Hamlet

OK. Let's get started. Today's lecture is on Hamlet. Hamlet is probably first performed around sixteen hundred and it's a play, as you probably know, with an interesting textual history. There are three distinct editions in six, you know, three and sixteen, four in quarter Texas and then in the Folio of sixteen twenty three.

I'm going to talk much about the textual differences in the play, but I think if you're studying it and writing about it, it's well worth having a sense whether the things you're writing about are the same in all three tax or whether they're different. One way to do that is to look at the Ardern three Hamlet, which prints all three texts, but they're also online versions. The enfolded Hamlet, which is probably one of the easier ways to look at textual differences.

But that's not something I'm going to talk about today. Telling the plot of Hamlet might seem unnecessary, but let's do it anyway. In outline, Hamlet is a revenge plot in which the ghost of Hamlet's father tells him that his death was murder and reveals that the murderer was his brother, Hamlet's uncle Claudius. Claudius has now married Gertrude Hamlet's mother.

That follows a long period of testing the ghosts information via a performed play and some soul searching about the morality of killing Claudius. Hamlet mistakenly kills an old courtier, Polonius, whose daughter Ophelia goes mad with grief and whose son Laertes comes to claim revenge. Meanwhile, 14 brass, a foreign prince, is marching through Denmark in a climactic scene. Laertes and Hamlet fight a fencing match. But Foyles, which are poisoned by the king, take both their lives.

Not before both Claudius and Gertrude have also been poisoned. The entrance of 14 brass into the shattered kingdom brings the play to a sombre conclusion. So I've said before that some of my focussing questions for this series of lectures seem very naive and perhaps this is the worst one yet.

The question today is, why is Hamlet called Hamlet? Well, depending on how you're hearing the question, we could say that it's clear that the play Hamlet is called Hamlet because it's named after its main character, who is called Hamlet. Tragedies, after all, signal their interest in the singular self largely by naming themselves after their protagonists, unlike comedies, which tend to be named for moods or for phrases.

This is so dominant a convention that of play titles where only the title survives from this period. There are a large number of lost plays from this period. In fact, probably only about a six or something of the plays performed. Do we now have such a large number of plays where only the title exists in records if the title is a name? We tend to assume it's a tragedy or a history. So it it's a very strong convention in this period.

So that answer Hamlet is named after its main character because it's a tragedy only prompts the next question. Why is Pentathlete called Hamlet? Another easy answer? Presents itself as very often in Shakespeare's work works here. He takes both plot and character names from his sources. So very often Shakespeare imports the names of characters as well as the outline of plot from the sources he's reading. He doesn't always do that. It's interesting when he doesn't.

But here he does. The sources of Hamlet are themselves slightly oblique. We know that Shakespeare used the history of the Danes by Saxa Grammaticus, in which he found the story of armless, a prince who feigns madness after his uncle kills his father, who is sent away to Britain and who returns to take revenge on the king. So we know that the main armless comes from this story, probably via a French translation from the 15 seventies.

What confuses the source study of this play is the apparent existence of a phantom play related to this one, which we do not, in fact have an earlier version of Hamlet known to scholars as the or Hamlet or the prefix meaning earliest or original. So it's important to be clear that we don't have the or Hamlet, even though people talk about it often, critics talk about it as if we do. We don't have it. And to my mind, it's dubious whether it actually existed at all.

But if it did exist, it may have been by Shakespeare or by Thomas Kidd, author of the era's most popular revenge play, The Spanish Tragedy and the planning to come back to later in the lecture. The issue is that there are references to a Hamlet play early in the 15 nineties.

It's uncomfortable for scholars to think that Shakespeare might have written Hamlet earlier in the fifty nineties because of course, we know Hamlet is a very useful play for arguing about the way Shakespeare's career develops. And if Hamlet said it out to be an earlier play, it would really spoil that narrative.

So there is that there's a little resistance to the idea that Shakespeare might have written an earlier Hamlet and that references which pre-date the date we think the play is may actually be to this play. But there are references to a Hamlet play in the early 50 nineties and even apparent quotations from it in work by Thomas Nash, who quotes the phrase is Blood is a beggar and Hamlet revenge. The second one we might think is in our play, but in fact, it never occurs.

And this may suggest that, as he did with King Lear and with Henry, the fifth Shakespeare here rewrites an earlier play, whether by himself or someone else, and transfers the name of its characters wholesale. So that means that Hamos is called Hamlett, because that's what he was called in the earlier play or in the other sources. So what's the issue with this question? Well, I want to try and use it to talk about two particular critical approaches. One is biographical.

Is there, as many critics have asserted, a connexion between the character Hamlett and the name of Shakespeare's son, CamNet, who died in 15 '96? The second issue is a more thematic one. How does the name of Hamlet help to construct the plays characteristically nostalgic mode? And how might we understand the implications of Hamlet being such a nostalgic play?

I don't start with the second point. First. So thinking about Hamlet is a nostalgic play may seem wilful, given that in so many ways it has seemed the work in which Shakespeare is most modern for Sigmund Freud and for Karl Marx. Shakespeare was the textual exemplar for their theories of psychological and economic modernity. And they turned to Hamlet to illustrate that Lacan nature, Adorno, Prufrock all used Hamlet to theorise ideas of modern selfhood.

In his landmark study, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, translated into English in 1965, the Polish state director, Young Kott imagined Hamlet wearing the black sweater of the European intellectual and reading Sartre and Beckett every age from David Warner at Stratford in the 1960s to David Tennant at Stratford in the first decade of the 21st century, has rediscovered Hamlet himself as a modern individual, most at home in the modern world.

For us, Hamlett soliloquies have come to represent a completely overdetermined articulation of fraught or reflective consciousness. So Hamlet seems like a modern man caught in the process of emotional and intellectual formation.

So what I'm suggesting is that we're completely attuned to seeing Hamlet as a play that anticipates modernity, that looks forward, and it's absolutely clear that Hamlet is a play which is much more popular and influential now than it ever was at the beginning of the 17th century. So it's come into its own in some way that didn't really register.

I think with audiences at the time and one way of explaining its apparent lack of popularity at the time, if its writing is to say that it was it's too ahead of its time, its to eat something which only the modern world can come to terms with. So because of all that weight of feeling that Hamlet is modern, that Hamlet anticipates us, that Hamlet writes the modern self in some way.

It's quite hard for us to think about the ways the play is deeply retrospective, looks backwards rather than forwards. But what I want to try and talk about today is a hamlet that's backward looking and caught up in its own history. That's to say for a play which has had so vital an afterlife, it is itself deeply mordant. And that's, I think, where the name of Hamlet starts to echo rather differently. So we've already established that the name Hamlett comes from the place sources.

But one thing which is absolutely distinctive about Shakespeares naming in this play is that he doubles the name Hamlet, both for the dead father and for the living son. So in none of the sources is that overlap between the generations registered by them sharing a name in Saxa Grammaticus Armless Father has the wonderful name whole when Dale, for instance.

In case we do not spot the significance of this, Shakespeare repeats the repetition for breaths to his son, to a father who has the same name. Clearly, there are plenty of names for Shakespeare to choose from. The play chooses to duplicate them. This also means that the first time we hear the word Hamlet in this play, it refers not to the living prince but to the dead. Former King Horatio's speech in Act one scene one names Valiante Hamlet as the man who slew 14 brass.

So there's a strange sort of anticipatory version of the story in which two characters who are going to go on to encounter each other later in the play have already had their decisive encounter in which Hamlet SLU 14 brass to the play's first Hamlet is a ghost. Hamlet really is a play of the undead. And it's tempting, perhaps, to speculate that this might be the hamlet.

The play is named after the overshadowing Hyperion, who is so idolised by his son that it is impossible for the son properly to succeed, either in the political sense or in the sense of being fulfilled when he encounters the ghost for the first time. Hamlet addresses it with his own name. I'll call the Hamlet King father Royal Dane. Oh, answer me. I'll call the Hamlet King. Father Royal Dane.

Oh, answer me. And that strangely anticipates a more famous assertion of what it is to be Hamlet, which comes later in the play. It is I, Hamlet, the Dane. So these words have already been sort of occupied or allocated to the dead king. So the ghost pulls the beginning of the play backwards from the outset. Hamlet, the play is preoccupied with the past. In the tense opening scene on the Ellsinore battlements, Marcella's asks, Has this thing appeared again tonight?

Tough. This thing appeared again tonight. So the action tells us that the play is doubly reiterative. A ghost is always a recollection of the past, and the ghost that has appeared before is doubly recollected, as Horatio informs us. The ghost represents both a more martial Denmark, a nostalgic world of sledding, poleaxed. One of the textual cruxes in the play don't quite know what it means, but it's very brave, whatever it is, and other feats of daring do.

But later, descriptions of the ghost which describe as murder murderous he lay sleeping in his orchard evoke a more a sort of broader sense of a lost golden world, a kind of prelapsarian past. The serpent that that stole my crown is obviously a kind of DenTek reference in the murder of a brother pushes Eden beyond reach, as Claudius admits when he tries unsuccessfully to pray in the middle of the play, recollecting that his crime hath the primal eldest curse upon it.

A brother's murder, the primal eldest curse clearly is the curse of Cain, who killed his brother Abel. So father and son share a name, and thus they cannot be properly distinguished in the hourly economy of the play. When we hear the name, we don't immediately know who it refers to. And one consequence of that is that young Hamlett cannot form an independent identity for himself. These repeated names link humbler more closely than we sometimes allow to.

Those concerns with succession, both political and psychological, of the history plays. In some ways. Hamlet's nearest neighbour in the cannon is not another tragic protagonist like Othello or Macbeth. But the Prince, Henry and Henry, the fourth part one, another prince trying to escape the burden of a father with whom he shares the same name. We can see Henry.

The fourth part one goes to considerable several automatic lengths to disguise this fact by calling Prince Henry how Harry Young Wagh, all those kinds of things, this ceasing to be ways that the play has tried to evade the fact that he and his father have the same name. Michael Sheen's recent performance of a psychiatric ward hamlet, in which he plays all of the characters, all Laurence Olivier's uncredited voiceover of the ghosts role in his 1948 firm, in which he also plays the main character.

These are both liberalisations of the overlap between father and son. And this is something that's missed by the more conventional way of doubling the ghost in the play with Claudius or with the grave digger. For instance, both interesting ideas about where the ghost might come back in the play. But those two versions. Think about Hamlet, father and son, as being in some sense doubled. So the appearance of the ghost pulls Hamlet into a past and away from the future in Act one.

Scene two. When we first meet Hamlet, Young Hamlet, that's to say we see a distinction between Laertes, the son of Polonius who requests permission to go back to France and is granted it. The contrast between that and the situation of Hamlet himself for your intent in going back to school in Whittenberg, it is most retrograde to our desire, Claudius tells Hamlet. Hamlet allows himself, therefore, to be persuaded to stay at home rather than to return to university.

And in that decision, he fixes himself as forever a child. Perhaps this is connected to the old critical chestnut. How old is Hamlet? And Greg Doran's production of 2009 with David Tennant has Hamlett available now on film. The scene in which the ghost appears in Gertrude's chamber is played.

Lesser's the sort of psychosexual drama that we've often seen it, as in, for example, Mel Gibson's film version, where Hamlet is more or less having sex with his mother and more a kind of affectionate family portrayed. The parents sit companionably on the bed. The ghost stroke's Gertrude's hair. Their young son sits happily at their feet. It shows that his development is, in some sense, arrested the ghosts encouragement.

Remember Me is a command for the son to join him in the past, a past that is shown by the play structure. Of course, old Hamlet is already murdered. By the time the play begins to be completely unreachable, that past is already beyond the play's theatrical world. So when Claudius tells Hamlet that mourning for his father's death is unnatural, he is not just callous, but really articulating a quite different world view or a quite different direction of travel, we might say.

Nature's common theme, says Claudius, is the death of fathers. You must know your father lost a father. That father lost. Lost. His stuff happened, says Claudius. Time moves on. Sons live longer than fathers. Claudius is pragmatic. Approach to succession and progress, therefore, is quite different from the impeded and circular. Remember me, which structures Hamlet's role in the play? What Hamlet does in the play tends to be about undoing and negation rather than about doing and progress.

You'll see that he undoes a lot of things which might actually be plot themes. He breaks off his relationship with Ophelia. Case is not in a kind of courtship plot. He does not return to university, so it doesn't move on. The play flirts with a different location when Hamlet is sent to England. But of course, Hamlet comes back from that and never takes the play with him. There are all kinds of ways that a plot might move things along. New things ahead are frustrated by the way the play works.

Hamlet's primary attachments, of course, after the dead, not to the living. The skull of Yorick gives rise to one of the play's most famous lines and clearly its most iconic visual moment. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest of excellent fancy. They often reproduced image of Hamlett face to face with the skull. It's a kind of cataclysmic reverse of the graphic we use to illustrate evolution with those primates gradually straightening up into Homo sapiens here.

Progress collapses. We look straight into the past, but also with it, the future. Now, since at least Freude, the idea that Hamala cannot make progress in this play has been understood psychologically. This is a psychological impediment to do with mourning and melancholia, Freud tells us that prevents him from making progress.

But I think there are other ways, too, to see it less as an individual or a personal property and more as a as a cultural one bound up with the specific moment of the play's composition. I guess throughout this these lectures, I'm sort of stepping back from psychological explanations of why characters do what they do and trying to think more about traumatic ones or historical ones.

I've already indicated that Hamlet is written around sixteen hundred shortly after As You Like It, which I discussed in last week's lecture. Unlike like that play, I think Hamlet registers the anxieties of that particular moment. The comparison I made earlier with Henry The Forth makes clear, I think, how much Hamlet shares with the English history plays of the earlier fifty nineties now censored by the bishop's ban, which banned satire and history that I talked about last week.

Again, in relation to us. You like it? Like those earlier history plays, that's to say Hamlet has, as part of its charge, issues of regime change and political stability that arose from uncertainty over the tuda succession. The question of the next monarch preoccupied lately is debating society as we know, but could not be discussed directly. And the theatre was one, perhaps the dominant environment in which different scenarios about the transfer of power could be rehearsed,

as in the deposition of Richard the second. The reign of Henry. The fourth. The rise of Richard. The Third. The challenge to singular kingship in King John. These are all place. I've already lectured on. So Hamlet then exists as a kind of belated history play and in that a rather apocalyptic one. In some ways this is the kind of end of history, in a Fukuyama's sense, mysteriously. Hamlet himself, despite being evidently old enough, does not inherit the throne.

And the play itself does not, I think, adequately explain why they should be given the cultural atmosphere of its first performance when succession was such a hot topic, it's hard to think that this oversight would have gone unnoticed. It's hard to think that this just doesn't matter. In sixteen hundred one, what matters more than anything is who is going to succeed. Here we have a kingdom which has in some ways what England really wants, an intelligent young male heir.

But it doesn't give the throne to him. And that's I think that's something important about the play. Instead, the Danish royal family and Hamlet destroys itself without outside interference. And the kingdom itself is left to fall into foreign hands, fought in brass marches on into Denmark and is able suavely and without shedding a single drop of his own soldiers blood to enter the throne room and take over with.

Soros has fought in Brussels and Brussels the best, I think of these characters who comes in and kind of cashes in on what's happened at the end of of a tragedy with sorrow. I embrace my fortune, but I have some rights of memory in this kingdom. Memory again, which now to claim my advantage doth invite to me. Interesting comparison maybe with at the end of Julius Caesar. Similar highly political review of what's happened. In my lecture, I'm Richard the Third.

I talked about the way in which that play never invests much dramatic energy in its eventual winner, Richard's nemesis, Richmond. Richmond wins the battle for the kingdom, but he barely even figures in the battle for the play. We might say something similar or for Tim Brass, a figure often and in fact very easily cut from Hamlet. So much so that some critics feel photographs was added in. It's so easy to take him back out again that he was never integral to the play's design.

So he's is rather easily cut from the play and won with whom it is very hard to take much interest. The future is hardly presented in Hamlet as something to look forward to. We're almost inclined to agree with Hamlet's own solipsism. The rest is silence, as if it really is all over once. Hamlet is dead. So as an image of late Elizabethan anxieties, then Hamlet has an extremely bleak ending. But like Elizabethan culture more widely, the play prefers to look backwards rather than forwards.

To think forwards was, after all, a crime now connected to this backward looking must be the issue of religion. We all probably know that one of the big issues about Hamlet is what this Catholic ghost coming back from Catholic purgatory is doing in an apparently Protestant play in a Protestant London.

The ghost's description of his imprisonment, quote, confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burned and purged away, describes an outlawed doctrine of purgatory just as the ghost very presence is anathema to Protestant theology. Horacio, the alumnus of a distinctly Protestant university, Wittenburg, associated ineluctably with Martin Luther, is more Orthodox. He questions what the ghost intends.

Warning Hamlett not to follow it in case it might, quote, deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness. Taking up suggestions that Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, who was fined for represent C, that's the crime of not attending church, taking up suggestions that that meant that John Shakespeare was an adherent of Catholicism, the old faith. Stephen Greenblat has memorably described Hamlet as a Protestant son haunted by the ghost of a Catholic father.

And in that, he represents a peculiarly, peculiarly Elizabethan predicament. A child of the reformation over whom is cast the long shadow of the Catholic past. I think seeing the murder of old Hamlett as some sort of allegory for doctrinal change is too stark. Shakespeare happily is not writing the fairy queen, but seeing something of the play's nostalgic pull as the unquiet remnants of a shared Catholic past gives us a specific religious historiography for the play's structure and tone.

One of the things you'll be aware of in in Shakespeare studies of the last decade or so has been that turned to religion and a new sense of the importance of religious identity and religious controversy to all the culture cultural products, including the drama of this period. Now, one final aspect of the play is nostalgia, I think is theatrical. Hamlet draws extensively on kids blockbuster play the Spanish tragedy he takes from that earlier play the name Horatio, the appearance of the ghost.

The image of a woman running mad. The murder in the garden. And the device of the play within the play. These all come, I think, wholesale from the revenge play predecessor. They're not in sacks. So Grammaticus. And the story of armless. Now, we're used to seeing Shakespeare as someone who routinely transforms the dross of his sources into his own pure gold. So whenever we talk about Shakespeare, sources were saying he makes a very flabby, kind of boring story into something really dramatic.

He cuts and shapes it and makes it something which is just awful, really, really brilliant. That's I mean, that's a very common way. We only ever really talk about Shakespeare sources in that way. But we might try and think here in the relation between the and between Hamilton, the Spanish tragedy about a relationship to previous plays, which is less effortlessly superior.

Harold Bloom's influential account of literary history, The Anxiety of Influence, introduced a paradigm that saw poets forever wrestling with their strong, poetic predecessors in a creative but violent Oedipal rivalry. Bloom says that the poet is always struggling against the father poet who is stronger than him and who he must kind of overcome in order to gain his own poetic strength.

Shakespeare is the only significant poet that Bloom exempts from this paradigm, saying that Shakespeare alone had no strong predecessors. I think he must be wrong and that kids Spanish tragedy is perhaps the father figure in this Partick Hougan here. The Spanish tragedy is a huge influence who might even say a haunting of Hamlet. This most popular of Elizabethan plays. This is the play. This really is the play that everybody knows the Spanish tragedy in Elizabethan England.

And I've sometimes used the comparison to say this is like this is the Elizabethan England Star Wars. Everybody knows what it looks like and what it's about. Even if they haven't seen it or it's so long since they saw that, they've kind of forgotten about it. It hasn't it has a kind of currency and a recognisability, which nothing else has, and particularly not Hamlet. So this most popular of Elizabethan plays is ever present in Hamlet from its structure to its language.

Even the word stalking, which is used of the ghosts distinctive movement across the stage, is one which is very strongly associated with descriptions of the stage presence of Edward Alleyne, the chief actor with the Animals man and quite likely the first actor to play Hirani Mo. Stalking seems to have been a slightly recognisably earlier kind of stage movement, non naturalistic stage movement. Stalking is associated very much with Allen and not with later actors, but in wrestling with the past.

And I think it's quite useful to try and push the Oedipal theme in Hamlet away from a sort of tired cliche about whether Hamlet wants to sleep with his mother and towards a more textual sensibly the pull rivalry that this might be a play which which is in a kind of struggle with parental figures, parental textual figures, rather than parental character figures in wrestling with the past. That's to say Shakespeare makes a crucial change. The grief that motivates kids.

Geronimo is, of course, the death of a son, Horatio. But Hamlet is mourning his father. The dynamic of past and a future is quite distinctly altered.

The play's theatrical, not nostalgia, though, I think looks back further than the decade or so to kids play, which probably dates from the early 50s, nineties back to the mid century, Tudor interludes such as sackful and Norton's score baduk, which typically separated out the particulars, separated out action and words by having a dumb show which performed action and then a kind of verse, formal verse presentation which gave that the accompanying script.

This, you'll see immediately, is the dramaturgy of the mousetrap, the play that the players bring to Elsinore dumb show plus Verst presentation. So in Hamlet, the players come to Elsinore and Hamlet shows himself a connoisseur of their performances together. They recall a heroic repertoire that Priam and Under Siege of Troy is. That is the speech that Hamlet is struggling to recall, just as Polonius recalls Julius Caesar.

There are heroic figures in the background of Hamlet and the heroic dramatic figures. The players enact a closely paralleled version of old Hamlet's murder. An extended stage direction spells out in considerable detail how this how this action is mimed. The dumb show enters. Enter a king and queen very lovingly. The Queen embracing him. She kneels and makes show protestation, and to him he takes her up and declines his head upon her neck.

He lays him down on a bank of flowers. If you've been trying to look at Shakespeare's stage directions for actions within plays, you'll see that she has been never gives us that kind of detail. But the dumb show is all choreographed for us. The descriptions continue with the king's poisoning and the wooing by the poisoner of the Queen, who seems loathe and willing a while, but in the end accepts his love. The play then repeats this mimed action, but this time verbally.

And it's when the verbal retelling of the story comes out that Claudius interrupts the performance, calling for light on the play. It's over. So we might observe in passing that there's dramaturgical split between doing and saying is rather apt for the whole play of Hamlet, in which the relationship between doing and talking about doing is famously fraught.

But more importantly, I think what I'm trying to think about here, which is the issue of retrospection, is that these nuggets of theatre that come out when Hamlet is engaged with the players come out as affectionate tributes, nostalgic fossilised versions of earlier forms of drama, which are being implicitly distinguished from what Hamlet sees as a very modern and rather regrettable development.

But development of the boys companies. So you remember when Hamlet is talking to the players, he says that they talk about how bad it is that a group of little ISIS of small people, small children have taken over the theatre scene. So instead of this kind of modern theatre world, Hamlet is thinking back to an old theatrical culture in Kenneth Brunner's film of Hamlet, The Mouse Trap and the other flashbacks in the play to the players repertoire are filled with cameo roles by older actors.

It's a kind of blacklist on Marge to the cinematic and theatrical past. Here we see John Gielgud, Charlton Heston, Judi Dench. These are these are figures from a previous theatrical or cinematic generation. And it's a modern version of how the particular form of theatre in its staging and its stilted language are deeply nostalgic. In Hamlet. Like the time of old Hamlet of Yorick, of Priam of Hirani, Mo, things the play says were better in the past.

So far then, I've been suggesting that Hamlet is called Hamlet because it's one of the ways the play pulls him backwards into previous plays. And previous generations. So the naming becomes an emblem of the play's frustrated teleology and its difficulty of moving forward. So I think the name Hamlett thus enacts something of the dramatic treading of water that are discussed in as you like it in the last lecture.

And therefore, I think this structure is related to historical and cultural factors about the end of the Elizabethan era. The nostalgia that made history such a popular genre in the theatre and beyond. So it results in a play that resists its own movement to annihilation by looping back on itself into a parallel and doomed universe in which Hamlet is always and already dead.

Hamada's is like one of those characters in a time travel film who has to go backwards to the moment of his own death in order to rewrite his own history that he can't. So this cumulative nostalgia provides a reading which thinks about Hamlet as a symptom of its own move moment, his own historical moment, rather than as his more usual one that thinks about Hamlet as an anticipation of of us.

And one which resists the movement to update the play, which has been such an insistent and such a fruitful project of theatre, particularly of cinema in our own era. So Hamlet's name can connect him to the past of his own play and hobbles him from moving forward. It condemns him to a life of remembering, revenging and all those other re prefixes which suggest repetition and redundancy.

So how might we fit this reading into my other point, something which is more obviously connected with Shakespeare's own individual biography, not with a kind of broad brush stroke sense of what what was it like to be kind of fun to Seattle Elizabethan? But what was it like to be William Shakespeare? The idea that Hamlet actually recalls the young Hamlet.

Shakespeare's twin children, Hamlet and Judith, were named after their neighbours, Hamlet and Judith Sattler and scholars have been quick to notice that when Hamlet Sattler is mentioned in Shakespeare's will, his name is spelt Hamlet Hamlet. Shakespeare died in 15 Ninety-Six, aged nine. As Freud put it in the interpretation of dreams with considerable certainty, it kind of course, only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet.

I observe that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father. That is under the immediate impact of his bereavement. And as we also may assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived, it is known to that Shakespeare's own son, who died at an early age, bore the name of Hamlet, which is identical with Hamlet. Modern greens are unclear whether Hamlet and Hamlet are, in fact, identical.

But you can see how the association arises in this as in much else of his work on Shakespeare. Freud is heir to Victorian notions of biographical criticism in the 19th century, invented a narrative of Shakespeare's plays on his 19th century. Critics were completely preoccupied by was what was the right order of Shakespeare's plays because they wanted to make a kind of intellectual biography of the playwright.

And if you look at late Victorian books on Shakespeare, they almost always move, try to move chronologically or in a perceived chronology. This is a reading which sees the turn from comedies to tragedies as a consequence of his own moods and the character of Prospero in The Tempest as a self portrayed. So there are lots of ways which we haven't quite let go of that critical paradigm.

We still think the early works are less sophisticated than later ones, which is essentially a kind of biographical narrative about how our writer develops. As a corollary, 19th century biographical scholarship also invented, although I think it didn't intend to, the so-called authorship controversy, a feeling that, in fact, Shakespeare's life did not adequately map onto the plays.

It couldn't explain the play and that into that gap. There was a kind of interpretive dissonance which meant that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because he hadn't been to Italy or haven't studied law. He hadn't had a life which gave rise in a proper way to the plays. The idea that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare was a view that Freud also espoused at certain points. So in some ways, this is between Hamlet and Hamlet is not.

It's part of Freud's kind of own backward looking ness towards Victorian criticism, Freud as a Victorian rather than Freud as as a modern inventing modern psychoanalysis. But it's an idea that the idea that Hamlet derives from its author's grief for his dead son has been revived recently and an extremely influentially by Stephen Greenblat and a bestselling biography, Will in the World or How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. The Renewed Popularity of Shakespearean biography in Our Own Period.

So even as we are self professional entry, critics say we shouldn't read literate literature by biographically. Literary biography is one of the biggest growing literary genres in our own period. You know, there's a huge appetite for literary biography, for writers, biographies in the marketplace, and particularly for biographies of Shakespeare.

So it's the kind of mismatch between a critical piety which says biography is not relevant to literary study and the kind of narrative appetite for literary biography. So the renewed popularity of Shakespearean biography in our own period means that the search for points of putative emotional connexion between the plays and the life, or rather the invention of an emotional life as a back projection from the plays has been returned to the critical table.

One of the problems about Shakespeare's biography, as you knows that there is no detail whatsoever about what he thought, what he felt, what he believed in, only these very stark details about financial transactions and so on. And it's only biographies have always been struggled to know how much of the emotion in the plays. It is permissible to kind of suck back into the life. So Cumbo Graphy help us with Hamlet.

Clearly, this is a play which is preoccupied by grief and by mourning, a play which looks back backward to something it knows to be unrecoverable. And clearly, the name the idea that Hamlet's name registers Hamlet encourages us to see that lost thing as something personal rather than, as I've been arguing so far as something cultural. The gains of this reading. Okay. The gains of thinking that Hamlet and permanents are in some way connected are twofold.

Firstly, the reading authenticates the play's emotional landscape by connecting it to familial grief. Many people, I think reading Renaissance literature feel ethically a bit at sea by the difficulty of understanding the emotions expressed in that literature as coming from some real experience. If you think about how we worry about sonnets, whether sonnets, a literary exercises or whether they're biographical, that might be an example.

So so one gain is that it's so to authenticates the emotional landscape of Hamlet by saying this comes from a really experienced grief. The second game, I think, is that it helps to humanise Shakespeare, whose apparent abandonment of his young family in Stratford to pursue his career in London has always been a problem to biographers. How should we how should we take this this apparent carelessness about its children?

In fact, we don't know whether Shakespeare even attended Hamlet's funeral in August 15, 96, but the idea that the grief produced this literary masterpiece goes some way to excusing Shakespeare from any charge of neglect. Both Hamlet would play and Shakespeare the writer. That's to say, take a kind of benefit from the association of Hamlet and Hamlet.

And I guess I've been thinking about that because one thing is one of the questions I think is most interesting about Shakespeare criticism is why do people want to believe what they believe? What's at stake in arguing one thing or another? But there's also counter evidence to this counter evidence that Hamlet and Hamlet are not, in fact, connected. From his earliest plays long before Hamlet's death, Shakespeare envisages that bond between father and son is crucial.

In the third part of Henry the Sixth, a famous stage direction introduces us to a sort of distilled a kind of microcosm of how terrible civil war is. This is the stage direction. Enter a son that's have killed his father one door and a father that has killed his son at another door. Shakespeare's most famous depiction of grief for a dead child comes from King John, where Constance laments her son, Arthur. Grief fills up the sorry, but I've made a mess of this wonderful first line.

I'll start again. Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, remembers me of all his gracious parts, stuffs out his vacant garments with his form, then have a reason to be fond of grief.

We're so invested in the Phantom of Shakespeare's own emotional biography that many critics date King John the play in which that speech occurs at fifty nine to six solely because they think it could only have been written after Hamlet's death. Of all, the other evidence about the place suggests it's written earlier than that. Shakespeare. I think the answer to that is that Shakespeare can access grief without the immediate stimulus of Hamlet's death.

That shouldn't really be surprising to us, because one thing we know about writers is they make things up. So the association of Hamlet and Hamlet may actually work to underestimate the inventive or creative powers of the dramatist on the one hand, and to overestimate the claims of confessional writing on the other, writing to alleviate inner personal torments.

Isn't romantic construction of the mind of the artist, which hardly exists in this earlier period the most authentic source of writing in the Renaissance? Is previous writing not personal experience? Shakespeare doesn't, I think, write autobiography much as me might want him to do.

So I've been talking about Hamlet as a nostalgic play and emphasising the strange echo of Hamlet's name for the play's recursive structure and for its habit of retrospection, rather than seeing this as the play in which modernity is most fully anticipated. I've tried to stress the ways it seeks a kind of comfort in the past and then to suggest that this registers less person Shakespeare's own personal inner landscape and more the cultural position of the Elizabethan fantasy.

Next week I'll be talking about the comedy Much Ado about Nothing. And the question I want to ask is why does everyone believe Don John.