Shakespeare’s Fourth Wall Breaking Weirdness

Geoff Klock has a doctorate from Oxford and is an associate professor at BMCC-CUNY, where he teaches mostly comp, but sometimes film, and old school Brit Lit. 8 years of that. He is the author of three books, two about comic books and one about poetry. His new one will be about Hannibal Lector, the TV one.

In Twin Peaks David Lynch’s character says “we all live inside a dream — but who is the dreamer?” Join me for a look at a few scenes in Shakespeare — Hamlet reacting to the Ghost, Macbeth reacting to this wife’s death, the play put on by the characters in Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Prospero’s farewell — where characters seem to know for a flickering moment that they are in a play — and what that can tell us about mindfulness, our own relationship to art and to our lives, and David Lynch’s question.