University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor, curator of the Shakespeare and Politics website (thegreatthinker...) in the second of three lectures on Hamlet.
My impression is that when Hamlet says "get thee to a nunnery" he is trying to push away and protect Ophelia from the repercussions of his plotting at court (and possibly avoiding her being used against him, or being hampered by concern for her). He cannot simply ask her to go (they are overheard; she may refuse). He is acting 'mad' at this point, I gather. Professor Cantor's view on a persistent strain of despondent Christianity in Hamlet seems contradicted by his wide and various friendships (with palace guards, players, fellow students and so on, and not least with Ophelia): he seems well-adjusted and well-liked before seeing his father's ghost during his period of grieving. This event changes him, perhaps strengthens his belief in life after death, and brings home the unpleasant responsibilities of his position for the first time. I agree that the play is concerned with the problem of other minds (or a difficulty in peering into other people's souls), but I would interpret Shakespeare's deep interest here is in miscommunication: how often custom (like courtly language) or social difference or deceitful intent (and on and on) get in the way of clear and accurate communication and meeting of minds. There is also, I think, more than a simple contrast between Christian piety and pagan heroic virtue. Paris represents a more hedonistic, flamboyant worldview; and Wittenberg something of the more rational, philosophic, sober worldview. Both of these were represented since ancient times too. I suppose for teaching purposes some simplification helps guide the discussion. Aside from that, I think this lecture is full of profound and entertaining insights, and I'll have to revisit Hamlet.
how meaningful, cogent your lectures are for me Prof. Cantor, having spent so much time over these last 30 years wandering about that Mansion of Shakespeare's plays presented by the BBC.
A strange play Hamlet is: Much of the important action is invisible or occurs offstage. The pirates are crucial. They represent the followers of Hamlet, the faction that would see him as King, the opposites of characters like Osric, Guildenstern, and Rosencrantz. And, ofc they are the catalyst who complete the transformation of Hamlet into action hero. Also, apparently only those friendly to Hamlet can see the ghost of his father, who defeated Old Norway, and died at his brother's hand.
The point about Denmark and Norway, in which Hamlet talks about Fortinbras becoming the next king of Denmark, could have had subtle messages to the early audiences of the play. Those would have had nothing to do with the actual political realities that existed, at the time, concerning Denmark and Norway, as the latter had been under the former's rule for over two hundred years: Danish nobility, in that period, ousting most Norwegian nobility, as land holders. They might, however, have had to do with how those countries are presented in the play, as two neighboring and often warring nations. England and Scotland fit that description perfectly. The early 16th century had seen Anglo-Scottish wars and border raids, on both sides, were still endemic. When Hamlet was first performed Elizabeth 1st was on her last legs and it was illegal to talk about the succession. There were other claimants to it, but James VI of Scotland, had, as the great grandson of Henry VIII's oldest sister, the strongest one. Therefore Hamlet's support of Fortinbras could have been Shakespeare, or whoever wrote the plays, giving a hidden hint in support of James becoming James 1st of England. The lectures are about Shakespeare and politics and the political reality, when "Hamlet," was first staged was one could not be too open in what he or she said about sensitive political situations. Just a thought.
The claim that Claudius would have gone to hell if Hamlet had killed him because Claudius was lamenting the vanity, pointlessness and lack of his ability to materially support his protestations to heaven of his desire for redemption, is actually what would have sent him to heaven. ''Thoughts without deeds never to heaven go'' and yet to acknowledge one's own unworthiness in thought to the purity of the righteousness of the metaphysical divine providence as but a mockery of the absolute wisdom of God's virtue is also to make complete the humbleness needed to reach heaven. Like the Priest in the film Léon Morin says; all prayer is a mockery. Claudius is unworthy of it - yes, but he is cognizing his own unworthiness and understanding that fact, so Hamlet was right and Hamlet did see into his soul a bit in that moment. ''When thou liest howling, a ministering angel in heaven will my sister be'' Laertes tells the Priest, when upon proper doctrine of who is to be buried when and how this ought to affect the inward passage of the soul, bars his sister from ceremonies meant to commence her soul's journey onward to God. Shakespeare here, is speaking about the transitoriness and arbitrary, contractual nature of religious instition of Christianity in how, mere contingencies of a non-permament, unprofitable and useless world - - a simple breach in one stipulation of the mortal contract of the right and wrong type of way to behave - to not breach transitoriness of social custom, habitude and proper assimilation into cultural mores - no matter how transitory in nature the incidents of breaching the contract may be - affects one's eternal destiny. Therefore, it does not matter what the inward state of the soul is to the ''churlish priest'' who buried Ophelia, since in being institionalized, a religion loses that part of its individual quality that would have the actual condition of the soul rated more highly than outward decorum and rules of how to enter into heaven that must be standardized to reach a common normality and religious social and moral political contract with the ethereal. It is not the soul of religion, but its outward contract that ends up becoming more real, even in its empty casual accidence, chance based on the misjudgement of knowledge. It is the political social basis of this contract, the consideration of other people's souls that prevents Ophelia's soul from being properly buried, according to the priest - to give an unsanctified death a burial, destabilizes the metaphysical paradise of those who would follow the rules of sanctity for reaching heaven's door. So true, Hamlet saw Claudius' soul, and true he saw that he repented his evil, in spite of his inability to eventually change that from his repetency in that moment on the chapel when his soul for a brief moment was inflected inwardly by its own guilty conscience - - even though it be a remorse of being unable to properly express repentance ethically. Evil, bad people, are not weighed down upon their consciences by worries of not being able to repent successfully their deed. Religion is an outward form and appearance, that relies on external arbitrary rituals to prove its existence. And yet in her soul, Ophelia was truly gracious and kind, just because of the brute fortune and chance, of some machinations of Denmark, in the backwater of Europe, in the blink of time in which she is born to tragedy outside her grasp, Ophelia's soul is cast into purgatory without permanent rest for the rest of eternity - in spite of its protestations of metaphysical eternity, theologians are again and again, thrown back upon doctrinal questions that are defined by the limits and bounds, random chances and encounters, of our basic material existence. When in the first act, Hamlet says ''there is more in heaven and hell than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio'' there is a key in that line to the mysterious, hidden, inversion of values in the afterlife beyond this mortal coil that Laertes' true conviction - since his mourning at Ophelia's funeral is not a contradiction to Hamlet's, but rather what spurs it on, and this anger in fact, just a passing fact of the shock to them of Ophelia's death, but we can surmise, part of what causes Hamlet to eventually smile and look on Laertes as a brother, even though we may be sure that Hamlet actually understands and is aware of saying so even when he knows Laertes must betray him due to Laertes' own emotional weakness for his sister. It's shown that Hamlet grasps the fact that our philosopher's and priest's knowledge cannot go beyond their mortal foolishness and that indeed, an inversion of the values to which the priest might have judged Ophelia harshly in this world could transmute those judgements of her inward forces of character that led to her being victim of suicide from wretched, outcast madness to blessedness and her greatest boons and heroisms according to the unknowable measurements of merit taking place in the way that an extra-mortal judgement of life after death with an evaluation that can go beyond having passed the tests of moral value in this finite, imperfect world ends up contradicting its image of immortality and eternity by being reliant upon the importunity of the changing and turning twists of a fate beyond the subject's control, and a reliance upon tangible objects to represent something beyond them, but to which we end up becoming confined upon, and using the eternal beyond to return upon a fixation upon finite rituals of that eternity in the hereafter. - Hence Hamlet's bemusement when the grave diggers rather talk crudely and bastardize his conceptual and intellectual attempts to penetrate the core questions of this problem in rather vulgar and satirical terms, the grave diggers are in a way mocking Hamlet's own entire intellectual refinement on the question of death, mortality and religious symbolism by knowing for themselves what he has poured his entire mind to solving, and reducing it to the laughter of the rabble, the boredom and entertainment of the peasant who wants a gallows to make their subservient existence with a thousand woes in feudalism more bearable with the public entertainment at hanging. The genius of Hamlet, right before the ''to be or not to be'' speech, is hinted at in that Claudius' thoughts can be moved by speeches alone mainly; ''How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word.'' There are references to art, to use of art, in two senses in the play - as use for deception and as a use for revelation of meaning and truth ''Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.'' ''Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as1900 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show Virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak it profanely), that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.'' So Hamlet sees art as showing ''scorn her own image'', he is a renaissance artist, who only finds joy in the play, because it can enlighten and show ethical emancipation for the spectator when written in a way that imitates nature so as to make us consider of ourselves parts of ourselves and moral problems in life we'd not have considered before were it not for the imagination of the artist giving us a mirror to look at ourselves through. The tragic irony, is that Hamlet's weapon against Claudius - his art of the play's ability to portray a mirror of Claudius' corruption to the public and render his deed in metaphorical form with fiction to move us to cathartic identification with the wrongs happening in Denmark, the ''bad report'' of ''the brief abstract and chronicle of the time'' implies Hamlet's ambitions to sway men's opinions and moral notions is the reason for why he wishes to have special privileges given at court to his players who will insert and read his lines that will give his view points in the play. This is in fact metaphorically what Shakespeare also does with the reader of Hamlet, - Hamlet is too successful, so his play actually rises up and gives Claudius a conscience and ascends and beatifies his soul to heaven - art can raise the consciousness of morals, but Hamlet pays it at a high price - if his play had not been so convincing and well-done to Claudius, if he hadn't touched upon the human soul so closely as he had, and given fruition to unactivated guilt that Claudius in his daily life's revelry, drinking, sleeping and eating had stifled, then his play's conscience is what kept Hamlet from killing Claudius outright because he couldn't stop his beatification having occurred from the catharsis of his art. That is - Hamlet's play literally saved Claudius from going to Hell by showing him the difference between right and wrong, virtue and vice - and Hamlet was too successful at moving the king in the way he aimed to, the way he said some people had been moved to tears by watching a play.
15:30 Whoah!!!! I never caught that before. Hamlet says "your" not "our" or "my". Sir, in thy Hamlet lecture be all my lit failings remembered. Get me to English Lit 101 for why would I be considered a Hamlet fan.
What is this word he uses several times (also in the previous lecture), at 17:17 for instance? It sounds like "thoumos" and could be some kind of classical concept pertaining to heroic virtues, but Google is yielding nothing.
He talks about it in his first lectures: From Plato’s Republic’s 3 parts of the soul: reason (logos) controls the two irrational parts: eros, thumos (or thymos: spiritus, ambition, courage, often related to patriotism, cf. Coriolanus); not Plato’s precise terms. Achilles is the great image of thumos (a Homeric word). Cantor says Shakespeare could've read Plato in translation in the 1590s.
A more complete formulation, as has been well-known for many decades, is that Shakespeare's tragic heroes fail because they're in the wrong plays. Switch Hamlet and Othello, switch Hamlet and Romeo, switch Lear and MacBeth, etc. So, it's not just that Hamlet is in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's part of Shakespeare's tragic formula.
What would switching those character accomplish? From a playwrights and an audience perspective: there would not be a Hamlet without the character of Hamlet, which is accentuated by all the other characters, with which he is constantly comparing himself. So to me it seems futile to imagine switching the characters from the plays. But maybe I am lacking imagination. However it seems more fruitful to look at the classical model of a hero. They too are all out of place and untimely. We don't have to look outside the plays to see that this is also the case for Hamlet, within the play. He wants to be in Wittenberg, but he is stuck in Denmark. Hij wants to be the king, but is just the prince. He is completely out of time and place all the time.
@@MaartenVHelden I'm cautious replying because the idea is not mine. It's from Bradbrook, I believe, or perhaps Bradley [they all run together in my head at this stage in life], but the point is that I adopted the idea without citation. Anyway, a tragic hero fails because of a tragic flaw. Typically, we say Hamlet is indecisive, Lear is rash, Othello is bold, Macbeth ambitious, etc. So imagine Othello charged with avenging the death of his late father, the King. He would act boldly and the play would end in the second act. Shakespeare's heroes have foibles that are intensely personal, to the degree that they propel the action.
I wonder what that would look like for the history plays. In Henry IV, the king wishes his son Hal had been switched at birth with Hotspur. I wonder what Henry IV would look like as Henry V, and vice versa, what his son Hal would look like as his father. That's actually a huge theme of Henry IV, there's the famous scene where Falstaff and Hal rehearse the court scene between king and prince. It's not always clear in Shakespeare who is who.
@@jason8434 Yes, tho first one must establish what is the main conflict, and second determine how important to the play's success is the character's growth and development. So, specifically for Henry IV and Henry V the conflict at the core is military leadership, and in Henry IV obviously character development is crucial. I don't know Henry V had that built in ability to grow, as he did that growing as Hal in IV parts 1 & 2. As for leadership, I'm not sure
@@jamesduggan7200 I disagree about the core conflict of Henry IV. I don't think it's military leadership, it's the survival of Bolingbroke's regime. It's fundamentally a play about regime change, both in the larger sense of change from medieval feudalism to modern capitalism, but also in the narrower sense that Henry IV has instituted a new regime by deposing and murdering his medieval predecessor, Richard II. The nobles in Henry IV helped legitimate the regime by supporting Bolingbroke to the crown, but their loyalty to the new regime is tenuous at best. They don't want a new regime, they are medieval nobles who want a king that maintains the status quo. Military leadership is embodied in the old medieval hero Hotspur. But it's not Hal's combat with Hotspur that ultimately matters, even though that drama is the climax of Part 1. The play goes on, and what matters is no longer military leadership but military organization. The Henriad moves from the medieval court of Richard II to the "interregnum" London of Henry IV. The collapse of medieval chivalry is personified in Falstaff, a man who was once "Sir John with all Europe" but is now a drinking, whoring old knight who is socially inferior to the Shallows of the world. Falstaff is the complete antithesis of military leadership, he pockets the money given to him for an army and picks up starving stragglers and ex-cons to fight for him. They'll fill a pit as well as better, as Falstaff says. Not military leadership but regime change is the core conflict. Hal has to defend the legitimacy of the regime, not his personal honor as a knight. By the time of Henry V, we are moving into the formation of a centralized nation-state and centralized armies. What matters in the play is numbers and strength, not military leadership. Military exploits are in service to the regime, that's how the play begins, Henry IV wants to organize a crusade to divert the civil war with his nobles and unite around a common enemy. As Falstaff says, honor is a mere scutcheon in a world of gunpowder and cannons and capitalists.
