Shakespeare’s Hamlet has inspired countless interpretations: “Words, words, words,” as the play’s eponymous protagonist might put it. Writers from J.W. Goethe to Friedrich Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot to Sigmund Freud, Carl Schmitt to Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster have attempted to make sense of the panoply of human experience the play offers up—on matters of love and desire, melancholy and indecision, guilt and vengeance, sex and death, war and politics. Each critic’s view reveals just as much about the critic and their preoccupations as it does about the play itself. What about Shakespeare’s Hamlet—its themes and poetics, the picture it paints of human variability—has generated such a rich array of reflections on, for instance, human existence (“To be or not to be?”), political structures (“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”), feminine sexuality (the Ophelia question), and so many other aspects of psychic and social life? And, moreover, how might these many interpretations serve as a case study in the act of interpretation itself?
In this course, we will begin by reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet before embarking on a three-week long discussion of some of the play’s most significant interpretations: by Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Jacqueline Rose, and Critchley and Webster. In so doing, we’ll take up psychoanalytic and existential points of view, alongside the question of tragic character, family relations, and the political ramifications of guilt and revenge. With each interpretation we encounter, we will ask: what is the desire driving it? And how, perhaps, does that desire mirror Hamlet’s own—to find meaning in an unjust world?
Please Note: There *is* no physical Brooklyn Institute. We hold our classes all over (thus far) Brooklyn and Manhattan, in alternative spaces ranging from the back rooms of bars to bookstores to spaces in cultural centers, including the Center for Jewish History, the Goethe-Institut, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. We can (and do) turn any space into a classroom. You will be notified of the exact location when you register for a class.
Instructors will contact students approximately one week prior to the first class with reading assignments and details about the course location.
