cheerful Hamlet, but also a hamlet. It sounds a bit scattered<\/p>\n or or unsure of of himself as opposed to<\/p>\n the to be or not to be speech that that we all know it was Hamlet sounds famously philosophical<\/p>\n and plausibly suicidal to be. We’re not to<\/p>\n be. That is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer<\/p>\n the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles,<\/p>\n and by opposing end to die to sleep no more. And by a sleep<\/p>\n to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to is a contribution<\/p>\n devoutly to be wished to die to sleep. To<\/p>\n sleep, change to dream. Right. There’s the rub for that<\/p>\n sleep of death when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. What dreams may come<\/p>\n must give us pause. There’s the respect that makes calamity of<\/p>\n so long. But for who would bear the whips and scorns of time,<\/p>\n the oppressor is wrong. The proud men contemplate the pains of describes, love<\/p>\n the loss, believe in swords of office and the spurns, the patient merit of the unworthy takes when<\/p>\n he himself might his way just meet with a bear. But who would final’s<\/p>\n bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life<\/p>\n that the dread something after death, the undiscovered<\/p>\n country from whose born no traveler returns? Puzzled. The will<\/p>\n makes us rather bear those ills we have that fly to other that we know not of<\/p>\n conscience does make cowards of us all. And thus the native<\/p>\n few of resolutions stick, lead, or with a pale cast and<\/p>\n enterprises of great pith and moment with disregard, their currents turn to ride<\/p>\n and lose the name of action. You know the fair Ophelia<\/p>\n you might or is the all night sins, remember?<\/p>\n Thank you. Thank you so much. So that speech<\/p>\n has been ably and beautifully explicated by my colleague Douglas burster here.<\/p>\n If he’s not here in this book, which is called to be or not to be an apt title,<\/p>\n and and I won’t rehearse his arguments here here at all except<\/p>\n to say is something something that that he concludes with, which is essentially that<\/p>\n in his reading that to be or not to be speech as we know it is essentially a distillation of the play<\/p>\n that that that numerous themes of questioning, of of of<\/p>\n worries about the afterlife, etc., etc. are contained in that speech,<\/p>\n that that in a way goes against what I’m going to say about the speech, mostly<\/p>\n because if we contextualize it, a very different kind of speech emerges.<\/p>\n That is to say, when Daniels speech occurs, the following<\/p>\n things have happened, which I telegraphed earlier, the following things have happened.<\/p>\n Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia has disintegrated, as with<\/p>\n the first quarter speech, however, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have come to court and they<\/p>\n have been set to Hamlet by the king and queen to spy on him. They have come to<\/p>\n Hamlet and he is instantly suspicious of them and rightfully so, and<\/p>\n sniffs out that they’ve been that they’ve been sent to spy on him.<\/p>\n He’s not really happy about that. But it’s really crucial to understand that he knows he’s under surveillance.<\/p>\n That’s absolutely important for the speech as we have it. The next<\/p>\n thing that happened, which is really important, is they’ve been bantering with him and they say, well, you know, if<\/p>\n you’re upset now, I can’t imagine what Lenten entertainment the players will have<\/p>\n from you. And he says players. What players? And they say all of the players are on their way and Hamlet.<\/p>\n Then there’s a very, very famous passage in the play that in<\/p>\n which Hamlet enters. ICE-SAR entertains the players. He needs them. They’re his old friends.<\/p>\n And he’s struck with a very famous idea, which is what?<\/p>\n Play something thing. Thank you. Yes, exactly right. Yes, he has decided<\/p>\n this is near the end of Act 2, scene 2. Hey, it’s not just great to see the players,<\/p>\n but that they can serve my purposes. How cool. And in fact, not only am<\/p>\n I being spied on, but maybe I can spy myself. So what he’s decided to do is<\/p>\n use the players to spy on on on Claudius. And he’s<\/p>\n very excited about this. And this is his plan, at which<\/p>\n point. Unintelligibly he then gives the to be or not to be speech.<\/p>\n Why? Why<\/p>\n is he suicidal? Probably not. Probably not at this point.<\/p>\n Probably not even close. He should be excited. He should be pleased.<\/p>\n So. So this is a very strange sort of mystery about about the<\/p>\n about the speech. An extremely famous Shakespearean and AC Bradley seemed to actually think this<\/p>\n is a strength. That is to say that Hamlet sort of entertains suicide a second time,<\/p>\n even after even after the players have come. And I’m not quite sure why this<\/p>\n is the strength. I actually think it’s incoherent. He seems to be on a linear path<\/p>\n to test Claudius to see what’s what’s going to happen. And so<\/p>\n he gives this speech, which is characterized in a way that no<\/p>\n other soliloquy that Hamlet gives is characterized or can be characters, which is to say we will search<\/p>\n in vain in this particular soliloquy for any personal detail about Hamlet’s<\/p>\n life. Every other soliloquy makes reference to his personal situation,<\/p>\n to the death of his father, to the that possibly the loss of love in his life<\/p>\n to particularly to to King Claudius. This has nothing.<\/p>\n This has. This is completely abstract, random, impersonal.<\/p>\n To see this speech as deeply felt, I believe is a mistake. Or or I should say,<\/p>\n to speak. See, this speech as deeply felt in the moment is a mistake. It may have been deeply felt<\/p>\n when Hamlet wrote it and put it in a drawer 20 years. But but at this point at<\/p>\n this point, it makes no sense to have Hamlet give this particular speech now unless we make it<\/p>\n make sense. So that’s what I’m gonna do or suggest. OK. So. So<\/p>\n once again, nobody’s being surveilled, wants to surveil the king. He’s got this exciting new idea.<\/p>\n He doesn’t really have any thoughts of suicide. This speech is essentially a sham.<\/p>\n It’s essentially fraudulent. Not only that, but let us not forget that this is not<\/p>\n fundamentally a soliloquy. There are many people on stage. The king<\/p>\n is behind the curtain. Polonius is behind the curtain. Ophelia is onstage.<\/p>\n He may pretend just to see her at the end of the speech. But there she is. Oh. Softly Now the<\/p>\n Ophelia. Hey, how are you? It’s surprising. Now<\/p>\n this can be staged so that he I assume that he doesn’t see her or that she comes on at the end of the speech<\/p>\n and his back is her right there. All all kinds of ways to arrange it so that Hamlet<\/p>\n doesn’t know if Feel is there, but Hamlet knows Ophelia is there. I would I would guess<\/p>\n so. I guess I want us to think about how how different this speech<\/p>\n is. If Hamlet is giving it to an audience and knows he’s giving it to an audience.<\/p>\n What what what the speech means under those circumstances.<\/p>\n And. There aren’t that many plausible answers. But<\/p>\n but one interesting thing does does sort of emerge. Again,<\/p>\n this this depends on my much different reading from Alan’s reading of Hamlet. Go<\/p>\n into Ophelia and essentially essentially saying goodbye<\/p>\n to her, saying farewell to her. My guess is he. He does so in a in a<\/p>\n in a ironically almost comically<\/p>\n over-the-top way in which in which his miming is is easily summarized<\/p>\n by Ophelia to the king and queen. He knows she’s going to tell and<\/p>\n and he you know, he makes gestures and he sighs heavily and and runs<\/p>\n away. So that so that a would say, oh, my gosh, Hamlet, poor Hamlet. And the<\/p>\n immediate reading is, oh, he must be mad for your love. So that that seems<\/p>\n that seems plausible. So so Hamlet right now is buying time.<\/p>\n That is to say, before the players show up, when the players show up, he has a plan.<\/p>\n But until that point, he was just buying time. He didn’t quite know what to do. Right. The players show<\/p>\n he has a plan. His plans have to change. He needs instead of instead<\/p>\n of people to be suspicious of him, he needs to allay suspicions. So he gives this speech<\/p>\n to explain this speech that we know it. The speech as we have it, it should be or not to be soliloquy,<\/p>\n not essentially to say I’m going to kill myself, but as he says at the end of<\/p>\n the speech. To lose the name of action. Just to promise Claudius he’s not<\/p>\n going to do anything. It’s a promissory note for passivity. And<\/p>\n what’s great about Hamlet, the play in Hamlet, the person is whenever Hamlet makes<\/p>\n a plan, he then messes it up. He cannot help himself. This is one<\/p>\n of the keynotes of his character, so that after Hamlet gives the speech and he thinks,<\/p>\n oh, this is great, nicely formed. Got this guy, got the fake philosophy down.<\/p>\n Sound really passive. Not going to do anything to lose the name of action. Soft to Ophelia<\/p>\n nymphet. They are since be all my sins remembered. She says Here are some of your love letters. And he goes like<\/p>\n this and he flips out at her.<\/p>\n He cannot control himself. He he loses the plan that<\/p>\n he had so carefully formulated, after which point put Claudius and Polonius<\/p>\n steps out and Claudius turns to play and says Love and insight, much like love.<\/p>\n And he said, You. And although his speech lacks form a little, it wasn’t much like madness either.<\/p>\n So Hamlet really does a very, very bad job of carrying through with the plans that<\/p>\n he does seem to have. But at this moment, at this central moment in the play, the to<\/p>\n be or not to be soliloquy. I think we need to see it as a completely insincere setup<\/p>\n job that he then cannot sustain. The one other great example<\/p>\n of Hamlet having having the moment that he’s simply having a plan that he simply cannot sustain comes<\/p>\n in the famous play within the placing. But I’ll yield my time now to James.<\/p>\n All right. Thank you. And Eric, I am here<\/p>\n sort of batting cleanup. And one<\/p>\n of my goals was to make sure that you’ve got something like what you were promised in the<\/p>\n advertisment, which I think said it was going to be about to be or not to be through the<\/p>\n ages. And Eric has given us a lot about<\/p>\n to be or not to be. And so I’ll try to say a little about Hamlet through the ages.<\/p>\n But I’m sure will want to return to all of our thoughts about the<\/p>\n play and some of your thoughts afterwards. Hamlet has<\/p>\n always been one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. Perhaps his most popular was Allanson,<\/p>\n both on the stage and in the study. It was published several<\/p>\n times in Shakespeare’s lifetime. That’s part of the problem, because we<\/p>\n have these different competing texts, as Eric mentioned, that make present<\/p>\n certain challenges of interpretation. But it also seems to have always been very popular<\/p>\n in performance and with good reason. It is a play<\/p>\n that that has everything right. It’s got all kinds of<\/p>\n narrative devices and character types and plot elements that<\/p>\n we find really compelling. It’s got a ghost story and a murder<\/p>\n mystery. It has a love interest. It’s got a family drama. It<\/p>\n has these larger political dimensions.<\/p>\n And. It also has this very compelling central character<\/p>\n that people have always enjoyed trying to get the measure of. And certainly the actors<\/p>\n have always enjoyed playing. Yeah, if you’re young after<\/p>\n word of advice, if you hear that somebody is having auditions for a production of Hamlet,<\/p>\n don’t go along thinking that you might get cast as Hamlet because people tend to do this play<\/p>\n because actors want to play the part. So probably that part has already been cast. I’ve<\/p>\n I’ve been in Hamlet five times, I think. And I’ve never, never played Hamlet.<\/p>\n I have played the Ghost. The King, Laertes fought and Bross and Renaldo.<\/p>\n So I’ve only I’ve Polonius left, I guess, anyway.<\/p>\n So it’s it’s a play that’s always been successful. It was done by Shakespeare’s<\/p>\n company in The Globe Theater. Now we know that. We think we know Richard Burbidge<\/p>\n is leading actor who also played his other tragic protagonist, played the role<\/p>\n of Hamlet, Ophelia and Gertrude would’ve been played by male actors.<\/p>\n And the play would have been done in broad daylight in on a bare<\/p>\n stage in the middle of the afternoon. So it’s a play that<\/p>\n in modern performances tends to be quite atmospheric with a lot of night scenes and<\/p>\n creepy castle settings and so forth, but would have been done very simply and starkly<\/p>\n in Shakespeare’s theater. We know that it was done also at the two universities<\/p>\n of Oxford in Cambridge. It was done at the court before King James first,<\/p>\n though, after Shakespeare’s death. And it was<\/p>\n also performed abroad in Germany. Seems to have been<\/p>\n one of the first Shakespeare plays performed outside of England. And it was even performed<\/p>\n in a ship called the Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in<\/p>\n Africa. And 6:44, apparently, the captain decided that it was<\/p>\n a good entertainment for the crew. He said he let the tragedy of Hamlet be performed<\/p>\n to keep my people from idleness and unlawful games or sleep,<\/p>\n which I’ve always enjoyed. Hamlet doesn’t always succeed in that goal.<\/p>\n But anyway, I think one of the reasons it’s continued to be so<\/p>\n popular is that it creates these kinds of questions of interpretation<\/p>\n that we’ve been talking about. Can the ghost be trusted?<\/p>\n You know, why does Hamlet delay if he does? How guilty<\/p>\n or complicit is Gertrude in the murder? Our Hamlet<\/p>\n and Ophelia lovers. Why is Claudius on the throne instead of Hamlet? All of these kinds of questions<\/p>\n are part of the play and especially relating to what we’ve been saying about<\/p>\n Hamlet’s behavior to Ophelia and so forth. Is Hamlet really mad? All right.<\/p>\n Oscar Wilde famously jokingly proposed an essay entitled<\/p>\n Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad or only pretending to Be? And what<\/p>\n I think gives a sense of just how much ink has been spilled<\/p>\n over those kinds of questions. But each<\/p>\n production has to explore the play in its own terms. And<\/p>\n each age, I think, remakes Hamlet in its own<\/p>\n image. And it’s really interesting to look at the performance history of apply<\/p>\n to read about the famous Hamlet, to see<\/p>\n images of those productions and see how the play has been<\/p>\n continually transformed. And that’s, I think, the thing that David Corn Haber was going to<\/p>\n talk about and hopefully maybe sometime we’ll give that same talk to to British studies<\/p>\n just to give some examples. The great hamlet of the the 18th century<\/p>\n was in London was John Philip Kemble, who was very much a hamlet for the<\/p>\n age of reason, a a neoclassical hamlet. He. You see images<\/p>\n of him. He looks like a Greek statue. He carried himself<\/p>\n very nobly. He was never especially<\/p>\n passionate, always very thoughtful and reflective in his delivery of the soliloquies<\/p>\n and so forth. Whereas the great hamlet of the 19th century, Edmund Kean<\/p>\n was a very passionate romantic him. Right. He was a very<\/p>\n kind of fiercely physical, energetic presence in the role. He had<\/p>\n a blazing dark. Eyes and a kind of intense, wiry<\/p>\n presence, and he was a true romantic in that he he sort of burned himself out<\/p>\n at an early age through dissipation and drink, and this kind of led<\/p>\n to his sort of cemented his his legend.<\/p>\n One of the very famous comments about Edmund Keen’s acting, I think in the role<\/p>\n of Hamlet, I believe, as Coleridge said, that to to see Keene Act<\/p>\n is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. And I think that’s a great kind of<\/p>\n romantic characterisation of his performance<\/p>\n in the 20th century. You move on to a kind of psychological<\/p>\n hamlet, especially with the reading of Sigmund Freud developed by<\/p>\n Ernest Jones. That Hamlet is in the grip of an edifice<\/p>\n complex and that his his delay and his neuroses all<\/p>\n are connected to the fact that he is his uncle has<\/p>\n done the thing that he himself desired to do, which is kill his father and marry<\/p>\n his mother. And so you get a lot of sort of psychological edible<\/p>\n hamlets in the first half of the 20th century, including, most famously, Laurence<\/p>\n Olivier, who played the role in the 30s on stage and in the<\/p>\n nineteen forty eight film where he’s he’s definitely a little<\/p>\n long in the tooth for that part, but it it kind of maybe sort of builds up<\/p>\n the sense of Hamlet Gertrude family romance in that he is<\/p>\n I think exactly the same age as his mother in that film. And their scenes<\/p>\n are very passionate and particularly the famous the scene that used to be called the closet<\/p>\n scene where Hamlet and Gertrude have a kind of intense encounter<\/p>\n which Olivier set in in Gertrude’s bedroom and in many<\/p>\n subsequent productions, the bed is a prominent prop in that scene.<\/p>\n So that’s kind of gets us into the 20th century. And the later 20th century tended to get<\/p>\n a lot of kind of drop-out student hamlets. Who were, you know,<\/p>\n kind of fighting against authority and their oppressive<\/p>\n older generation. Martin Sheen played such a hamlet for Joseph Papp<\/p>\n in New York in the late 60s, and then David Warner<\/p>\n for Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Company did a famous kind of anti-establishment,<\/p>\n you know, sort of teen rebel student Hamlet. So that’s, you know,<\/p>\n kind of a few instances of the way this play has been kind of remade<\/p>\n over time in recent years.<\/p>\n In recent decades, there’s been, I think, a a little more interest in that<\/p>\n kind of geopolitical dimension of the play, which used regularly to be cut.<\/p>\n Right. That the play begins and ends with a conflict<\/p>\n between Denmark and Norway and with the figure<\/p>\n of Fortune Bros. Who is a also an avenging<\/p>\n son like Hamlet. His father was killed in single combat by Hamlet’s father. And he’s<\/p>\n kind of out for revenge now. And I think in a lot of recent productions, he’s become<\/p>\n a sort of powerful and kind of disturbing figure in that<\/p>\n he takes over the kingdom at the end. There was a very famous production directed<\/p>\n by Ingmar Bergman in Stockholm, and then it played in New York also where the<\/p>\n play ended with Fourton Bross and his troops coming in, in<\/p>\n kind of modern. I mean, it was the production was all in sort of different periods,<\/p>\n but they they rappelled in from the flies and kind of crashed in<\/p>\n from the sides in kind of black riot gear, military garb with helmets<\/p>\n and machine guns and with modern Danish rock music blaring.<\/p>\n And it was this kind of assault on the world of the play from this kind<\/p>\n of threatening invader. And I think that that image has come up<\/p>\n a lot of times in modern performances.<\/p>\n But yeah. Fourton Brass used to always be cut from the play. It tended just<\/p>\n to end with Hamlet know, saying the rest is silence in a ratio, saying, good night, sweet prince<\/p>\n and flights of angels sing Nature Rest. And you didn’t have this kind of reassertion<\/p>\n of the kind of international scene. And the becomes one of the consequences<\/p>\n of this. Is that one of the great. Soliloquies of Hamlet was<\/p>\n almost never performed, and so we’re gonna have one more tiny bit of performance.<\/p>\n But it is this very interesting speech from Act 4,<\/p>\n which occurs only in the second quarter of Hamlet, not in the other two<\/p>\n published early published versions of the play. And it’s a speech in which<\/p>\n Hamlet has just he’s been. He’s on his way to be<\/p>\n sent to England. And he happens to have a kind of close encounter with Fourton Bross,<\/p>\n who’s marching through Denmark with his troops going<\/p>\n to invade Poland, since he can’t invade Denmark at the moment. And<\/p>\n Hamlet learns from foreign brass, Captain, that there’s going to be this this huge<\/p>\n battle over this very inconsequential patch of ground, which is not<\/p>\n toom enough or continent to hide the slain. Right. It’s in thousands of people are going to<\/p>\n die over this unimportant piece of land. And Hamlet,<\/p>\n in some strange way is inspired by this and<\/p>\n has the following reaction. How all<\/p>\n occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge.<\/p>\n What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be put to sleep<\/p>\n and feed a beast no more? Sure, he’d have made us<\/p>\n with such large discourse looking before and after, gave us not that capability<\/p>\n and godlike reason to fust in us unused. Now,<\/p>\n whether it be best you oblivion, or some craven scruple of thinking<\/p>\n too precisely on the vent, I thought, which quartered. But one part wisdom and ever<\/p>\n three parts coward. I do not know why yet I lived to say this<\/p>\n things to do so as I have cause in the will and strength means to do it.<\/p>\n Examples gross as earth exhort me. Witness this army of such mass and<\/p>\n charge led by a delicate and tender prince whose spirit with divine ambitions<\/p>\n makes mouths at the invisible event, exposing what is mortal and unsure to all<\/p>\n that fortune, death and danger dare. Even for an egg<\/p>\n shell. Rightly to be great. He’s not to stir<\/p>\n without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw. Win honors<\/p>\n at the stake. How stand by. That have a father killed<\/p>\n a mother staind excitement’s of my reason and my blood and let all sleep<\/p>\n well to my shame. I see the imminent death of twenty thousand men who a<\/p>\n fantasy and trick of fame go to their graves like beds.<\/p>\n Fight for a plot. Run the numbers cannot try the cause, which is not 2mm<\/p>\n enough and continent to hide the slang.<\/p>\n Oh, from this time forth, my thoughts. Be bloody<\/p>\n or be nothing worth.<\/p>\n OK. So that that’s the speech that that no one wants in hand letter that somehow<\/p>\n doesn’t make it into many productions, but that, you know, people have found<\/p>\n interesting of late. And it certainly seems that Hamlet<\/p>\n is able to see the kind of futility and waste of war in this<\/p>\n military adventure of and brasses. But at the same time, he he seems to<\/p>\n tell himself, that’s what I have to do to carry out my revenge from this time<\/p>\n forth, my thought to be bloody or be nothing worth. And we can<\/p>\n argue about exactly what Hamlet’s position is at that point, because<\/p>\n as Alan has pointed out, he doesn’t turn around and go back and kill Claudius. Right.<\/p>\n Then he gets on the boat and goes to England. But from this point of<\/p>\n the play, he does start killing a lot of people. And the last movement<\/p>\n of the play is famously kind of a blood bath, which, you know, when when when pushed,<\/p>\n you know, finally to take action. Hamlet takes some some pretty<\/p>\n severe and violent action. And the German playwright,<\/p>\n great Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht focused on this moment in his reading of<\/p>\n Hamlet. And he’s the poem that he wrote about Hamlet as as kind of the moment of Hamlet’s<\/p>\n regression that, you know, Hamlet has been this philosophical character who has not<\/p>\n been able to bring himself to take a violent revenge. And something about this encounter<\/p>\n with Fourton Bross spurs him onto that. So anyway,<\/p>\n something to think about. I want us to be able to get onto your questions and<\/p>\n just you know, I would encourage everybody to go see that after your last performance next<\/p>\n week and and look out for kind of how they handle some of these different issues<\/p>\n that we’ve been bringing up. Because, again, Hamlet is an endlessly<\/p>\n fascinating text that will repay continued exploration of this kind.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/64\/to-be-or-not-to-be-through-the-ages.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/64\/to-be-or-not-to-be-through-the-ages.mp3","audio_player":"