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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody, Jeff here. Couple quick things before we get into the episode for the day. First of all, a lot of new people are finding the show. That's so exciting. Welcome and thank you for listening. Really appreciate you listening along with us. Reading along with us. Follow up to that to keep the momentum going. We've concocted a little challenge here. We were going to take a couple weeks off. No new episodes over the Christmas time holiday. But if we get to 150 ratings on Apple Podcasts, we're gonna do a bonus episode. Record it before then, but we'll drop it over the Christmas break. For your holiday listening pleasure, go to Apple Podcasts. Leave a rating 5 stars and once we get to 150 we'll let you know that we made it there. But thanks so much for listening. Really excited. We're having a great time. I hope you can tell that. And without further ado, let's get into the show.
- [00:57]
B
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- [01:28]
A
Welcome to Zero to well, read a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [01:35]
B
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Jeff, to pod or not to pod. That is no question today as we turn to Hamlet by one William Shakespeare.
- [01:46]
A
Madness and great ones must not unwatch go. And we do not know how to handle this. So it's driving us a little bit crazy because it feels like trying to eat an elephant. When I used to teach this, I would take two, three hour set, you know, class periods and that was still not enough. So we're going to do the best we can to an introduction, an appreciation of an investigation of Hamlet by one William Shakespeare. It's especially daunting. We were talking about this yesterday, Rebecca. It's like and things we've recorded before this. I'm not actually sure where this is happening in the release schedule, but we've done what, seven or eight of these at this point. For each one of them you feel a responsibility to get it right?
- [02:24]
B
Yes, for sure.
- [02:26]
A
For this one I'm feeling something else. I'm feeling like unequal to the task. We're not Worthy. The Little Wayne's world here, like this is where I am with this.
- [02:37]
B
I don't know if I feel we're not worthy so much as that it is an impossible task. You can't sum up Shakespeare in one podcast episode. You can't really do any of the individual plays full justice. But we're trying to find that marriage of cocktail party and English class. And I think through the lens of that vibe, we have arrived at a layout for this episode that will both, that will satisfy both sides. It will give people who have not read Hamlet or who have no desire, who haven't been there in a while.
- [03:11]
A
Right.
- [03:12]
B
Some hooks to hold on to. And if you're a nerd and you're looking for an excuse to go back and read some Shakespeare, this will give you, I think, the encouragement that you're looking for some, some hooks for that as well. But it is. We talked about it a little bit yesterday. We've been sort of chit chatting about it all week. Your partner Michelle sent me a lovely video of you reading sections out loud with your kids. Like, we usually try to come into these episodes pretty cold and having not really spoken to each other about whatever the topic is, but this one has leaked its way all around. And I think it's part. It's just because this is such a huge topic, it's such an important book. Shakespeare is the goat. Hamlet is the unequivocal best and most important of the Shakespeare plays. It's a huge task, but I think that we're going to find our way into a fun approach for it today.
- [04:00]
A
And say you want to pick up a copy of Hamlet for yourself. Go check out thriftbooks.com where you can find 19 million books, movies, CDs and games. There are dozens, hundreds of Shakespeare editions you could get. You can find My Beloved Riverside Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, used. It's a big old textbook. It's going to cost you, you know, 30, 40 bucks. Find it there. You can find a mass market paperback classics with a concordance with notes and summaries for four or five bucks. If you want something you can throw in your bag and really mark up and not feel too weird about messing up a little bit. You, you can find critical editions, collector's editions. You can go get Maggie O. Farrell's Hamnet if you want to do a little secondary reading in anticipation of the movie coming out. Thanks to Thriftbooks.com for sponsoring season one of Zero to, well Read. I think that that feeling of being overwhelmed is not the worst way to approach it because it. Shakespeare and Hamlet are both overwhelming, especially for a modern reader. We stand at remove here of some five centuries, right, of language, of understanding, of thought. And it feels overwhelming to try to understand it. Even I, who have read this many times, have tried to teach it. I'm no expert, I should say, I'm not a Shakespeare scholar, but I'm an appreciator and I've had some experience wrestling with the text and wrestling with the plays and ideas. But even just getting through one of the great soliloquies here feels like there's so much muchness to quote a different book that it's like that may. And so maybe that's the first thing to acknowledge for anyone who is approaching Shakespeare at all. Even if you have some experience, just to sort of get that on the table, that that is part of the experience. Like it's so the weight of history, the weight of the art, the weight of the craft, the weight of the ideas are so overwhelming. And that's part of the pleasure. Maybe. Maybe that's the thing to say.
- [05:56]
B
I think that's part of the pleasure. And also the. The language is so old, so many of the words are not words that we are familiar with. The iamic pentameter means that he's putting words out of the order that they would normally follow each other in sentences just to get the rhythm right. And that is disorienting in its own way. I think the way to go into Shakespeare for everyone who's not a Shakespeare scholar is let it wash over you. And that it's about the vibe, it's about the ideas of the play. I was thinking if we had teleported Shakespeare into 2025 and taken him to see modern drama, how much of. How much of you know all those ideas and concepts and the. The specific language that we use today, he wouldn't understand. And that gave me some permission to like, I don't need to look up every word that I don't understand here because you can get the context. And when you go to see a play, that's the experience of like watching the people interact, understanding the characters, motivations, and that these are plays. That Hamlet is a play is a really important part of this. This was not written to be read. It was written to be experienced. And I'll say right from the top, one of my tips, I read through it once and then I went back and reread it listening along with a full cast audio production.
- [07:21]
A
That's an unbelievable idea. When you told me that yesterday it never occurred to me to do an audiobook of this. We're going to get to this down the way. But you know, one of the questions we routinely ask or have been asking the last few is does an adaptation give you the gist of this? And this is an unalloyed yes, right? Like if you get it, there is no. Well, now this is the other thing that happens. You're going to Weezer and you want to destroy the sweater of this podcast episode. We're going to pull one thread and it's going to come all the way apart. But like, there is no Hamlet, right? There is no agreed upon. This is the real thing. The thing most people get is all of the Hamlets that have ever been attributed to Shakespeare in the form of this four hour long play that almost certainly was never performed like that. Like really keeping to two hours even, I think, I don't think it's mentioned here. Maybe it's Romeo and Juliet, but like Shakespeare even mentions that it's. You get two hours on the boards. Like the plays are supposed to be kept to two hours. So the, the version we're talking about is twice as long as anything that got produced in Shakespeare's lifetime. So any decent version of it is as likely as any other decent version of it to capture the thing. And you can never capture it. But you're right. Talk about that audiobook experience a little bit more. What did that do for you? And you know, where could people go find it?
- [08:33]
B
I have to give credit to this to my high school English teacher my freshman year, Joe Hunsley. He is no longer with us. He was an incredible teacher and we read Much Ado About Nothing. And I think he correctly assumed that high school freshmen would be overwhelmed if you just handed them the like, Dover paperback of a Shakespeare play and said, go with God. So we broke it up reading in class, and he was using audio like cassette tapes that he must have had for 40 years at that point. But we listened to a full performance of it and he would stop it along the way and we would dissect sentences with a, like, what was that scene about? What's going on here? But that really imprinted on me, like that was before I had seen Shakespeare performed. It was before I had seen Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet adaptation, which is my other sort of signal experience with Shakespeare. And it was a powerful and very helpful way because you can hear the cadence, you can hear the tone, though the actors have done the interpretive work of what emotion should this word or this phrase convey that we can't get very easily because so much of the language is unfamiliar. And I had kind of forgotten that. That was my experience. But then I was I I had ordered a new copy. It's a Folger Shakespeare Library edition of Hamlet. It has a ton of notes in it and I was just cruising around like I wonder if there is an audiobook of this. And the audio edition of this same adaptation is free for Spotify Premium users. And it's three and a half hours long.
- [10:05]
A
And I was like, bingo, Bingo. That'll do it.
- [10:10]
C
Today's episode is brought to you by Avery Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, publishers of Playful By Cass Holman with Lydia DY Worth we're all born playful, but we tend to disconnect from that instinct as we grow older and get bogged down in productivity, culture, among other things. But in the book, how play shifts our thinking, inspires connection and sparks creativity. Renowned designer and play expert Cass Holman advocates for adults to embrace open ended, unstructured play with no obvious goal or purpose. The book shows us that play helps us build problem solving skills, find joy in tough times, and literally improves our individual and collective well being. Adopting a playful mindset is crucial in helping us overcome fear, failure and embrace new ways of thinking, de stress, reset and connect with each other. It also grows our creativity at every stage of our lives and helps us find joy in bleak times. I mean, all of that. Some of that, every bit of that. Okay, so make sure to pick up Playful by Cass Holman with Lydia Denworth and thanks again to Avery Books for sponsoring this episode.
- [11:18]
A
Foreign.
- [11:23]
C
Is brought to you by Hachette Audio, publishers of the audiobook the Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri From World Fantasy Award winning author Tasha Suri comes the Isle in the Silver Sea, a heart shattering standalone romantic sea of sapphic longing, medieval folklore and a love that spans centuries. In an England fueled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other. Over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes. Now we have Simran, a witch of the woods, and Veena, a knight of the Queen's court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires when to give in is to destroy each other? As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs. To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them. But what tale is stronger than the Knight and the Witch. Make sure to pick up the Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri. And thanks again to Hachette Audio for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Harlequin, a leading publisher of romantic fiction delivering feel good high stakes and heart pounding stories across every kind of love. No matter what kind of romance you love to read, Harlequin has it for you. And in one of their latest books, Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor, we've got some snowed in goodness. We've got some small towns and some unusual residents. So when a snowstorm hits during her travels, Luna Stack finds herself stranded in Clawhaven, Alaska, a cozy small town with more than a few unusual residents. Well, things go from bad to complicated when Luna accidentally drinks a potion that tethers her to Oliver Musgrove, the local grumpy innkeeper who also happens to be a werewolf. Now these two opposites are stuck spending the winter together while they wait for the antidote. And although they might not want anything to do with each other, the bond says otherwise. Make sure to pick up Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor. And thanks again to Harlequin for sponsoring this episode.
- [13:34]
A
And we're going to get into as much of the history as we think we can manage, and that may be useful to make, you know, 60 to 75 minutes of enjoyable podcast content. But it's helpful to remember that Shakespeare was an actor as well. And in this particular play, again, none of this is anywhere like canonical, but it's generally thought he played the player king and the ghost, which is, you know, kind of one of the reasons Maggie o' Farrell gets excited about Hamnet is, you know, playing Hamlet's father and all the stuff that goes into it. But it's meant to be performed, right? And Shakespeare himself was writing for him and Lord Chamberlain's Men to perform these things. So the way it's staged and even the way we get the documents that we understand to be Shakespeare largely are taken. Like he didn't sit down and print a version of this. Like, you know what, I need to get this down on paper. It's taken from sides and various pieces in production for this to be. And when we get to the score, this will probably get as high of a score as zero we're ever going to get to be. This. This is secular scripture when it comes to the Western intellectual tradition outside of the Bible, this is the first and greatest secular scripture in the Western canon. Because even Homer was, you know, even at the time was sort of religious, right? It's about the gods and it's. That goes into myth. This is something created out of whole cloth. But the fuzziness around the play's origin and then Shakespeare himself, which I'm less interested in because I don't know there's much water there. But that's the thing that happens. It's amazing, Rebecca, that we don't even know what Hamlet is. And there's this idea of this, er, Hamlet that Shakespeare wrote before this version, which he, he likes. The idea that he was so drawn to this that he did a whole nother version. It's wild. It's just so wild to think that this is a. This is a fuzzy business for being a monument. This is. This is a monument made of dreams and ghosts.
- [15:27]
B
And I think that the biblical comparison is useful there because that is how most of us are taught to think about the Bible. You know, in modern Protestantism, in contemporary. Even the. As a piece of contemporary literature, to be understood insofar as it inspires a lot of references in books over the last several centuries, that there is not one canonical version, that these are stories that were passed down and written and retranscribed and then told orally to other people who transcribed them in their own language. And then through the centuries it was updated into more modern English. We go from King James to like all these different new editions of the Bible for people with the intention of making it more legible to them. And I think you can think of Shakespeare in those ways as well. That there are the versions that he wrote, but then there are transcriptions of so many different performances of the plays. And that's on the page in this Folger Library edition as well. Like, I did not spend time parsing things, but they use different symbols around words and phrases to indicate, like, this is a phrase that appears in one of the other versions, but not all of them. This is a phrase that appears in two of these. This is from the First Folio. And so there's opportunity. If you really want to nerd out, you can. But if nothing else, the text is useful for reminding yourself that there is not one solid version. There are some quotes that, you know, have pretty much endured, at least in our modern readings of them. But it's helpful, especially again, as you were saying at the top, to remember, like, that audio production I listened to was about three and a half hours long. A person who was going to see this performed at the Globe would see about a two hour performance. So a Lot of the words get cut and they're pulling it down to conveying the essence of the idea.
- [17:14]
A
And I think then that that gives us some latitude that that combined with. It's funny that we're recording Pynchon and Shakespeare back to back because one thing they, they share in common is our lack of access to the authorial intent or any sort of additional commentary by the author on their own work. Because Shakespeare, if he ever did it, it doesn't exist. That was not the modus operandi of the time. So we do not. All we have is the text, but oh, what a text it is and oh, how much of it there is. And any of the books we're going to talk about and this isn't really a book, this is a play. I guess this is our first foray into a non novel bear repeated work. Hamlet is the first one that we've read that is sort of the work of a life. You could spend a lifetime wrestling with it and come back to it over and over and again. And some of it is because of. Then you can get more granular and specific in the history of the text and the language and do the entomological or philological work of understanding what this word is that you don't understand or what it comes from. There are still mysteries to unfold. Like you know, this. There's a. There's a reference to some story about an ape that's just sort of dashed off as if everyone understands what the reference is. And in my. This is. I use the David Bevington edited version that came out in 1990. The note there is. This is some lost anecdote. We have no idea what this is. Even these are elusive, right? These things that we feel like have been so well trod that but there are still hidden corners to be considered or understood.
- [18:43]
B
That was certainly true in my two back to back readings of this over the last week that there were things that I gleaned just reading it on my own and trying to construct this play in my head. And then things that landed completely differently when I heard it performed and other things that landed when I heard it performed that I hadn't picked up on at all just in reading it myself. So I think multiple encounters with Shakespeare is the way to go. If you have not read Hamlet and you're gonna go on your first adventure with him listening to this podcast, just know you're part of the deal is that you won't get everything. Neither of us gets everything. I'm pretty comfortable saying nobody living today Gets everything.
- [19:25]
A
And even at the case, this is something I've always wondered and there's no way to know this, but like if you were a groundling, sort of, you know, the, the regular person paying a penny to go see Hamlet at the globe in 1600 or 1601, were you like. Yeah, I get all of this. No one knows when.
- [19:44]
B
Also, like, it wasn't super highfalutin at the time.
- [19:49]
A
Yeah, I think there's some. It's. It certainly wasn't. It certainly wasn't opera like that in that particular. It was meant to be a popular entertainment. I, I still wonder how much went over the heads of. I mean, literally and figuratively. We know there's no way to know.
- [20:06]
B
Shakespeare is clearly very well read for his time. There are biblical allusions, there are references to the Odyssey, references to the Aeneid, to all kinds of classical texts. I'm sure there are references that I did not pick up in mine and that he was more educated and had a pretty like conventional and successful career and life where not everybody at the time had access to that kind of information and, or education. And so going to see a play like this might have been. It works on two levels. There is this messy family drama that's at the heart of it. And then there are all of the references and illusions in the language that are layered on that. If you get them, that adds to the richness. But I think you could have a good time just going to see this as a revenge story.
- [20:50]
A
Yes. And that's. And we'll get to why this is important, which is one of the most hilarious things I've ever had to tackle is why is Shakespeare. Hamlet's important. But I think it is worth thinking through some of the specificity here. And one thing that Shakespeare does is takes sturdy, well known, familiar genres, even stories, and then does Shakespeare stuff to it. Right. Because at its heart, this is a compelling setup, which you're going to do a quick synopsis of in a minute. Romeo and Juliet is a compelling setup. Taming of the Shrew, a compelling setup. Largely Julius Caesar, of course, Richard III, Henry 4, Henry 5. Like he's taking sturdy narrative structures, familiar containers, and then decides to blow it away with language, you know, And I say here, the greatest wielder of the English language ever to do it. But it's not. He's not doing that and creating the stories from whole cloth at the same time. I think that's something that's interesting to know because he is very much a practical person trying to make his living doing this. And at some level, he needs to provide the sword play and love story and moments of catharsis that a audience wants. But then he's gonna throw in seven soliloquies for him. You know, just like that. Have. No. That's so. So unnecessarily beautiful in a revenge play. So unnecessarily complicated and deep and groundbreaking. But that's where his creativity really flourishes. And he does amazing things to put his characters in a position to be complicated and be conflicted. But from a story level, these are crowd pleasers. They just are. And that really holds up here. So with that all being said, what is the plot of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?
- [22:43]
B
Okay, so the king of Denmark has been dead for a couple of months. Like, body is barely cold in the ground. His son, Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is furious that his mother, Gertrude. Gertrude has already gotten married again, and he has married his dead father's brother, Claudius. So the ghost of the dead king appears to two of Hamlet's friends. It won't talk to them, though, but they summon Hamlet, and the ghost reveals to Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius, who poured poison in his ear. Hamlet vows to avenge his father's death. It does not go well. Along the way, Hamlet accidentally attacks somebody else. There's a sword fight where the tips of the swords are poisoned, but the swords get switched during the fight. Kind of a Princess Bride feeling moment. So both Hamlet and the person he's dueling with end up poisoned. There's a cup of poison that the wrong person drinks, and by the end, everyone is dead. Hamlet's girlfriend, Ophelia commits suicide because Hamlet is driven mad by grief. But one of the people he has accidentally killed is her father. So she's also driven mad by grief and by having been abandoned by her lover. There is a lot going on here. The body count starts at one with the dead king in the ground, and then seven more people die along the way.
- [24:01]
A
Is it seven? So Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Polonius, Affilia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I guess those are the seven, right?
- [24:08]
B
Oh, well, yeah, yeah. And Hamlet.
- [24:10]
A
And. Oh, and Hamlet. I forgot the Hamlet. Let angel sing thee to the rest, sweet prince. Okay, so a couple things I want to say just about this. This idea. There was this story, the Tragedy of Amleth that was kicking around before. Also Thomas Kidd's the Spanish tragedy was probably the. The pinnacle of the more formulaic version of this. What to say about the fact that Shakespeare's son's Name is Hamnet. As far as I can tell, there is no direct correlation. Right. Everything that we know is that this is maybe a more common name than we think. It's just one of those things. However, it's also there. So it just is. And I think one of the great pleasures of Shakespeare, one of the great pleasures of having a canon, there are many downsides, but then you can refer to canons and you can play with it like Maggie o' Farrell doesn't hand it, or as Steven Coogan does in Hamlet 2, or that Tom Stoppard does in the Shakespeare in Love or something like this. So. But in terms of what we actually know, we don't know much. We just don't know much. It's a fertile mystery what the relationship is. That's all I've got to say about this. At this point, there's really not much else to say.
- [25:26]
B
And all we can glean from Maggie o' Farrell's Hamnet is just based on timelines lining up that around the time that Hamlet goes into production is within a few years of Hamlet, not Hamlet of Shakespeare's son Hamnet dying during the plague. And so we know that Hamnet d while Shakespeare or that becomes the background. It's happening while Shakespeare is writing this play. He's clearly, this is a fathers and sons man play on so many levels. Yep, that's happening. But we only really know that because timelines line up. What more is happening in Shakespeare's life or what more is going on in culture at the time that informed this is a mystery. And I think you could drive yourself nuts trying to ground that, or you can just let it be part of it. Doesn't really matter. The work is so good on its own.
- [26:19]
A
Another strategy for understanding him, understanding space, for dealing with Shakespeare is something that John Keats wrote about Shakespeare himself, which is this idea of negative capability. Said Shakespeare's great genius was negative capability, which is the ability to hold more than one conflicting idea in your head at one time and not go crazy. So let it. Let them exist as possibility fields to be explored. And, you know, you don't have to choose a truth or what you think happened because it can't be known. So you get this really evocative and generative suspension of certainty, which is a lot of fun if you can allow yourself to have fun with it. Suspension of certainty that is fun for Hamlet is not the way he interacts with the world, but ergo, the suspended. The problem there is your father's death. I want to linger here on Something that, when I was reading it to Rowan the other day, I was struck by is how compelling the opening is. You know, we get these. These foot soldiers on the wall and they're. They see a ghost and it's come back multiple times and they're trying to decide, should we tell Hamlet about it? Won't speak to us. So we shall we tell the prince who's back. It looks like his dad. We should probably mention this, right? And then Hamlet's own interrogation of it. That's a very sort of. It feels very modern to have a hook. This is a plot. What is this ghost? This is a ghost story.
- [27:36]
B
What is the ghost story?
- [27:38]
A
What does the ghost want? And I was listening to a podcast I like recently, sort of bemoan a modern algorithmically driven tactic, which is to have a murder in the first five minutes and then a flashback, right? And I was like, even 600 years ago, we were trying to figure out how to hook. How to hook people's attention at the beginning, right. And this is a way to do that. And then what you come back is Hamilton has all this knowledge and his. His journey is one of consciousness and understanding because he knows pretty quickly that Claudius did what he was afraid he was going to do. And so the drama of the plot, one of the great interventions here is the drama of the plot is not what is. How is Hamlet going to get revenge is how does Hamlet deal with the truth of what has happened? And his investigation is a moral and one of conscience that it is a sort of fact. Because it's actually very simple. Right? There's a very simple morality here with like, Claudius killed his dad. He should be killed. But Shakespeare's like, that's. That's too easy. That's too easy. Here, let's see where do. So do we want to do. Let's do Shakespeare stuff? Who wrote it? Let's do what we can say about Shakespeare. I think it is interesting to. To think about who Shakespeare was through the reality, which is people think he didn't exist. I think that's an interesting way of understanding what we're dealing with here in a couple different ways.
- [29:05]
B
You know, you've made it when a conspiracy theory exists about whether you were real or not.
- [29:10]
A
Yes. Yeah. There's sort of the anti Stratfordians who say someone. These are a group of people that really go back. You know, Mark Twain was one of these people. Weirdly, Mark Twain was inventing type lasers and believing Shakespeare didn't exist. What an odd guy. Like, this is not. This is not a fringe theory so much as it is a persistent and strange one, and it comes out of really two veins is the best of my understanding. I'm not an expert in the anti Stratfordian, so I'm sort of paraphrasing what I've understood and what I've looked up a little bit over the last couple weeks.
- [29:43]
C
Today's episode is brought to you by Hachette Audio, publishers of the audiobook Poppy State A Labyrinth of Plans and A Story of Beginnings by Miriam Gerba Read by Miriam Gerba from the award winning author of Creep comes a powerful book about a writer at the peak of her powers. At once a love letter to California and a literary tour de force that tells the story of resilience and reclamation through relationship with plants, memory, myth and indigenous knowledge. Miriam Gerba has lived in California her entire life with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscapes as refracted through the languages and memories of her ancestors. In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling and part study of place. We love a non fiction genre, bender, and if you do too, make sure to pick up Poppy State by Miriam Gerba Red by Miriam Gerba and thanks again to Hachette Audio for sponsoring this episode.
- [30:49]
A
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- [31:08]
B
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- [31:47]
A
Two things one is a paucity of direct Shakespeare. I wrote this stuff. We just don't have it. We just don't have it. And the second is, and I think this is more interesting A fundamental disbelief that these things exist, that these plays exist, that Shakespeare could be this. As good as he was, right, Rebecca? Like, that's kind of the two veins this comes out of.
- [32:11]
B
I think that's it. Those are the two that are going on. And then there was an interesting note in the intro to the Folger edition that I read that was like, also, Shakespeare seemed to be a pretty conventional guy. And the language of these plays is unruly and creative and artistic. And maybe people have a hard time with that guy. Like, really? That guy could do this?
- [32:35]
A
Yeah. And Stoppard builds that little bit of that into the invention of. Sorry, I'm getting confused. That's a different stopper play, Shakespeare in Love. But I think people with their head screwed on mostly right, say, yeah, Shakespeare wrote it and he was just really good. I think Occam. That's the Occam's razor, right, Rebecca? Like, he just was that guy. One of the ironies is a lot of the people that argue against the anti Stratfordians think that need to be someone more well educated, like Francis Bacon or somebody, because Shakespeare couldn't have been that smart. What's funny is in Ben Jonson's inscription for the First Folio, he kind of makes fun of Shakespeare for not being that educated. He has a little Latin and less Greek because he doesn't make Greek reference. He doesn't make very little. Where a more traditionally highly educated playwright would have a lot more Greek shit in it, and Shakespeare just doesn't. So right at the beginning, people, his contemporaries are saying, it's amazing he's doing all this stuff even though he's unlearned it unlettered.
- [33:32]
B
If you try to think about the books today that ring both bells that do really well, it's very.
- [33:38]
A
That's a. That's a really interesting that people that.
- [33:40]
B
People like that they engage with, that they have fun with, the books that sell and that get critical and commercial acclaim there. Those exist in a sweet spot that is not super highbrow. It's not dropping references to the most difficult classical texts you've ever read. It's not the author on every page reminding everyone how educated they are. Those books exist, exist, and they serve their own purposes. But like, Shakespeare lives in that sweet spot. And my impression of how the plays landed at the time that they were new is that they landed in that sweet spot as well. That you could be an educated person who was pretty literary and pick up a lot of these references. He is making like he's dropping stuff from the Indian and you can enjoy that. But if you're somebody who like I just want a good story, you're also going to get that from Hamlet. And that to me is a further piece of evidence that this, this could have been a pretty normal guy who had an extraordinary mind and a very creative way with language and was able to do something nobody else had done. But the idea of like that these plays would have needed to be produced by someone coming down from the ivory tower doesn't work for me. Like folks coming down from the ivory tower cannot reach the common reader very successfully.
- [34:57]
A
I'm also going to do a very poor job of summarizing multiple centuries of evolution here in the next 60 seconds. But I'm going to give it a go, which is that one of the, one of the other things we wrestle with as a modern reader of Shakespeare is that Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Shakespeare seems amazing is because we've been taught that things like Shakespeare are amazing because Shakespeare is essential to the canon. Like there's a self reinforcing thing that's happened over the decades and centuries from the jump. Shakespeare was very well regarded, even by his peers. But to the point where he's become this sort of secular saint of Western art. Number one draft pick for writers of the English language was not obvious from the beginning. He's fallen more or less out of favor at various points. And there was a point, especially after he died for I don't remember now but some period of time where he needed to be taken up and reclaimed. And some of what's going on is contingent historical strangeness. But some of it is also this which is at this particular moment we're in, we're in sort of the, the Renaissance, right? We're in Elizabethan England coming out of one intellectual period to another. And the period that would follow Shakespeare especially would be increasingly towards humanist thought, increasingly towards the Enlightenment, the Great Awakening and other things like this, where thinkers in the academy and the arts were especially interested in non Christian based art and reference points. Who can we look to? Like where do we look to? And Shakespeare emerges at a very interesting time in the history of England, in the history of the West. And I should say here, that thing we say here are my understanding of Western literature, specifically in English literature, even more specifically still. All those caveats still apply is it was an interesting time in which art could. For a long time theater wasn't allowed in England, which is very strange. And then as it was becoming allowed, it was these not evangelical ecclesiastical plays, they were Christian plays. Like representation of stuff from the Bible that turned into these big guild festivals that then turned into representations of classical antiquity and then turned into. Well, we can tell different kinds of stories here at the same time. Elizabeth herself was an interesting person. But our philosophical moment, science is starting to become a thing. Rebecca. The world is not just. God said so, or maybe it isn't. And any epistemical change is a very kind of. Like when the river goes into the ocean. Where those things mix, you get a lot of generative stuff happening. And Shakespeare's is a time when a secular theater is becoming. Is possible, and an intellectual tradition of maybe there's more to human life than just the Bible is possible. And Hamlet, I think, is in a lot of ways, at the spear. That is the tip of the spear of this kind of thinking at this moment.
- [38:00]
B
And education and public access to reading material are really shifting here as well. Like, we're a couple hundred years after Gutenberg. We're getting the discovery of a lot of classical texts or the rediscovery of classical texts that are being printed and distributed for the first time in a very long time, or printed for the first time, distributed in a new way among folks and access to those stories. And to have a like, oh, we have not. The realization that we have not always understood life through the lens of Christian philosophy and ideology, that there were Greek and Roman myths, that there are stories that are much older than that. And Shakespeare seems interested in all of those as well, and in the common threads of humanity and very human problems and behaviors that people have been doing for from the beginning of time.
- [38:50]
A
So. So why is Shakespeare so great? Some of it is because we say Shakespeare is great. And there's no way to quantify that. But I wanted to get that into the air. That's one of the things that happens, right? Because so much literary tradition since has edified Shakespeare, we come to it and we sort of get it. Like, this feels great, because that's what we told. Stuff like this is great. But. But to be a little bit more specific, this is my experience of teaching. Also my experience of reading as well, I'll say personally, is if you teach texts from classical antiquity, they are quite good, but the characters do not feel modern. Right. Achilles feels like a character. You know, you go read Dante or the great Roman works. They feel like interesting characters, but they don't feel recognizable as people. And here's one thing that Hamlet is a great example of for Shakespeare is that these tend to feel recognizable as characters. They have flaws. They have Desires, they're not formulaic. They have inner lives. They don't. Many of them. Some of them do, but many of them don't map neatly onto archetypes. They may be playing with them, but they tend to meal. They tend to feel more real in that particular way, and emotionally real.
- [39:58]
B
Ophelia is a great example of this and, like, really the only female character that gets notable stage time, notable screen time. But it's like, this is the 1600s, and she's an unmarried woman, so she has to be concerned about, like, courting the right guy, but also protecting her purity and her reputation. And Hamlet has made some promises to her. You get the sense that maybe there have been a few roles in the hay and that she went into that space with him because he has made some promises to her. And now her boyfriend has gone nuts because he's found out that his father has been killed. And he's pushing her away. And she's. She's like, but we had a deal here, dude. And then he accidentally kills her dad. And so she's in grief as well. She's lost her father and she's lost her boyfriend. And in 1623, men were the way that women got access to power. So she sees no hope for herself, and she goes and drowns herself in the river. And there is. Is nothing more human and more, like, believable and relatable to, like, think about that as a dramatic teenage relationship. Like, Hamlet is 30. We. I'm going to assume Ophelia is around the same age. We're not told how old she is. So these are young adults, like, early young adults. But this maps onto, like, teenage melodrama and the kinds of romance stories that we've been telling for as long as we've been telling stories of, you made me promises and why are you ignoring me? And don't you love me anymore? And get yourself away from me. I'm too, like, I'm too much now. I'm in too much pain. I can't deal with you. You should get thee to a nunnery where you'll be safe. You and your virginity will be protected. It's so. It is so real. We're still telling those kinds of stories now. People are still living those kinds of stories now.
- [41:52]
A
And, you know, to connect a couple of the threads to Hamlet is not sitting around Elsinore, which is the place, the location within Denmark. This. This castle in which we. All of the action that we see takes place. He's out in Germany studying. Like, he's 30 he's a 30 year old heir to the throne and he'd rather be in Germany doing plays and reading philosophy. If that's not a good example of where we are historically, I don't know what is. He is more interested in books than the throne. Right. That there is something other than these ready made ways for Hamlet to be. He doesn't. He. He'd rather be somewhere else, you know. And does Ophelia kill herself or does she drown because she's not paying it like that. Even that is kept in a suspense. Right. We don't get a specific, totally clear answer about what happened to Ophelia other than she's been so subject to the machinations of the. The crowned that it happens here. So that's one thing. So also what. And the reason that these not only do they have recognizable thoughts and feelings, we get access to them. And Shakespeare did not invent the soliloquy or monologue, but he did. Perfect. It goes back to sort of Roman theater. There. There are monologues, soliloquies in Seneca, but in Hamlet especially. And this happens for I think Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing as well. The soliloquy as a place for the character to work out how they're feeling to articulate the complexity of what's going on inside is new. Or again, I don't know, I'm not a scholar, I shouldn't say. But this is one. These are the high points. Right. You kind of come for these great soliloquies. And there's some other stuff here too. But the great to be or not to be, which is a cliche at this point that's even started to see is what Hamlet is doing there is working through multiple morality systems to figure out how to be in the world, frankly, not whether or not he should.
- [43:41]
B
Yeah, he's. I mean he's basically writing in his journal out loud is what is happening in those scenes.
- [43:47]
A
And this is something that goes away a little bit in the theater and art as we look for more psychological realism. But. But I would tender up unto you a listener and Rebecca as well that anytime you hear a voiceover in a movie or you. Or you listen to a pop song that's told from a point of view. Those are all in the Shakespeare soliloquy traditions. They all. They all flow from a character speaking to us directly about what's going on inside. Especially, you know, musical theaters are the. Maybe the best extent. You know how they say dinosaurs don't exist, but birds are still the best dinosaur like the most recognizable dinosaurs. The one song in a musical theater is the bird to the Shakespearean soliloquy dinosaur. It's still around. It looks a little bit different, but the narrative function or access to interiority is the same because you can't have them talking to someone else because these are private thoughts. These are internal thoughts. You can't have internal thoughts on the stage. So what do you do? You give these people these weird theatrical moments of sort of talking into the air about what they're saying like no one would actually do. It's. It's a fascinating. And it's so familiar. It's hard to see the strangeness and wonder of it at the same time. Let's see what else to say. Just the greatest wielder of the English language ever do it. I have one example here. This is not a soliloquy, but I found myself struck by this. The. The play, the mastery of form. This is Hamlet talking to someone. And he's just. He's using the metaphor. It's like, you don't understand me. You can't. You can't deal with me much. Like, you couldn't just pick up that flute and play it right. And like. Well, I. I can't play this. Like, nor. Nor should you play with me. Because he is so frustrated with people trying to think they can work him. That's one of. That makes him more angry than anything is. Someone else thinks they could do something. They could do something with words to Hamlet. He's like, you have no idea who you're dealing with here. It's like, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ. Yet ye cannot make it speak to blood. Do you think I am easier to be played upon than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me. You cannot play upon me so like that, double bars, just like. That's just this part. That's not even like the top 15 thing people reference in that. And it's like amazing. Like, that's just in there. That's just sitting around. It's just unnecessarily amazing for what he's saying there, which is, I'm smarter than you. That's essentially all he's saying. I mean.
- [46:20]
B
And I think that's one of the things also to remember just about the experience of reading Hamlet is there are so many more words to say the thing than are necessary, and most of them are pleasurable. But also, this is permission to not have to parse every single word. Because Shakespeare is just having fun with the language. And in Hamlet, Hamlet is having fun with the language as well. But we as readers can, like, you can get what is happening in that scene from like the first sentence that he says, and then he goes on for five more just to like, really rub it in and make his point, because he's having a good time hearing himself self speak and making them listen to him. But that, like, that comes back to me every time I read Shakespeare is there are so many more words than are actually necessary here. And it's very rare for that to be enjoyable. It's. For me, it's enjoyable in Shakespeare. In a lot of other experiences, you're like, why do we have so much going on here? You could edit this way down. I don't need Shakespeare to be shorter, though, because the language is such a part of it. It's such a pleasure.
- [47:22]
A
Yeah. And. And so if you have experience of reading it or listening to it, give yourself permission to linger now and then go back and spend a little time. You don't have to do a full close reading, but like, in this particular. Just look at the. The layeredness of musical metaphors here and look at what he's actually saying about. You know, this is also about making art too. Right. Like, you have to have the ability to play the thing to get the most out of the thing.
- [47:45]
B
And there's something to be said. If you're not going to listen to it on audio, like, read sections of it out loud. I think if you get stuck, read it out loud to yourself or to, you know, whoever is around your house with you. And in doing that and having to figure out, like, where should I put the emphasis in this sentence? What is the cadence and the rhythm here?
- [48:03]
A
Some of that, or what are the possibilities? Try it a couple different ways. Out loud. Yeah.
- [48:06]
B
It makes itself more legible, which is also one of the pieces of magic of how Shakespeare works.
- [48:14]
A
So what's your first time with this.
- [48:15]
B
Piece of magic with Hamlet? It was sometimes or any of it. My first reading of Shakespeare was Much Ado About Nothing, that high school freshman experience. And I just did the math. I would have seen Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet in the theater before I had that experience. I don't. I had not read Romeo and Juliet. I didn't read that until later in high school. So I think that the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet might have been my first real experience with Shakespeare. And I love.
- [48:44]
A
What a wonderful one for a teenager. What a wonderful.
- [48:47]
B
You know, and we, we've read it and watch. We've revisited that film together at least once in the history of book riot and it holds up. So I feel great about that actually as a first Shakespeare experience. And they're talking fast, they're running through the language quickly and really just, they're just hitting the points that you really need to pick up to know what's happening there. And I think in some way that might have primed me for being able to go into Shakespear without stressing out so much about getting every last word of it. But being there for the vibe.
- [49:20]
A
Yeah, even there is a. There's a caricature of sort of a moldy version of Shakespeare performance that I think, I think Robin Williams makes fun of in Dead Poets like alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well. Horatio with like the skull. Right. And then there's a more Rat, a Tat Lerman where you get sort of the. There's energy from rapidity that comes. What's funny about Shakespeare adaptations is all people adapting or performing Shakespeare are doing unto Shakespeare what Shakespeare was doing into other stories, which is doing a version of them, putting their own spin on them. So the layers of interpretation, adaptation and transfiguration are dizzying and can be overwhelming and a put off. But if you can sort of go around the corner to how exciting the possibilities are, that's where maybe some of the.
- [50:11]
B
What was yours?
- [50:13]
A
I was telling. I don't remember. I, I know I saw the Mel Gibson Hamlet in the theater and I would have been 13. I was looking at the calendar when that came out and so already a book nerd. I don't remember if I had done any Shakespeare before then. I do know that I went out and bought this very same copy. This, this, this mass market paperback.
- [50:33]
B
After seeing that book has been through some things with you.
- [50:35]
A
It's been, it's, it's. I would have been carrying around in my pocket all week. I, I maybe should make a necklace like flava flavor.
- [50:42]
B
You and Jacob Elordi carrying around books in your back pocket.
- [50:45]
A
I know. Well, I'm a large man, so I can kind of hold it on to me in some particular way and it's. Well, it's well trodden, well traveled. I mean, I don't know, it's like I think my Own experience is sort of indicative to a lot of people. How they experience Shakespeare is that sort of enter. It's like always have been something, you know, is a big deal.
- [51:01]
B
Yeah, maybe that's in the.
- [51:03]
A
You know.
- [51:03]
B
And it's interesting you talking about how Shakespeare is riffing on other things because I think one of the big reasons to read Shakespeare and especially one of the big reasons to read Hamlet is that so many other works draw on Hamlet. And if you like listening to music and being like, oh, I know the song they're sampling right here. You can think of so much modern literature is sampling from Shakespeare or sampling elements from Hamlet. I was watching the premiere of the Lowdown last night and texting you like there's very exciting text to a Hamlet kind of storyline in one moment. And like, maybe that's not what Sterling Harjo is doing there. And I'm just looking through Hamlet goggles right now, but it. It looks familiar. And yeah, those things are all over the place. And there it. That's fun. That's a fun part of reading culture to be like, oh, this goes back to this thing.
- [51:52]
A
Yeah. And so our current. And that's all informs our current reading of it. For me, every time I have an occasion to experience Shakespeare again, especially red, I should say this is just for me. Especially red. I have a moment. I have an intrusive thoughts. Maybe that would be a good format to have. Maybe. Maybe we should have an intrusive thought section.
- [52:15]
B
I'm sad that we didn't think of this until after the Thomas Pynchon recording.
- [52:19]
A
My intrusive thought here is, why do I read anything else? And it's. It's. I don't think. I don't believe that. But I find the experience to be so great and so stimuli. I think stimulating.
- [52:35]
B
Stimulating is a good word.
- [52:37]
A
It's so stimulating for many of the reasons we've said and then just on the level of the line that I'm like, why do I do anything else? But I have that same experience when I go to Morrison. I have that same experience when I go to Homer. I have that same experience when I go to Whitman. So this is not the only experience. This is not the only tinfoil I can chew on and get that kind of a buzz. But I do have it here. And maybe in its most.
- [52:59]
B
I think that's such a useful feeling to identify because people can tie themselves in knots trying to argue intellectually about what makes art great.
- [53:09]
A
Yes.
- [53:10]
B
But I think you know it when you feel it or you know it, when you see it and something gets crowned as one of the greats when a lot of people have that same feeling about it that like this is the best it gets. This is the like epitome of a reading experience. Why would I want to do anything else? And like all of the caveats in the world about how the canon was originally formed by pretty specific groups of people who were pretty homogenous. But as we like we still come to that, we still have like a book of the summer or a book of the year or an agreement when something wins the National Book Award that like, yeah, that was the one this year. It doesn't always happen, but when that happens it's really magical. And I think that that's the feeling that we're all calling on when we have some sort of agreement about a work being excellent, is that it inspires that like, why would I want to spend my brain time with. With anything else? And Shakespeare certainly evokes that.
- [54:14]
A
So what's. What's like to read this? What is it all about? I think I still, I find both pleasurable and frustrating that a lot of it I can't get on a first read and even a second or third read. There's just some stuff that eludes me in terms of word choice or illusion. And honestly sometimes just that doesn't need a footnote. I'm like, I'm not really sure what's going on right here. I do think that that's to be expected and some people might be that find that very frustrating. And I find it frustrating to a point. I think the other thing that it does for me is the play feels then inexhaustible because I can never get my, my hand around it. Even something like Never let me go, which we, we love and we've recorded about. I kind of feel like I get it. Rebecca. Yeah, I kind of. I kind of. There's not a lot of mystery mysteries left to uncover. I mean that more in like a Eleusian mysteries than sort of Agatha Christie mysteries. But here it's always going to be out ahead of me. And I am the kind of person that likes that, but not everyone does.
- [55:23]
B
Yeah.
- [55:24]
A
So that's one that was maybe my, my thing to. That I would noticed again this time.
- [55:28]
B
Yeah, I think it's disorienting to sit down and read Shakespeare in the way that reading anything that's 400 years old is disorienting. And that when you can go in with that expectation of like, I'm not going to get it if that's just the water we're swimming in, I'm not gonna get everything. I think that makes it much more enjoyable than a version that is like beating yourself up or stressing out about not getting everything. People have dedicated entire lifetimes to studying these works and they have died saying that there was more left to do.
- [56:03]
C
You.
- [56:04]
A
And the thing that blows my mind then, as way of transition is what's amazing to me. And it could not have been intended by Shakespeare, I don't think. But who knows, man? I'm not going to pretend to be able to play the stops of that particular recorder. Is the play itself is not as about the limits of understanding. Right. The play itself is about what's beyond death. What what is the right way to do this thing? What should I be feeling? And how can I know things? Because as I say here in the notes, the word question itself appears 17 times in the play. And I didn't even count the question marks. A lot of Hamlet's soliloquies are sort of a series of questions.
- [56:46]
B
Yeah, a lot of his. I mean, he's thinking out loud, trying to decide how to feel about things. And then once he has maybe got a beat on how he feels about things, what he should do with those feelings, how he should act. What does he owe his father as vengeance for this death? How should he enact that vengeance? What does it mean about him? And then how is this spinning out to touch everybody else? It's kind of. It's all questions. It really is grounded in that. That feeling of being a person that is constantly having to figure out what to do next.
- [57:18]
A
Right?
- [57:19]
B
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A
Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. So you know one ways to see this, and one of the reasons it has been deified, and I think that's a secular deification, is what's happened to Hamlet and Shakespeare is as the first full throated interrogator of the human condition, which is to have reason, to have knowledge, to be the greatest of all animals. How perfect is the human understanding? He waxes rhapsodic about what a noble thing and what an amazing thing humanity is. And yet it's still not enough to know what happens after death. It's still not enough to cut the Gordian knot of wanting to avenge your father and loving your mother and hating her, of how to deal with someone that you've wronged. What does justice look like? The imperfectibility of human life is central here because he gets as clear a cut, a sense of wrong as anyone has ever gotten in art. Like he gets a ghost. He does the play, he overhears the confession, and yet that is still quite, not quite enough to feel whole. He cannot bring his father back. Even the revenge play is not a mousetrap that can work in arrears to recreate the dead mouse. He cannot bring his father back. And that's the central sadness of Hamlet is loss and imperfection and not knowing all that. One would want to know the Hamlet as it is most verbally unarmed in trying to have a feeling about his father, sort of with the ghost and what to do about that feeling. And so I think that's really important to say and you can even see that we get a bit of a hybrid being here too, even if we look at the question of suicide. I had this in my notes at one point he says, oh, at the divine had not fixed itself against self, same slaughter. Oh, basically saying, I wish it wasn't a sin in the church to kill yourself. But then that's not actually the reason he doesn't want to kill himself. Because in the to be and not to be soliloquy, it's because you don't know what the hell's going to happen that you're afraid, you're a coward, because you're fundamental. So we get really a Transition from the reason not to commit suicide as well as a sin. Like, no, really for Hamlet, it's because he doesn't know what the hell is going to happen. That's the limit of his understanding. So that's a real transitional thing. You can see in the bigger thing here also, as happens the church and understanding of the church. But also understandings of. Like the court and traditional stories of kings and queens. Hamlet is fighting against expectation, ceremony, tradition. He would go, as I said, rather go plays and study in Wittenberg in Germany. Then come be a member of the court. Right? He's gone. It's like how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me. All the uses of this world. All these ready me things that kind of suck. I don't want anything this. And then you can see in a way of understanding the play is. Then all the other characters are possible ways of Hamlet being that he rejects Laertes mode, forts and brass mode. Horatio, who's this antique Dane or Roman. A different kind of understanding from the classical world. But he's like, none of those are interesting. I'd rather play all the parts. And that's why I think Hamlet is probably the greatest role for people to try to play is get. You get to do it all. You get to be the fool and the lover and the fighter and the pontificator and the wronged son. It's an amazing. It's an amazing part. I can only imagine what it's like to play it.
- [62:14]
B
It is an amazing part. And he's just. Just. He's rejecting conventionality. He's rejecting all of the roles that he sees the people around him playing. And all of the boxes that his position in life has put him in. Like that he should be lined up to be the king someday. That he should be comporting himself in a certain way. He should be concerned about what people think about him. And he lets himself be completely unhinged. He's just bananas all over the place. He and his girlfriend are fighting in public. He's yelling at people. He's like. Like sneaking around watching gravediggers. He gets on a pirate ship at one point.
- [62:50]
A
It's one of those stranger things that he's. He's taken captive by pirates and then out duels them all. Dread Pirate Robert style. Just by himself.
- [62:58]
B
Really like mythical quality to a lot of what he's doing. But I think you're right on that. An actor playing this role gets to have a great time and gets to flex a lot of muscles and just exist in so many different modes. And as a reader, as a viewer, as someone attending a play, it's really, really fun to watch someone who's doing that and doing it well. Like, it's enlivening and exciting anytime you watch somebody, like, having a ball, doing something. But I think a great performance of Hamlet is. It's so up there with one of the best things that you can watch someone do well. And when they know they're killing it, it's just. It's excellent.
- [63:40]
A
It's all. It's dizzying to think about what's actually happening when you're watching someone perform Hamlet. You're watching someone act, someone acting like they're acting mad, but they're actually not.
- [63:52]
B
Yeah.
- [63:53]
A
Because it is. That antic disposition is a way for him to basically, I don't know, like, dance all over the court. It gives him permission to be weird.
- [64:06]
B
It's cover.
- [64:07]
A
Things that. Yeah, it's cover. It's cover. But also then it gives him access to different kinds of encounters and spaces that normally would. He wouldn't have access to. Right. He couldn't say the things he was saying to these people if they. He thought they were playing as straight. It would give too much away.
- [64:20]
B
Yeah.
- [64:21]
A
So, like, the acting gives him your cover is the right way to put it. There's neff. There's nothing good or bad but thinking make it so. What morality is that? Except that humans get to make our own meeting for good and for ill. Right. One of the more famous lines that this comes from, I'll say this. You may have had this experience, not you, Rebecca, but other people, and may have this experience with Hamlet of getting frustrated for his quote unquote indecision, because it takes him 4,004 hours and multiple thousand lines to do the revenging. And even that is sort of compromised. And my students often brought this to the table. It's like, why didn't he just do the thing? And I. And I answer with this. So this is my own. Oh, and even I have the note here that even Lawrence Olivier's famous film of Hamlet begins with this is. This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.
- [65:06]
B
I've never read it that way. This is so interesting.
- [65:08]
A
Anyway. Yeah. But like. And I answer with this. Does that really hold up? He does not immediately kill Claudius. True. But what he does is he conducts a moral investigation of Elsinore.
- [65:20]
B
Yeah. He springs right into action.
- [65:22]
A
Yes. And the moment he does act rashly, once he gets confirmation that Gertrude really didn't know. And the ghost says, leave your mom alone. Which is really interesting, by the way. Way for the gender politics of the ghost and whatever else is happening here. When he does indact rashly, it's terrible because of the limits of his understanding. So this, I think, if you think of this, a revenge play. Yeah. It takes a lot to get there. But if you think of it more of an investigation of Elsinore, of extant representations of morality. He's trying to figure out what he. How he feels and what he knows more than what he should do. Do. I've always made the case that Hamlet doesn't really want to kill Claudius. He's not. Or let me put it this way, he's not ultimately interested in killing Claudius because what he knows is that doesn't bring his dad back.
- [66:06]
B
Right.
- [66:06]
A
And then what? Then he has to be king. He doesn't want to be king.
- [66:09]
B
Yeah. I mean, he knows from the get go what he's going to do. He comes out of the encounter with the king's ghost like, well, I gotta take vengeance now. And the rest of it is. I've never read him as indecisive about it, so it's really fascinating to me. But the rest of it is, how am I going to do this? What does it need to look like? And maybe some of it is feet dragging about not actually wanting to do it because he knows, as you're saying that that won't, it won't fill the hole that he's really trying to fill there. I mean, Hamlet is very emo as. Yes, like, there, there is that. And so I think if you. And this really depends on the actor, if you're seeing it performed, like there is a version of Hamlet performed that, like, could you just stop whining already? Like, stop. Get out of your feelings. We get it, get over it. And there's a point where one of the characters says this. Basically says to him, like, just get over it already and do something. But then, like, his dad's only been dead for two months. You're allowed to be emo.
- [67:14]
A
Yep. Yeah. I said to Rowan, like, you know, if you want to tell your friends Hamlet's the first sad emo boy, that's not the worst way of understanding this. But I think on the other hand, it's hard to remember now in, in 500 years of retrospect, how his expressions were almost black, revolutionary and blasphemous, nearly in its humanism. Like, what a piece of work is man. How noble and reason, how infinite in faculty. Inform and moving. How express and admirable in action, how like an angel. And apprehension. How like a God. So like there's something else going on here then, boy, we actually really kill. Because that's the quote unquote, just, just thing to do. And he's not quoting other things going, no, he's not. And especially when in a moment in history where the monarch is, you know, a manifestation of God's will to say that not by extension, how like a man. How apprehension. That's not just man, but any man. You don't have to be the king or queen, right? You don't have to be a priest here. The Protestant Reformation is in Germany. Like that's within his father's lifetime that that's happened. And we are rethinking the relationship of divinity and humanity. And it's not looking great for the divine in that re estimation. Okay, is this for you? This is so silly. This is for you.
- [68:30]
B
This is for everybody.
- [68:33]
A
Just try it, right?
- [68:35]
B
Yeah, just try it. And if you are worried. One of the reasons that I feel comfortable saying just try this in a way where we've couched most of our other recommendations for like, maybe it's not for you is that. But people have worked really hard to make Shakespeare accessible for. In so many different ways. So if the language is a problem for you, no fear. Shakespeare translations exist that are page like side by side of.
- [69:00]
A
That's what I have. Yeah, they have the quotations right on.
- [69:03]
B
The other side, the Shakespearean language. And then the whole thing translated in just like plain today English. That is a great resource. Listening to it on audio is a great resource. Norton Critical Editions are always a great resource. But that's like a ton of footnotes. If you, if you are a person who wants to understand everything or get like the Folger Annotated Edition that I used is really wonderful. Go and like go to a library and look at a bunch of different versions of this and find one that feels accessible to you. And then I think make part of your plan B to either listen to it or to watch one or two of the movies afterwards. Like have the experience of watching some people perform it. If you can go to a performance, performance, that's ideal. And. And then you. I think you get an extra layer of the unruliness of Shakespeare. When you get to see performances that so often are set in places that aren't Elsinore. They are not Elsinore Castle in the year 15 something. We move Shakespeare around into all kinds of contemporary settings and into all other modes. And that flexibility too is one of the things that makes it so magical. But give yourself a weigh in. That feels doable. And. And then just try it.
- [70:14]
A
I mean if you. If you really have never done any Shakespeare before, which welcome it. We welcome all here. If you can find a production of literally anything close to you. Go see something live first. Just. Just see. Just. I think it makes it more accessible to see real humans saying the words. And you're not going to understand it all, but you're going to get some of it. And that's. That some of it could be very tantalizing to you. It could. It could lead to other things. Immortal questions aren't asked.
- [70:40]
C
All of them.
- [70:41]
A
Yes.
- [70:44]
B
What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? This is all right there in the text.
- [70:56]
A
Any. I mean there's some of. What do I. That's probably the least of these. The least of the apostles. Apostles here.
- [71:04]
B
Yeah.
- [71:05]
A
Though it is there because he's Laertes and Polonius and Ophelia and I mean he is as self centered as Hamlet is. He is not only self centered, he's not right.
- [71:14]
B
And one of the things that I think makes this a great work of literature and that makes other works that are great, great is that it's not just addressing some of these questions but it's trying to understand where these questions sit. Like in priority.
- [71:27]
A
Yes.
- [71:27]
B
With each other. Once you figured out what you owe your neighbor and what the good life is and how to deal with the certainty of death. Or you started to answer some of those questions. Which ones? The answers to them are not all going to work with each other. They're not all compatible. So which ones do you give priority to? If you know that death is certain and you feel like it's that murder is evil and you think you owe your father vengeance for his death. How do you do that?
- [71:56]
A
Because you know it won't bring your father back.
- [71:57]
C
Right?
- [71:57]
B
Right. How do you do the math there?
- [72:00]
A
Right. Yeah. That's a really good point. Is that you can get true and useful answers to these questions that are logical opposites or they compete with each other. Undermined. Yeah, they do compete with each other. That's very true. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? You say here the text is not really concerned with itself on that level. I will say there's a Lot of theater stuff happening here that having studied a little bit and looking the concordance like are directly where there's. Like this is. Shakespeare is also a good example of why putting contemporary cultural references into your plays dates them. Because there's stuff about like Internal Actors vs Children's Guild War stuff that's in the play that's very strange. I think that the way this is mostly about art is Mostly is about theater. And I have a. I have a conspiracy theory. Tell me or no.
- [72:50]
B
Put on your tinfoil hat.
- [72:51]
C
Let's.
- [72:52]
A
I don't know if this is intrusive thought. I love to think about the possibility of Hamlet realizing he's in a play.
- [72:58]
C
Oh.
- [72:59]
A
Where his attitude changes considerably after he rationally kills Polonius. He says there's greater purpose going on here. And I like to think that he is such a student of the theater that he could real. He could realize that I am actually in a revenge play.
- [73:17]
B
Because do we think that 2025 Hamlet would believe that we're in a simulation?
- [73:22]
A
I think there. I think I would. I would like to see a version of Hamlet where he sort of breaks the fourth wall and like walks out into the audience. When he does this line about. He appeals directly to the mute actors and audiences that there's bearing witness to the end that he's talking to them. And when he does special providence. There's special providence in the Fall of a Sparrow. He's like looking at the lights and like the rigging to see. Like this is all a design that I am trapped within. Anyway, that's my favorite thing. But it's about.
- [73:49]
B
There's like a Truman show element to your. Yeah.
- [73:52]
A
Or more Luigi or more Be a Luigi Parandello. Seven actors in search of a play where they break the fourth wall and they realize they're in a play. And once the curtain falls, they'll be gone and into oblivion. But like there's something that. That Hamlet exceeds the trappings of the theater and play so much that I kind of like the idea that maybe his realization about the limits of his understanding is I am not the playwright. I am the great actor and I'm the great character, but I'm still not the playwright right here. Anyway. That's funny. Let's see. Best in words. I mean, good lord. I mean, there's. So you need to go here we. I think this is where you need to go because.
- [74:26]
B
Yeah, there's.
- [74:27]
A
There's the phrases you collected that you just know that come from. It's not just Shakespeare, but Hamlet.
- [74:32]
B
Yeah. This is an incomplete. Well, these are all from Hamlet. Yeah, this is an incomplete list of phrases that you know, but you might not have realized came from Hamlet. Frailty, thy name is woman. This above all, to thine own self be true. Which, by the way, largely taken out of context.
- [74:45]
A
Yes, it's ironical.
- [74:47]
B
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. A murder most foul. There are more dreams in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Brevity is the soul of wit. Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. What a piece of work is man. The plays, the thing. Get thee to a nunnery. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Alas, poor Yorick. Good night, sweet prince. This next chunk of them are all in the 1. To be or not to be. Soliloquy we. To be or not to be. That is the question. To sleep, perchance to dream. I. There's the rub. What dreams may come and shuffled off this mortal coil?
- [75:22]
A
It's unbelievable.
- [75:23]
B
Like those. Those last five are all in, like, half of a page of text.
- [75:31]
A
My favorite to note here are the ones that are cited unironically in which Polonius says them. Who is the kind of the. The. This. The courtly fool. He. He is so reasonable and so adroit in his manipulation of the court and understanding of its goings on that he is a fool. So, like, brevity is the soul of wit. That's Polonius. Hamlet doesn't. Shakespeare and Hamlet do not believe that brevity is the soul. They believe in a maximalist witticism mantra in that to thine own self be true. He's giving Claudius a series of useful aphorisms of just sort of, like, getting along. Right? Of just sort of, like, playing along and keeping up appearances. But, yeah, it's tremendous. It's hard to know what to do with it.
- [76:17]
B
There is so much. And then there are so many works that have been inspired by Hamlet. We were talking off mic yesterday, you were saying we get a new Hamlet adaptation, like, roughly every 10 years. So there are a ton of films that you can pick from, but there's also Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The Lion King is an adaptation. Until you put that in, that's my favorite. There's a film from the 90s called what Dreams May Come that's not really a Shakespeare adaptation, but the line is taken from there. Also, big in the 90s, when we were first discovering that teenage girls had a psychology of Their own. Mary Pifer wrote a book called Reviving Ophelia that directly pulls from her reading of what is happening with Ophelia here. The play that won the Pulitzer for drama in 2023 is called Fat Ham. It's by James E. James, and it's a spin on Hamlet set at a black family's Southern barbecue. And the Hamlet character is a black gay man. And I got to see a production of that a year or two ago that was really terrific. So if you can see Fat Ham, go see it. But to. To watch, like, how. How adaptable these stories and ideas are. Bob Dylan wrote a song about the assassination of JFK called A Murder Most Foul. Nick Lowe wrote a song called Cruel to Be Kind, which comes from a line in this play, I must be cruel only to be kind. Book Titles Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I mean, the phrase infinite jest exists in Hamlet, and I was this week years old when I learned that.
- [77:46]
A
Oh, really? Was that your first time?
- [77:47]
B
That was the. I was like, oh, that's in here. And the.
- [77:50]
A
That's Yorick.
- [77:50]
B
He's describing Yorick, the Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange's book from last year. That is also a phrase that comes straight out of Hamlet all over the place. If you need us at, you know, an hour and 15 minutes into this podcast to sell you further on, go read Hamlet. It's to pick up on this kind of stuff and to be able to say from your own reading and experience, that's what that's from.
- [78:13]
A
And. And listen, put this in the hammer spot. The lead single off Taylor Swift's new album is called the Fate of Ophelia. And she's talked about, apparently, and I haven't seen the interview about, like, it's not. That's not just a reference. Like, it's about, you know, it's another interpretation of Ophelia and what she means and how she's caged and done wrong. I. Yeah, I mean, it's just. It's just all there waiting for you to experience hot takes. You go first.
- [78:39]
B
I think Shakespeare is actually not snobby. We talked about this a little bit at the top. But what is happening in these plays is actually a really great antidote to annoying writerly stuff that bothers people about highbrow literature.
- [78:52]
A
The silliness, the bodiness. There's a lot of that.
- [78:55]
B
There's a lot of bodiness. There's a lot of wordplay. There's a lot of, like, people sort of elbowing each other and raising their eyebrows. And like there, there's dirty jokes there and there are like so much double entendre etc. They're having a good time.
- [79:09]
A
The first light I saw in Rowan's eyes that she like kind of, she kind of saw the matrix of what Shakespeare could do was he says I am too much in the sun. And you know when he's being told to come out underneath his clouds. But like he's double sunned, right. Because he's son of Gertrude and now of Claudius. And like she's like, oh wow, that's really smart. Yes.
- [79:27]
B
Yep.
- [79:27]
A
Yes it is. And that is the Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb I'm going to try to feed you to get you to burn in the witches of of Shakespeare nerdom. My hot take is if you can at least appreciate this. I really don't know to talk to you about art. I don't say to love it like I do. Yeah. But I think you've got to see like I kind of get what's going on. I can kind of see why this is a thing.
- [79:48]
B
And maybe more than anything else we're going to read and talk about this season. Hamlet exists in the zone of like, I don't really care if I like it. I don't really care if you like it. I don't care if anybody else else likes it. Liking it is beside the point. This is so foundational to modern literature that if you want to engage with.
- [80:08]
A
If you care about that.
- [80:09]
B
Right. If you care about that. Which you're listening to this podcast. So we're making some assumptions. It's just one of those and that like that great books.
- [80:18]
A
It doesn't.
- [80:18]
B
They're not about your enjoyment of them. They're about what they do, what they mean in the body of literature writ large.
- [80:28]
A
Yeah, that's right. Let's see where we go. Cocktail party crib sheet. So I have. Shakespeare himself probably played the ghost in the Player King I. E. The father figures, the Hamlet Q crying. My favorite anecdote that I'd watch a one act play of by itself is the story of Daniel Day Lewis playing Hamlet. He did an eighth month run at Hamlet and in the middle of one of the scenes where he's playing Hamlet talking to his father's ghost, he was so overcome and said this is something that was reported that he said he saw his own father's ghost. He walked off the stage mid performance and never has acted on the stage again.
- [81:02]
B
Oh my God. I've never heard that. That's incredible.
- [81:04]
A
It's an amazing story.
- [81:06]
B
Totally believable for Daniel Day Lewis too. Right.
- [81:09]
A
Who, when he was playing the lead in Unbearable Lightness of Being, learned Czech and didn't speak anything other than Czech for the whole.
- [81:14]
B
Yeah, he was here in Richmond when he was doing the Ablying Lincoln film. And the Daniel Day Lewis sightings around town while being a method actor were very interesting.
- [81:25]
A
I think we did this before. No one really knows which version of this was performed. There's sort of a cloud of possibility around Hamlet and all that we have for it. The first filmed edition was a short Steen starring Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet in a breeches role, meaning she was playing.
- [81:40]
B
A man, which is super interesting because when these were performed on stage, originally all of the parts were played by boy.
- [81:47]
A
And the first gender bent screen version of Hamlet was a 1921 German silent film in which the adaptation was. Hamlet was actually a woman pretending to be a man to sort of protect her identity. So that's a hundred years just from now of playing with this stuff. I thought that was interesting there. All right, our final thing. 0 well read score. Each one gets 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest.
- [82:11]
B
No, we have to do the Muppets, Jack.
- [82:13]
A
Oh, I'm sorry. This is a new thing. In addition to intrusive thoughts, which we, I think we absolutely need to bring into the future, this is. Would this be watchable as a Muppet version where a human plays the main character?
- [82:23]
B
Okay, first, I need to ride hard for just a moment for Hamlet 2000, which is the adaptation with Hawk and Julia Stiles. You can get what you need from Hamlet from one of the Signal adaptations, and that's a great one. You previewed this Muppets question for me yesterday, and I. I spent a lot of time last night thinking about who the human should be, and I have a few pitches.
- [82:46]
A
All right, let me hear.
- [82:47]
B
My number one draft pick is Adam Driver. I want to watch Adam Driver be an emo Hamlet on stage with a bunch of Muppets.
- [82:57]
A
I couldn't love that idea more.
- [82:58]
B
Right. A little more obvious might be somebody like Josh o'. Connor. Chalamet would get kicked around if this were getting cast today. Jacob Elordi would get kicked around. I don't think Tom Holland necessarily.
- [83:10]
A
I think the bigger you are, the funnier it is. Yeah, yeah.
- [83:14]
B
Adam Driver was the winner for me. And then also maybe like a Texas Muppets version with Jesse Plemons. But Adam Driver is my. A number one draft pick.
- [83:24]
A
I think that's very good there. You know, the Idea. I think this is sort of a meme that gets kicked around. And of course it comes from. There are Muppet versions of Christmas Carol Treasure island where there's like one human character. They tend to be considerably less murdery than what they pick for those. Because this would require Adam Driver to, like, kill multiple Muppets.
- [83:42]
C
Yeah.
- [83:43]
B
I don't know how. How do you, like, feel? Okay. Poisoning a bunch of Muppets at the end of this.
- [83:48]
A
But I love the idea of Adam Driver, you know, sort of just talking trash to all these Muppets about how stupid they are.
- [83:55]
B
I sounded like a crazy person last night, just, like sitting on the couch thinking about this and cackling to myself and trying to explain to Bob what I thought. An Adam Driver version of Hamlet with the Muppets.
- [84:06]
A
I think if we gender bent it, Florence Pugh would be hilarious as Hamlet with a bunch of Muppets.
- [84:11]
B
Yeah. I mean, the immortal question, should we just put Zendaya in this movie?
- [84:15]
A
I think she'd be great. Yeah, I think she'd be great as Hamlet. There'd be some interesting. It's her. His name is Hamlet. But Ophelia is Miss Piggy. There'd be some weird sort of puns and things going on there. There we could enjoy. Okay, zero to one, red score. E score one to ten, ten being the highest. The categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance, central questions, book nerd read. Credit. O damn factor. Historical importance. 10.
- [84:34]
B
10.
- [84:35]
A
There is no there. I think there are only three tens. There's Odyssey. Well, there's four if you count Iliad. And Odyssey is different, but the Bible, Iliad and Odyssey and. And Hamlet, I think, are the tens. Is there anything else? Yeah, readability is tricky. This is going to be its lowest score. It is arc, like you said, it's not snobby, but is arcane. Yeah, I have a hard time getting higher than 6.
- [85:00]
B
Yeah, I was gonna say 5 or 6. Like, I honestly had a harder time sticking with the language of pension than, oh, interesting. Shakespeare. Because there's just the barrage of it. Like, at least there's a rhythm, like a wall to Shakespeare that you can get into. So I'm. I'm good with a six.
- [85:16]
A
Yeah. I think also if there's something you don't understand in. In Hamlet, it's kind of over relatively quickly.
- [85:21]
B
Yeah.
- [85:22]
A
Right. So current, relevant, essential questions. I mean, this is a 10 forever. These are return to earth forever 10. Book nerd read. This is a 10. Oh, damn. Factor 10.
- [85:31]
B
Also a 10. Yeah. So we're looking at 46 out of 50, only dinged for the readability.
- [85:36]
A
I don't see. I don't see how anything's going to score higher ever. This is like the highest possible score you can have because if you put the Bible on here, I don't think it's a 10 for O dam. Maybe it's more readable.
- [85:49]
B
I think we will have a good time at hot Greek Summer next year because I think the Odyssey might outscore.
- [85:55]
A
This because it's more. It's more readable because reading in translation, I mean, that's also like a cheat.
- [86:00]
B
That's true.
- [86:01]
A
I don't know. Anyway, but let's just say we're in. We're in. Rare air here.
- [86:05]
B
Yeah, as good as it gets the goat for a reason.
- [86:08]
A
Did we do something? Did we. Did we entertain people? Did we help people Today?
- [86:12]
B
Today you can email us and let us know. 0 to well read bookriot.com and if you like the show, please rate or review it on, you know, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, your podcatcher of choice.
- [86:24]
A
And with that, zero to well read is a proud member of the Airwade Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much. What a joy to get to talk.
- [86:29]
B
A real delight.