Secret Life of Books
Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides.
The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC.
Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.
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Secret Life of Books
Hamlet: Shakespeare's secret double or pain in neck?
Hamlet is jammed with famous quotes like “to be or not to be,” “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” “time is out of joint,” “the play’s the thing,” “get thee to a nunnery,” and “the rest is silence.” But who really knows what happens in the world’s most famous play? And why is it so damn long? Jonty confides the intense boredom induced by the unabridged 5.5 hour Kenneth Branagh marathon Hamlet during the 90s.
Jonty and Sophie are in heated agreement that Hamlet is not a nice guy but a bit of an over privileged brat. The Ghost, not Hamlet, gets SLOB’s prize this week for MVP. not to mention lovely Ophelia, the play’s most moving and sympathetic character.
There many unanswered questions in Hamlet and Sophie argues that “to be or not to be?” isn’t even in the Top 10. And also, why do actors speak so slowly when delivering the “to be or not to be” speech? Jonty - at last - concedes that the Protestant Reformation is at the heart of this text! Plus we get a quick primer on political and religious life under Queen Elizabeth I, who was in crisis with a threatened rebellion from the Earl of Essex. The queen wasn’t the only one in a career slump in the late 1590s - Shakespeare was having problems with his work-life balance too.
Why — and how — did he and his business partners dismantle their theater and carry it across the Thames one frosty December night in 1598? Hear why Shakespeare played the Ghost in the first performances of Hamlet, and how this very adult play is also about the death of Shakespeare’s 11 year old son named Hamnet, a few years earlier.
Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum
Further Reading:
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Folger Shakespeare Library edition. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/
James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (Harper Collins, 2005)
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton UP, 2014)
Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton UP, 2017)
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood (Dover Publications, reprint edition 1997).
Every book has two stories. The one it tells. And the one it hides. Welcome to The Secret Life of Books. I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer.
Speaker:I'm John T. Claypole, broadcaster and producer.
Speaker 2:In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved.
Speaker:Today, Hamlet by We don't need to say who Hamlet's by.
Speaker 2:Ah. To thine own self be true.
Speaker:Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Speaker 2:Murder most foul.
Speaker:There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Speaker 2:Time is out of joint.
Speaker:Though this will be madness, yet there is method in it.
Speaker 2:Denmark's
Speaker:a
Speaker 2:prison.
Speaker:I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.
Speaker 2:What a piece of work is man!
Speaker:Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! The play's the thing. To be or not to be, that is the question.
Speaker 2:Get thee to a nunnery.
Speaker:Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.
Speaker 2:The rest is silence.
Speaker:Good night, sweet prince.
Speaker 2:Jonty, can you believe that we're actually taking Hamlet on, on Secret Life of Books?
Speaker:I know, it's a big one. You're scared, by the way, I know you're scared.
Speaker 2:terrified. You
Speaker:have a scared look about you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do, I do.
Speaker:Why are you so scared?
Speaker 2:This is a, very intimidating moment for me. when I was a junior, you know, academic at Princeton, I wasn't allowed to give any of the lectures on Hamlet, because they were occupied by the senior Shakespeareans.
Speaker:Wow, you're not even allowed to talk about Hamlet. It's, it's I mean, I
Speaker 2:don't think it was in my contract that I wasn't allowed to talk about Hamlet, but I didn't. And, when I was doing my PhD, I was trained by two of the greatest Shakespeareans in the world, Stephen Greenblatt and Marjorie Garber, you know, I meet people today who say, oh, I was in those classes and they gave those incredible lectures. So it's very scary for me.
Speaker:It is. It's probably quite scary for the listener as well, in that Hamlet has the potential to be a very long episode. I imagine the listener is looking at the duration. And let's just say, if we're still talking, Sophie, in an hour and a half, Yeah. We're not doing anyone any favours.
Speaker 2:You're so right about that, Jonty, and I love your commitment to keeping it brief. But Shakespeare didn't feel that commitment with Hamlet. He really let himself go. Did you know that in Hamlet, there are about 600 words that Shakespeare had never used before, and some of them he just completely made up out of nowhere?
Speaker:Wow. It's also, 30, 000 words long,. so. That's very long. That is very long. Very
Speaker 2:long. Yeah. And he also completely reinvented what the theatre could do with Hamlet, I think. You know, in this play with the soliloquies and the exploration of the inner lives of the characters, it kind of invents a whole other genre that hadn't happened yet, namely the novel. Hamlet in a way is a sort of proto novel.
Speaker:Yeah, and I did feel reading it over the last week that it is more like reading a novel than a play, isn't it? Yeah. It just hasn't got the boring descriptions that a lot of novels have. It's just the dialogue, but the complexity of it is much more novelistic, and I was reminded as well that I think this is one of those plays that's amazing on the page, but very hard to stage convincingly. Very. I've seen a lot of Hamlets, and they're almost invariably unsatisfying to watch. And I remember one occasion in 1992, Kenneth Branagh, who I love. Oh,
Speaker 2:you saw the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet.
Speaker:Which was the entire text. Oh wow, yeah. And I was 17 and I went with my parents and it was long. Long. So
Speaker 2:full Fortinbras.
Speaker:It was like five and a half hours long. Yeah. And I mean, hats off to Branagh for doing it. Stamina. But it was not a rewarding experience and, and it makes you wonder like what did the audience at the time make of this incredibly dense five and a half hour play? Like that was a sophisticated audience.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? That they say about Renaissance audiences, that they're sort of appetite for listening and retaining information and all of that stuff that we can't really do anymore. Cause we, we, we can't. Watch TikTok videos all the time that they just had this capacity to sit with material for much, longer. I mean, I suppose it would be what like binge watching succession.
Speaker:Yes, but harder work. And, one's always hearing about how theatres at the time would, have bear paging and cock fighting one moment and then a play the next. But the idea that a venue might go from something as Primitive as bear baiting to Hamlet with the same audience is phenomenal. But
Speaker 2:That's the beauty of the early modern world. These incredible juxtapositions and hopefully some of that will come up. So Jonty, if we're trying to keep this under an hour and a half, we are not doing ourselves any favor with with this immense preamble we're
Speaker:already off script
Speaker 2:yeah i know we are but i do want to bring us back to the script to say to the listeners so let's think of this as slobs hamlet we're not trying to cover everything you've already mentioned Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. There are many other famous ones, Laurence Olivier, even Mel Gibson., this is Secret Life of Books, Hamlet. We're doing Sloblet. Sloblet, exactly. This is Sloblet. And like those other models, it's going to be By William
Speaker:Slobshare.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can stop now. like those other models, it's going to be totally distinctive and field changing. I do have a content warning, though, for the listeners, which is that if you find Hamlet incredibly hard to understand, very confusing, and never, ever clear, even after you've listened to Slobs Hamlet, you're not alone with that. That, you know, most critics now say part of the point of the play is to Is it's incoherence. And I always think of that as a bit of a critical cheat, but let the listeners sit with that.
Speaker:Okay. so what are we going to do? A reading?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, feels a bit grotesque to me for us to do the reading of Shakespeare as, as, as highly qualified as we are.
Speaker:I disagree, but go on. Yeah,
Speaker 2:we had this, we had a tiff about this in the Midsummer Night's Dream episode as well. We could do that, or we could go to one of the greats. I was gonna do the to be or not to be speech. And then I listened to a few playbacks by the All the really big people. And why do people feel like when they do to be or not to be, they have to slow their speech to like a sixteenth of their normal speed? They really sort of masticate the words. So
Speaker:I think it's because it's almost impossible to understand. So yeah. To be or not to be,, the speech begins clear enough, but halfway through you've completely
Speaker 2:lost the plot. Complete you now. I
Speaker:think that's why, and also because, you know, they're creating a memory to treasure if you're an actor. You want to, when you're old, lie on your couch and remember the time you did to be or not to be in the back room of a pub in Islington.
Speaker 2:Right. So instead I have chosen another scene, not to be or not to be, it's from the very beginning where we fight. Very first see Hamlet. And I'm not going to say who's speaking because the listeners can see if they can figure it out.
Speaker:And me as well.
Speaker 2:And you. Yeah.
Speaker 4:How is it that the clouds still hang on you? Not so, my lord. I am too much in the sun.
Speaker 3:Good Hamlet. Cast thy knighted color off. And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not forever, with thy veiled lids, Seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou knowest tis common, all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.
Speaker 4:Ay, madam, it is common.
Speaker 3:If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?
Speaker 4:Seems, madam, nay, it is. I know not seams. Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, Nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour in the visage, Together with all forms, Moods, shapes of grief that can denote me truly. These indeed seem for their actions that a man might play. But I have that within, which passeth show. These but the trappings and the suits of woe. It
Speaker 2:Jonty, who was it?
Speaker:It was Andrew Scott that amazing production of Hamlet at the Almeida Theatre and Andrew Scott, um, is by far the best Hamlet I ever saw. And he also has this amazing trick where he's always sort of smiling slightly at the audience at the sheer ridiculousness of theatre itself. At the idea that there are these actors playing characters and everyone is together pretending that this is reality. And it's an amazing Effect he does and
Speaker 2:I also liked how in that opening scene listeners couldn't see but he's sort of sitting down fiddling with a watch or something on his arm. and he very much looks like a kid and all the grownups, Claudius and Gertrude and some servants and stuff are all standing around watching him. And you can see them thinking this guy's going to be a problem.
Speaker:When we get to the soliloquies, I think he's one of the only Hamlets I've seen who managed to make the soliloquies work the way he does them. Yeah, really compelling.
Speaker 2:Why is it a classic John T? Why well, first of all, do you think Hamlet is a classic?
Speaker:Well, obviously Hamlet is a classic. I think it's a classic For, many, many reasons, and we've already talked about some of them, the innovations to the English language, the unforgettable phrases. We also talked about the opacity of the play, and I think that's one of the great innovations That Shakespeare hits upon this idea of removing motivations from his main characters and by removing or obscuring motivations the reason why characters do things it opens up a psychological complexity that just wasn't in theater at the time. That's a brilliant
Speaker 2:comment.
Speaker:So we know that Hamlet wants to revenge his father's death, there's a motivation there, but we don't know why he does lots of other things. We don't know why he pretends to be mad. It's a completely It's a bizarre thing to do. We don't know why he's so cruel to Ophelia. And this was Shakespeare really innovating, stripping away motivation so that we just can't get that close to these characters. And So simultaneously, they're speaking to us in a way that is more representative of human thought than any playwright had done up until that point. And the soliloquies are the ultimate example of that. And yet at the same time, we just can't get that close.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really terrific, actually, because, um, there are a couple of sources for the play, but one of them is the, um, ancient Danish saga, the Historia Danica by the 12th century Danish scholar Saxo Grammaticus.
Speaker:One of my favorite books.
Speaker 2:It's a gripping read. In that, he's a child. Hamlet's a child and, and so he feigns madness as a way to sort of,
Speaker:Survive. He's going, because he's going to be bumped off because he is the heir, and he's a child, and he realizes his best chance of survival is to pretend to be mad so that nobody thinks it's worthwhile killing him off.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly. He's sort of an absence from the play. And Shakespeare just takes that out, which is great, by making Hamlet an adult. And the other thing about Hamlet, although he announces at a certain point that he's going to pretend to be mad after he's seen the ghost as I think that Scott performance show. That's the, those are the first words we hear Hamlet say in the play. And, you know, he's kind of already a bit mad in Shakespeare's version. So there's always this question mark about what's going on with Hamlet psychologically.
Speaker:And whether he really is actually mad.
Speaker 2:Actually mad. I love that account of why it's a classic. Mine's kind of connected. I think that there's this amazing innovation going on with Hamlet's character. He's annoying. He's appealing. He doesn't make any sense. And yet, everything he says seems to be incredibly rich and profound. I suppose, I'm just completely copying what you've said. Shakespeare gives us characters who have real interiority in this play. You know, you have this sense of people warring between their inner lives and their outer lives the parts of themselves that other people can see and the parts of themselves that no one can see. That's why I think. It's sort of a proto novel that there's this very hard to reconcile relationship between people's outward actions and what they know is going on inside their minds. Shakespeare's constantly playing with that. That I thought came up a lot in the Maggie O'Farrell response to Hamlet, Hamnet, which we're actually going to do an episode on. We
Speaker:are. We're doing it next.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And in that she picks up on the fact that Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet and it's very likely that he was revisiting his son with the writing of Hamlet the play. But she's also, I think, really picking up on the sense in which Hamlet the play is a sort of novel.
Speaker:You see, you weren't just repeating what I was saying. That whole idea of it being a proto novel hadn't occurred to me until I read,, your notes. And it immediately made sense. That was for me a G revelation. Oh good. Well, I'm always trying to. You still, you still blow my mind, even though we're, many months now into this podcasting
Speaker 2:relationship. We haven't yet
Speaker:got to our John Lennon, Paul McCartney stage just silently, and resentfully playing one another's songs in the studio. Frudging
Speaker 2:through the episode. What's the secret, Junty?
Speaker:So, for me, the secret is, I think Hamlet is Shakespeare to an extent.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker:And
Speaker 2:Because in the performance, in the first performance of the play, Shakespeare probably played the ghost.
Speaker:Yeah, so Not Hamlet. The theories are that,, Hamlet is in some way must be inspired by the death of Shakespeare's own son, Hamnet. Which is a name which is interchangeable with Hamlet But I feel that Shakespeare's channeling a lot into Hamlet himself and as we'll talk about when we look at what Shakespeare's doing in his life at this moment, he's having to process the death of his son. He's having to kind of watch a brewing, uprising, being planned by Essex, the Earl of Essex,
Speaker 2:to which
Speaker:Shakespeare is implicated. So he's politically in hot water.
Speaker 2:His
Speaker:father's about to die. So there's a lot going on in his private life. And at the same time, he's just having to keep the madness of the show. The show must go on.
Speaker 2:The play's the thing.
Speaker:Yeah, he's got, he owns 10 percent of the globe. It's a massive business risk. And so I think, Shakespeare's injecting Hamlet with a lot of the conflict and emotional conflict that he's feeling. Oh, that's great. That's terrific.
Speaker 2:You really did well with that point. When I saw, I think, Hamlet as Shakespeare on your notes, I thought,, that's going to be a tough one to pull off. But you completely pulled it off. Yeah, thanks. Well done. I love it. so my secrets are that, as I've already said, I'm completely terrified of talking about Hamlet in public.
Speaker:I know, that's, yeah. It's really
Speaker 2:scary. But It feels like forbidden territory,
Speaker:do you feel better now we're 10 minutes in or do you feel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm, I can feel my heart rate slowing, I've stopped sweating profusely.
Speaker:Okay. Yeah. listeners, hashtag pray for Sophie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so glad you brought up the topic of prayer. At the absolute, at the absolute center of this play, you know, we've now gone several episodes without my mentioning the English Reformation, but we're back, listeners, we're back. it won't stun you to know, I think one of the secrets of Hamlet is the Reformation. so to remind listeners, the Reformation is an event that takes place around about The time of Shakespeare's life, it actually takes a long time, but England is changing from being a Roman Catholic country under Henry VIII to being a Protestant country.
Speaker:Please refer to episodes 2, 7, 11, 9, and 13 if you want more details.
Speaker 2:But the point I want to make about the Reformation In Hamlet, and it's sort of connected to thing, the thing about inwardness and the soliloquies is that, with the turning away from Catholicism, there's also a turning away from sort of material, visible, graspable, ways of thinking about religion, you know, Catholicism is all about relics and rituals like the mass is this demonstration of a miracle happening in real life as the bread and the wine are turned into literally the body and the blood of Christ under the priest's hands. You And Protestantism gets rid of all of that stuff. And it makes questions of faith and belief and who you are. It makes these things very internal matters. It's a turning inward, it's all about self examination, understanding what's going on inside your own mind and your own heart and consulting that. So I think that's really important. I think
Speaker:you're completely right and I think the Reformation is central to this and in fact I did think rather cruelly this morning I was thinking I might steal the march on you and go and say it and bring up the Reformation before you could. And we will be coming back to the Reformation when we get to the ghost of Hamlet. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker:stay tuned.
Speaker 2:But probably many people listening to this episode, we're already about two hours into it, are wondering what actually happens in Hamlet, because I'm guessing that not everyone has recently seen or read Hamlet. So, Tell us what happens.
Speaker:Bizarrely, it's easier to give a synopsis of Hamlet than it is for Midsummer Night's Dream, which we did last week. And I was wondering why that is, because the play is so much longer. And it's because in terms of action, famously, Hamlet spends a lot of time not playing the Not acting. Not acting a lot of time fretting over the same issues again and again. So it's weirdly easier to give a synopsis to. Hamlet Prince of Denmark comes back from university in Wittenberg. Yes, nice. Is that good German? Yeah, beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm gonna say it again.
Speaker:From university in Wittenberg For his father's funeral. And he learns that his mother, the queen, Gertrude, has remarried his father's brother, Claudius, who is now king. Hamlet's father's ghost appears and informs Hamlet that he was murdered and how he was murdered by his brother. And that Hamlet, his son, should take revenge. Claudius, the murderer, suspects that Hamlet knows what's up and plans to exile him to England. England, and there's a lot of jokes by Shakespeare about, you know, what a terrible place England is. there's a guy called Fortinbras who's threatening to invade Denmark from Norway. Whenever anyone's staging Hamlet, they always try and cut Fortinbras. Yeah, I think Fortinbras
Speaker 2:was totally out of the action for about two centuries, actually, from the So the 17th to the 19th century, they just got rid of him.
Speaker:I know, but it's very hard, anyway, because he appears at the end. Meanwhile, Hamlet gets very weird. Rather than taking immediate revenge, he decides to pretend to be mad for no obvious reason. And, he also gets very unpleasant with his girlfriend. Ophelia her father, Polonius tries to sort it all out, but fails, and Polonius is also trying to sort out his own son, who's called Laertes, his future career. So Hamlet,, decided to pretend to be mad, and then from this decides to try and trick Claudius into confessing guilt. It's not enough to Hamlet that he's seen his father's ghost.. He wants non supernatural proof of Claudius guilt. This leads to the famous play within a play called The Mousetrap, in which Hamlet encourages some actors to put on a play that replicates the death of his father, to see how Claudius will react. And it works when it gets to the bit where The Claudius type character in, in the play murders the king. Claudius, stands up and shouts for light and goes running off. This prompts Hamlet to go and have a confrontation with his mother, which all gets a bit, weird, and people talk about Hamlet having, uh, Oedipus Complex, which means he's in love with his mother. He accidentally, in all this, kills Polonius, who's hiding behind a curtain, much like the one
Speaker 2:In our studio. Much like
Speaker:the one behind me, there might be all sorts of bearded men hiding behind the curtain.
Speaker 2:Cod pieces.
Speaker:Hamlet manages to foil Claudius plot to get rid of him, and the whole thing ends back in Denmark with Hamlet and Laertes stabbing each other with poison swords, you know, and Gertrude and Claudius drinking poison by mistake, and then Fortenbras, the invader from Norway, turns up and becomes king. It's very Game of Thrones. Yeah, it is actually very
Speaker 2:Game of Thrones. Yeah. And I wonder if George R. R. Martin was influenced by it actually. I'm sure., Must have been.
Speaker:Okay, so let's get into Shakespeare's life. it's a big period for him, both privately and publicly,
Speaker 2:It is, isn't it? Because there's a lot going on with his life as a sort of theater impresario, as a part owner of the Lord Chamberlain's Man, which is the acting troupe. But then there's all this stuff happening on the home front. Let's take the professional stuff first.
Speaker:Yeah. So the big thing is that Shakespeare's gone from being a playwright and a player to becoming a business owner. Yeah. And, for the previous few years, Shakespeare was part of this group, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and they tended to put most of their plays on in a theatre called, imaginatively, The Theatre. And we talked about this in our Midsummer Night's Dream episode.
Speaker 2:And that was in Shoreditch, I think. It is north of the Thames.
Speaker:It is. Yeah. And in 1598, the theatre, loses its lease. they have to vacate the theatre. And then it's rather exciting. The Lord Chamberlain's men decide they're going to start their own theatre. And on the 28th of December, 1598, in between Christmas and New Year.
Speaker 2:It's very cold.
Speaker:Very cold. Frosty. Yes, probably some snow. Yes. Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain's men gather, and they literally over this night, dismantle the entire theatre, because it's made of, wood.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker:And they carry it over on carts.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker:Over the river, and to Southwark, to the site of the Globe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker:there, over the following months, they build a new theatre called the Globe.
Speaker 2:It's an extraordinary story, because I guess there was some sort of fine print in the lease that, they, could keep the building that was on the land.
Speaker:That's right. The lease was for the land, not the building. Yeah. So they pinched the building. Yeah. Amazing story. Amazing story. But it means that in 1599, Shakespeare owns a tenth of the globe. It's a big business venture. They need to be packing in thousands of people a week. They do.
Speaker 2:Because actually, anyone who's been to the globe now, the rebuilt, rebuilt globe, in, which is also in Southwark, but it's not on the exact same site. apparently the current globe is about half the size of the original globe.
Speaker:So that,
Speaker 2:I mean, so a lot of people had to get in there. A lot of
Speaker:people, and just packing them in night after night in order to make it work as a business. So there is not much time for Shakespeare to draw breath and reflect upon much else in his life. Yeah. Which is a problem because, Sophie, there's a lot going on privately, isn't there?
Speaker 2:Massive amounts. And you're gesturing to me as though to invite me to start talking about it, but you've missed some real highlights of Shakespeare's career.
Speaker:Well, yes. I was skipping over for the sake of catching up on time.
Speaker 2:Well, there's some good stuff here. Like, you know, during this time,, Shakespeare probably would have seen, the original version of Hamlet. There was another play, wasn't there? Called Hamlet, probably written by Thomas Kidd, who, um, is, was kind of a minor, well, at the the time he was quite a major dramatist, actually. He wrote the Spanish Tragedy, which was a huge hit, a really bloody revenge drama. But he wrote a version of Hamlet, which Shakespeare would have seen probably multiple times and might actually have acted in,
Speaker:the thing that stuck with everyone about Kidd's production of Hamlet was the ghost saying, remember me, because that's the only thing we know about it. And so there was obviously something about this ghost appearing.
Speaker 11:Excited people.
Speaker 12:All right.
Speaker 11:Now I'm willing to speak about Shakespeare's personal life. So Shakespeare's living in London at this time. He's married and he actually has three children. Or he had three children. And his wife famously, Anne Hathaway, is living back in Stratford upon Avon. Um, and, Over the years, as Shakespeare's done better and better, she's been able to move into one of the fanciest houses in town.
Speaker 12:Has it got a conservatory?
Speaker 11:Probably. Swimming pool. Yeah. Double lock up garage. Yeah. Yep., and Anne Hathaway is about eight years older than Shakespeare and, uh, she has three kids. Susanna. who's their first child and then these twins who are called Hamnett and Judith. They're actually named after, strangely enough, some neighbors of the Shakespeare's in Stratford. And in spring or summer of 1596, Shakespeare probably got news that Hamnett, his son, who at the time was 11 was unwell and Hamnet died from this and Shakespeare wasn't there, he was absent and Anne Hathaway was alone in Stratford with her extended family and with the children. And it's always been a bit of a blank in the Shakespeare biography, how he responded to the death of his son. It was, it was conventional in the period for writers and poets to write very powerful,, moving poems on the death of children. Ben Johnson wrote a famous one,, but Shakespeare didn't. So there's a blank around the death and then, About four years later Hamlet gets performed. And so there's this idea that somehow Hamlet the play is revisiting and grappling with the loss of his only son, Hamlet.
Speaker 12:Yeah,. The other thing that's going on in his personal life is that around the time that he's writing Hamlet, Queen Elizabeth keeps getting very close to various handsome courtiers who want to marry her so they can become king, right? And she had it a bit with Dudley, who we talked about in the Midsummer Night's Dream. Kenilworth with his,
Speaker 11:the cranked dolphin.
Speaker 12:The cranked dolphin. And she's got it going on with Essex at this time.
Speaker 13:Yes.
Speaker 12:And Essex has been sent over to Ireland to,, crush the Irish people. They haven't been crushed for a couple of years and the English can't make their peace without crushing the Irish every couple of years. It doesn't go very well. And Essex fails in what he's been commanded to do. He comes back, he's out of favor, and he thinks, sod this, I'm just gonna seize power anyway. And so Essex plans a rebellion. Yes. Now, Shakespeare's weirdly caught up in this. Yes. One, because one of Essex's closest supporters is the Earl of Southampton, who was a patron of Shakespeare, a friend, possibly a lover. There's a theory that the homoerotic elements in the sonnets are about Southampton. And as part of, trying to get the public, interested in a rebellion, Essex's co conspirators think, let's put on a play that will show the fallibility of kings and queens, and they ask the Lord Chamberlain men to put on Richard II again.
Speaker 11:That's right, because it's got that deposition scene where the king is removed from the throne.
Speaker 12:Richard II is a weak monarch and is then deposed. Yes. So, so this is very deliberately a political act that the Chamberlain's men and Shakespeare Yes.. put on this play that they haven't done for a couple of years,, purely to show the public that it is possible to get rid of a weak monic. And Queen Elizabeth totally knows what's going on. She's reported as saying, I get it, I am Richard II, know ye not that, to one of her courtiers.
Speaker 11:Yeah, she was no fool, Elizabeth.
Speaker 12:No, and so Shakespeare, I think at this time, is doing a lot of Hamlet y type behaviour. His,
Speaker 13:his
Speaker 12:mind is full of kind of conspiracy, he's implicated in certain things, and he's just trying to muddle his way through without getting in trouble. And as
Speaker 11:we've said before, Shakespeare's always up for getting, sailing very close to the political wind, you know. He's not. He's not stepping away from controversy or difficulty, he's always stepping into it.
Speaker 12:we are now 47 hours into this episode. Let's get to
Speaker 11:the play. The play itself, Jonty, it's a five actor. It's like a five set match. in tennis. It's a really long one between Federer and Nadal. so I think we should put acts one and two together. It's, it's where the ghost is introduced and we find out why the ghost is so central to this play. And it's also where Hamlet rips out several of his soliloquies. There are seven soliloquies across the course of this play, famously. We're not going to talk about all of them.
Speaker 12:We're doing highlights. I mean, Best of. To keep your sporting analogy, we're doing the highlights clip of the Federer. Exactly.
Speaker 11:Okay, so Acts 1 and 2. The whole thing starts with Horatio, who's Hamlet's bestie, standing on the ramparts of a castle and. Why does this play start with pretty minor characters seeing the ghost as opposed to Hamlet seeing the ghost? And I think it's because Shakespeare wants to get across the idea that the ghost is real, that it can be seen by ordinary people.
Speaker 12:Yes. It's not
Speaker 11:just a figment of Hamlet's imagination.
Speaker 12:Yes, I think that's right. And another thing we know about the ghost, we don't know much about Shakespeare's life, but he does seem to have played the ghost. I mean, Shakespeare did other roles. He wasn't a great actor. There were some roles he was a bit eh, but when it came to the ghost, he nailed the ghost. Yeah.
Speaker 11:And so just to remind listeners, the ghost is the ghost of old Hamlet, Hamlet's father, the murdered king. So when the ghost first speaks to Hamlet, he says to him, I am my father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. The Ghost is essentially in a state called Purgatory. this is a Roman Catholic belief that by the time Hamlet was written would have been eradicated by the Reformation. Here we are again. But as several critics, including Stephen Greenblatt have pointed out, one of the things that the ghost is doing is reminding audiences that England used to be, organized by a different system of belief. And this included the idea that between life and death, there was this interstitial state called purgatory, which was kind of like a sort of hell taster flight. your relatives and friends could pray for you. They could basically pay for your term in purgatory to be shortened. Purgatory was this way for the living to intervene in the afterlife of death. And With the Protestant Reformation, purgatory was, um, Abolished or eliminated. So the ghost, again, Shakespeare being quite controversial, is telling the audience that he lives in this basically theologically illegal condition of purgatory and has come back to visit his son.
Speaker 12:And Greenblatt's ex wife, Blenation is also that purgatory was a bit of a racket. There was a lot of corruption around it. Yeah, a lot of dodgy priests asking for money to send prayers up to look after your loved ones. But people also missed it because it was something tangible you could do after their death. You give money, prayers will be made for them. It'll help them on their way to heaven. And people miss that structure. What you do with your grief.. Yes. If you haven't got a material thing like that, a ritual you can do. And so, the ghost of Hamlet's father, there's something soothing about it as well.
Speaker 11:I think the question around the ghost, is how do people in the early modern world, where death was everywhere, I mean, it's everywhere now too, of course, but then, you know, you should expect to lose children, you should expect to lose parents very early and so on. How do we the living keep contact with the dead? How do we keep them alive in our memories? We've, we've mentioned a couple of times now that the ghost, when he sees Hamlet says, remember me, remember me. And it's this question of how do we keep the connection with the people that we've lost? the appearance of the ghost gave this kind of promise that there is this ongoing relationship between the living and the dead.
Speaker 12:I mean, Hamlet embodies the doubts of a nation because even after he's seen the ghost, he can't quite believe it. And that's why he wants some other form of proof. It's why he wants to catch Claudius out. That's right. He also, in his. famous soliloquy, to be or not to be, sort of recognizes that there is no afterlife essentially. Yes. It's oblivion.. And so in that way, I think one of the appeals of Hamlet at the time was that it really was speaking for the, for the people. It was speaking for their spiritual uncertainty.
Speaker 11:Yes, it's true. And then as the play goes on, no one else except Hamlet can see the ghost. So there's a moment where famously, the ghost then appears when,, Hamlet is in his mother's bedroom doing the kind of eatable thing, and the mother can't see the ghost either. This is classic Shakespeare, he giveth and he taketh away. He says to the audience the ghost is definitely real, but then there's constantly this sort of uncertainty or sort of queasy nervousness actually about whether Hamlet is just deluded and insane. And you can actually read the whole of Hamlet, the play, from two points of view and There's Hamlet's POV, which is we know that there's a ghost and everything makes sense because we know the reality of the father's murder. And then there's everybody else's POV, Claudius and Gertrude and so on, which is just that Hamlet is behaving in this unbelievably erratic, crazy way with no explanation. So it's very much a play that's sitting on this, fault line between Protestantism and Catholicism, or to put that in more human terms, it's sitting on a fault line between knowing how to have a relationship with loss and grief and not knowing how to.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Let's talk about Hamlet.. As a character, because he's not very likeable. Not
Speaker 11:at all. Out of the gate he's a mouthy show off,
Speaker 12:And he does terrible things. He's awful to Ophelia. He's awful to Polonius. He's awful to his mother.
Speaker 11:Awful? He's awful to his stepfather.
Speaker 12:He kills Polonius. That's pretty awful. Yep,
Speaker 11:that's not very nice.
Speaker 12:He likes to wind people up. He likes to wind up courtiers because he knows they have to agree with him because he's prince. So he does this really tacky trick where he will say something to a courtier or Osric later on, and they have to agree with him.
Speaker 13:And
Speaker 12:then he contradicts himself deliberately and they have to agree with him
Speaker 13:And
Speaker 12:he keeps doing it to make them look ridiculous. And he does it twice in the play. It's really mean. Yeah. It's, it's really mean.., so, funnily enough, out of all the things he does, that was for me the sign that he's really, he's a really kind of overprivileged, horrible piece of work,. I thought.
Speaker 11:so it's a soliloquy start, right? And, The first soliloquy is the famous, Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew. Or that the everlasting had not fixed his canon against self slaughter. So Hamlet's kind of complaining about the prohibition against suicide, in theology, and then he says, Oh God, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world., it's very Hamlet, sort of whiny and complainy, and sort of, He's, as you said, he's back from Wittenberg. He's at the uni. he's doing his studies. He's, he's doing Philosophy I. and he's reading about discontented young men and he is a discontented young man.
Speaker 12:He likes spitballing, philosophically. He likes just throwing ideas around and not really doing. Yeah, totally. and
Speaker 11:actually, that's a great thing to say about that. about Hamlet because,, a lot of critics have made the point that Hamlet really does just chuck a whole bunch of philosophical ideas into the mix as you do when you're a student, and just sort of experiment with them. But we're not, as an audience, we're not really supposed to make them all add up or make sense.
Speaker 12:And yet the other thing about them is they don't really go anywhere. Suicide is really the first thing he's talking about. And, two hours later, when he finally gets around to be or not to be, he's still talking about suicide.. And that does raised the question, which has been asked by scholars a lot of times, which is, is Hamlet genuinely mad, or at least is he bipolar or manic depressive? Because he clearly has these very obsessive compulsive, ruminating thoughts that just go round and round. He's very
Speaker 11:ruminative. Sort of explained by the fact that his father's just been murdered and his mother has almost immediately remarried his uncle,
Speaker 12:and notably, his behavior is always swinging between languorous, depressive reflections on suicide to manic energy. So, so he certainly embodies that. And just want to talk technically about what Shakespeare's doing. Previously, characters when they soliloquize are generally pushing action forwards. And as we're saying, Hamlet's soliloquies don't necessarily push anything forwards. They're just moments where he steps outside of the action and starts to just talk about life and what it means to be alive. And I, I thought that one of the really effective moments where you see Shakespeare developing this technique is in that first soliloquy. Shakespeare really manages to recreate human thought. Mm. Full of ellipses, incomplete statements, recurring thoughts, and, Hamlet says, and I'm sorry I'm not, John Gielgud or Andrew Scott, but Hamlet says must I remember why she would hang on him. He's talking about his mother Gertrude and the way she doted on his, his father as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. And yet within a month, Let me not think on it. Frailty, thy name is woman. A little month, or ere those shoes were old, with which she followed my poor father's body, like Niobe, all tears. Why, she, even she, oh God! Yes, it's quite meandering, isn't it? So, it's just a brief example, but There's lots of dashes in there. Yeah. And his thoughts are just going all over the place. Yeah,
Speaker 11:he's really, capturing human thought in that way. But then Hamlet will also have these moments in again, in the same speech, which by the way, is a very long speech, where he completely pulls it together and, you know, brings, as you say, this kind of manic aggressive energy. And so he finishes the speech,, chastising the fact that his mother has, within a month, ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears has left the flushing in her galled eyes, she married, oh, most wicked speed to post with such dexterity, to incestuous sheets. That's very organised, that language. I mean, of speech and the metaphors, are very consistent across it,
Speaker 12:and again, it's very effective. It replicates thoughts So we see him circling around trying to gather his thoughts and then he finally pushes out a statement. It's a very powerful technique.
Speaker 11:Yeah. so that's the first of Hamlet's soliloquies. And then the second soliloquy is after he has seen the ghost and had a chat to him. And, it's a bit of an also ran soliloquy in Hamlet. It's not one of the greats. but basically he is ruminating on how he's going to hold with him the ghost's injunction to remember me and what Hamlet as a result is going to do with it. And he says, remember thee, yea from the table of my memory, I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, all sores of books, all forms, all pressures past. That's. One snippet of this speech. He does love to run off at the mouth, does Hamlet. But basically, you know, it's this, it's this motif of grief and remembrance. I think listeners in the audience would hear that as this question, when we have lost people immensely dear to us, how will we remember them? How will we keep space in our minds to remember,
Speaker 12:the other interesting thing about this is he has this moment and you think he's then going to gather himself into action, but he immediately afterwards decides to That he's going to pretend to be mad and do nothing. And how do we make sense of that? and It made sense in the source that, as we said, that in the original story, The Hamlet character is a lot younger, and has to pretend to be mad really just to survive the rest of his childhood.
Speaker 13:Yeah. But Hamlet's
Speaker 12:a grown man in Shakespeare's production.. And why does he decide to pretend to be mad, which then dominates the action And I'm asking you, Sophie, as an academic, who's never been allowed to talk about Hamlet, what do I
Speaker 11:think?
Speaker 12:And, and who has seen these great scholars not have an answer to this question. Sophie, now tell us, why does Hamlet pretend to be mad?
Speaker 11:Okay, jaunty. So I was thinking about this, of course, I think there's a couple of things going on beyond the way in which it helps structure the play This is all happening in quite a short space of time. But it's made long, it's made dilated by the fact of Hamlet's rambling, it's slightly incoherent madness, which is either pretend or not pretend. I think that's in the mix, but I think there's a couple of other things. I talked a little bit about how purgatory as this, interstitial state, has been abolished by the Reformation. And Protestants are supposed to be living in earthly time, which is essentially just a kind of preparation for heavenly time. You're preparing yourself for death and for salvation. You know, There's this, word in Buddhist thought, the bardo, which is about, being caught between not knowing. And I think Hamlet's extreme irresolution is giving us a version of purgatory, or a version of the bardo, a version of time suspended, of, profound uncertainty. transformed into a character on stage. So the cultural institution that could hold not knowing, that could hold the interval between life and death has been removed. Now it's on individuals to do it, I think is one of the things Shakespeare is getting at. with Hamlet's Uncertainty.
Speaker 12:There's a theory that, Shakespeare took inspiration from Julius Caesar, which is the play he had just done at the Globe. There's a famous line where Brutus says, between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. So the idea that between deciding you're going to do something and between it actually happening, the in between moment is, is like a hideous dream. Yeah. And the idea is that Shakespeare was so intrigued by that conceit he decided to make a whole whole play out of it. Yes,
Speaker 11:that's great. So that this sort of moment of uncertainty gets dilated into a whole play, which really resonates for audiences now. I mean, we're so aware at the moment of how unskillful we are in the face of uncertainty, how we sort of fall apart when we don't know what's happening.
Speaker 12:Yeah, and I'm a Libra on top of it. Oh, that's tough. Yeah.
Speaker 11:Oh, it's your birthday this week. It is. Yeah. Happy birthday.
Speaker 12:Thanks. I'm an Aries very decisive
Speaker 16:Shakespeare being a playwright and a theater impresario, he lets Hamlet dither around not knowing, as you say, how to behave or what to do. But fortunately in the end, the actors come to the rescue. Yes. and Hamlet, who's been pretending to be mad while he tries to think of a better idea, has a eureka moment because a traveling troupe of players. Comes to the castle and Hamlet says, I've got an idea. The play's the thing in which to catch the conscience of the king. Yes. He says, look, put on a play that's going to be a bit like how King Claudius. What happened to my dad. To my dad. Yeah. And then we'll catch, we'll catch Claudius out that way and expose him. And then I can be absolutely sure that he killed my father and run us all to the gallows. through him. Yeah. And it's all going to be good. And so this is like that moment in Team America, the film where, actors are the ultimate heroes. You can't do anything without a great actor. So the actors come to the rescue, don't they? Yes,
Speaker 15:they do. But of course, inevitably, all this just gives Hamlet another chance to do another soliloquy. So he's watching the actors practicing this play that he's cooked up called the mousetrap, which is going to catch, the king. Not
Speaker 16:Agatha Christie's. Not Agatha Christie's the mousetrap. No.
Speaker 15:Longest running West End play.
Speaker 16:Agatha Christie had not been born.
Speaker 15:It's Hamlet's mousetrap. It's this kind of pantomime that's supposed to show a kind of usurper killing a king and, and catch Claudius out. so Hamlet's watching the players rehearse this scene, now I am alone. Hamlet's thrilled to be alone. He's just always desperate to grab the talking stick. Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit, that from her working all his visage won? Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, a broken voice, his whole functions suiting with forms to his conceit, and all for nothing. it's a slightly baffling speech. Actually, he's kind of saying, I'm just a total idiot. How can I be so unable to be effective and inhabit my own life when I'm just watching this actor here who, in a fiction, in a dream of passion, just, pretending to be someone else, can make themselves do all these things physiologically, start to cry, seem distracted,, have a broken voice and all of this stuff. And basically Hamlet is doing a rumination here about the juxtaposition between the intensity of the theatre, and yet it's absolute nothingness, and the sort of nothingness of being a human, and yet the intensity of experiencing human life.
Speaker 16:And it's Shakespeare also saying, look, You can have your key workers, your teachers, your fire brigade people, but at the end of the day, what society really needs are actors they're the best.. So there's a bit of that going on as well, I think.
Speaker 15:Yeah. And it's also just hammering home this consistent motif in the play, which is not actually being able to tell the difference between something that is simply assumed,, put on, as Hamlet says in this speech, like suiting. It's like wearing clothes, this is why I keep coming back to this Reformation idea, that Protestantism created this fault line between being able to tell the difference between what people's exterior action meant and what their interior lives were like.
Speaker 16:So, the other thing that goes on while, the players are preparing to do their play is Hamlet finds time to reflect. Again, about whether or not he should kill himself with the famous to be or not to be, and we need to talk about to be do need to
Speaker 15:talk about to be or not to be, so let's cut to the chase. So, to be or not to be is in Act Three, which is the real sort of money act of Hamlet. It all comes together in Act Three. You know, there's a lot, obviously, a lot to say about this speech and yet nothing to say about it at the same time. It's, as you said, an incredibly hard speech to follow. I think it's supposed to be very hard to follow. We're not actually going to ask listeners to understand what it's really about. One of the things to know about the to be or not to be speech is that a load of other people are on stage when Hamlet is speaking it.
Speaker 16:Ophelia's there.
Speaker 15:Ophelia's there. She's just kind of standing around. I
Speaker 16:know. And he's supposed to be her suitor. I mean, how un hot is it?
Speaker 15:Unbelievably. For a woman,
Speaker 16:if the guy, you know, who's been trying to chat you up, yeah, is ignoring you. No, totally. It's like
Speaker 15:Ken on the beach in the Barbie movie, playing
Speaker 16:the
Speaker 15:guitar.
Speaker 16:Yeah. And
Speaker 15:she just has to sit there, you know, sort of lapping it up., and actually, Ophelia, I think has a kind of a nice moment when Hamlet finally stops gassing on in the to be or not to be speech. Ophelia says, quite, I don't know, I'm sure quite deadpan. She says, how are you?
Speaker 16:Which, it's a great comeback. It's so interesting to be or not to be because it doesn't feel when you read it, like it's one of the high points of the play.
Speaker 15:It's just become this massive punctuation mark. It is
Speaker 16:the Mona Lisa of theatre. Of theatre. And, but in itself, it's, underwhelming and I'm just intrigued why it has become so famous. Yeah, that's a good question. And coming back to the Mona Lisa, when you see it, you don't think I'm looking at the most amazing painting ever. It's
Speaker 15:surprisingly small. It's
Speaker 16:surprisingly small and you're thinking I'm looking at an icon rather than having a meaningful exchange with a work of art. And I feel again with To Be or Not To Be, whenever you see the play performed, you're like, Oh yes, this is the moment, and then you completely lose track of what's being said. Yeah,
Speaker 15:it's like the Hallelujah Chorus. It's what you've been waiting for, but then it just goes on absolutely interminably. So, let's read a bit of it. This is my version. I get to do the to be or not to be speech. To be or not to be. I'm not going to speak slowly. To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of trouble and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep, no more. And by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, to the consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep, no more. To sleep perchance to dream, aye, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. I mean one thing to say about the speech is literally every phrase and subphrase has been used and reused, there isn't a word in there that hasn't been used as the title of a television show or a book or a play or,
Speaker 16:which is why it's so hard to follow as well, because every phrase has been
Speaker 15:recycled
Speaker 16:and means a whole bunch of other
Speaker 15:things. So, I mean, one thing that happens in this speech is just that it's unbelievably beautifully written. There's like a lot of very good phrases in it. The thing that always strikes me about the to be or not to be speech when I'm rereading Hamlet. Is that it's completely out of place. So this is in the, the heart of the play. There's a lot of stuff going on. The Denmark's about to be invaded by Fortinbras. Who's this sort of warlordy King from Norway. Claudius, if you've panned back from the murder and you look at it as a big picture political situation, Claudius is a unstable king who presumably is having to shore up a lot of kind of discontent and anxiety in the kingdom itself.
Speaker 16:And on that I was thinking about this when reading it, but Claudius's marriage to Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, politically, it's a necessity. Because it's such a vulnerable state, you know, it's a war like state as it's described. And the last thing that Denmark needs at that moment is a succession dilemma.
Speaker 15:Right.
Speaker 16:And so, for Gertrude to marry Claudius is not only the right thing politically, it's also the right thing for Hamlet. It's ensuring that he's still, in theory, going to succeed to power. Exactly,
Speaker 15:that his succession is assured. So, yeah,
Speaker 16:it's very immature of him
Speaker 15:yeah, no, it's, it's very lame. At this point in the play, there are many, many questions. To be or not to be, it's definitely not the question. I would say it's not even top ten. No, it's
Speaker 16:not. And he's just come up with the plan with the players to catch the conscience of the king that the play within a play is about to happen. His entire mind ought to be on his plan and how he's going to put it off.
Speaker 15:All right. We need to talk about Ophelia.
Speaker 16:We do need to talk about Ophelia. So Ophelia is the young woman at court who Hamlet has been making love to in an old fashioned sense. He hasn't been literally making love. Well, maybe he has. Well, I don't know. I
Speaker 15:think the jury's out on that one. I think the jury's out. Yeah, there might have been some intimacy.,
Speaker 16:and from the moment Hamlet embarks on his I'm going to pretend to be mad strategy, he starts being Unbelievably cruel to her and rejecting her without giving any context and famously has the speech where he says get thee to a nunnery. Exactly. And, and there's a particularly appalling part where as they settle down to watch the play, Hamlet sits with Ophelia and then starts making all these really crass jokes. You know, he says, shall I lie in your lap, Ophelia? Mmm. And she's you know, very proper and a bit confused and says, No. And he says, I mean, lay my head upon your lap. I wasn't making a crass suggestion yeah. And he says, do you think I meant country matters? Yeah. I, you know, do you think I was making a course? Yes,
Speaker 15:exactly. And this would have been in public and in front of the king and the queen. So, poor Ophelia. She's there isn't a teenage girl in the world or a young twenties girl who hasn't been in this predicament of the person that they love. Turning on them, totally inexplicably, and how baffling and confusing it is. And the very cruel turn of the screw that I think Shakespeare includes here, is having all these older men onlooking Ophelia in her most vulnerable moments, like that scene, the get thee to a nunnery scene. Claudius and Polonius are spying on them.
Speaker 16:Yeah, and we'll get to the tragedy of Ophelia in, in a bit, but before that we should, remind listeners that, of course, the play within a play, it's effective. Claudius sees the action replicating what he did to his brother playing out and he freaks out has A panic attack and runs out the room and now Hamlet really knows for sure, but still doesn't manage to kill him. And that also comes to a head and what happens next. I think this is a brilliant moment in the play where Hamlet finds Claudius praying. So Claudius has run out and is having an attack of guilt. Yes. And he's like, Oh,
Speaker 15:my offense is rank. It smells to heaven. Isn't that what he says? That's
Speaker 16:right. And so he kneels down and starts to pray and Hamlet at this moment sees him and and says, I could drive my sword through him now. But can you kill someone when they're praying? How does that work theologically? So Hamlet has this moment of, oh, I was going to kill him, but I can't because he's praying.
Speaker 15:And,
Speaker 16:and the irony is then is that Hamlet then Walks off and Claudius at that point announces that he hasn't been able to pray. Yes. He can't focus. He's he's done too many bad things And he wasn't actually able to pray at all. So Hamlet could have killed him. He missed his
Speaker 15:moment Actually, just a quick a side riff and I know we're trying to avoid side riffs, but about oh, my offense is rank It smells to heaven. You know, I'm thinking about something is rotten in the state of Denmark. I'm thinking about the bits that's about to happen,, in the play where Hamlet has killed Polonius and he drags the body off and then Claudius is asking where's the body, where's the body? And Hamlet says, oh, you'll smell it as you go up the stairs. There's this sustained motif of decay and smell and rankness and rottenness in the play that, you know, on the one hand is obviously just a symbol for, having gone awry. sort of politically and socially in the kingdom. But I also think that it's quite interestingly connected to the ghost and the theme of memory and trying to memorialize or keep hold of something that is in the past. So the ghost is this relic of a system of thought where you can keep in contact with the dead. Through a series of rites and ceremonies around purgatory, things rotting and smelling and being decayed is a much more rational post reformation way of staying in contact with the stuff that has happened in the past, decaying matter that can be smelled. That's how long you have before things get forgotten. So, So I actually think there's something very purposeful in the play about this, the constant returning to this question of smell.
Speaker 16:I love that. And it's like the body of Hamlet's father is rotting, that it hasn't been able to be buried as long as his death hasn't been avenged. Exactly. The smell is getting worse. Worse and worse. Exactly. And I
Speaker 15:think it's actually part of why Hamlet is so bizarrely obsessed with Polonius's dead body, which you would assume he wouldn't care about, but he, grabs it and hoards it and hides it. It's like Polonius's body is the stand in for his father's body, the corpse that he never had.
Speaker 16:It's fascinating that bit. So, so just what happens is,, Hamlet,, doesn't kill Claudius. He goes up to see his mother, Gertrude. He has this very emotional,
Speaker 15:very
Speaker 16:bratty, very bratty. And he says, you know, you've behaved terribly. my father adored you and you've gone and married his brother who killed my father anyway. And she gets,
Speaker 15:The conversation is actually you know, a straight steal from some of the arguments that I've had with my 12 year old son about whether he's allowed to play video games or not. the mother says, Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended. This is in the, after the play debarked and Hamlet says, mother, you have my father much offended. Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue, says the mother. Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue. Why, how now, Hamlet? What's the matter now? Have you forgot me?
Speaker 16:Yes. Although unlike the, rows that you have at home, I can't imagine that you end up giving way in the way that Gertrude does. So, but by the end of the scene, Gertrude saying, I know, I know I've done wrong. This is absolutely true. And I can't see you going on that journey. Yes.
Speaker 15:And also if Baz says to me, Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseimad bed stewed in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty stye. I think he'd have to go to the naughty corner.
Speaker 16:He would. So during this scene, Polonius has hidden behind a curtain. To, so he can report back to. to. Yes. to Claudius on what happens. He makes a noise, Hamlet hears the noise, and thrusts at the curtain with his sword. Rapier, yeah. Rapier. And he says that he thinks it's Claudius behind there, but presumably he knows it's not because he's just seen Claudius trying to pray. Yes, exactly. A
Speaker 15:rat, a rat.
Speaker 16:Elsewhere. Yeah. And so he accidentally kills Polonius, which he doesn't show any meaningful remorse for. No. I mean,
Speaker 15:Polonius is a bit of an ass, it has to be said.
Speaker 16:Well, he is, but he doesn't deserve to be murdered. And also, he is the father of Hamlet's own true love. So it's not a great move to kill.
Speaker 15:Oh no, it's shabby, for sure. The father
Speaker 16:of the person you're supposed to be in love with. Yeah,
Speaker 15:kids, don't try this at home.
Speaker 16:Yeah.
Speaker 15:Alright, so I think we're doing alright, actually. We have made it to Act 4. We have. Which is quite short.
Speaker 16:And so, Claudius realises that Hamlet is after him, and so sends him off to England. Cue, cue lots of jokes about, um, What a terrible place. Yeah. And Cue
Speaker 15:Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well. Yes. Who are two extremely minor characters distinguished by the fact that they seem to be indistinguishable.
Speaker 16:They're the Thompson twins from Tintin, aren't they? Yeah. They're Tweedledum and Tweedledee. So,
Speaker 15:Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come on and, and they're, they're supposed to sort of accompany, Hamlet back to England, and are they supposed to kill him? Is that what the letter says? They're,
Speaker 16:yes. They're supposed to pass a letter to somebody in England that says, kill Hamlet.
Speaker 15:Yes, that's right. But Hamlet does a sort of switcheroo with the letters and
Speaker 16:He does. So
Speaker 15:Rosencrantz and Guildenstern end up getting killed.
Speaker 16:But the main thing that's going on in this act is the demise of poor Ophelia. Because Ophelia has been abandoned by Hamlet, and not only that, but Hamlet's murdered her father. And she breaks. She, she goes mad. Unbelievably shocking. And there are these very affecting scenes of Ophelia wandering around the court and
Speaker 15:Singing.
Speaker 16:And actually, you know, all these supposed villains, like Gertrude and Claudius, behave very sympathetically towards her. They
Speaker 15:do. They're quite nice to her.
Speaker 16:Do you want to sing like Ophelia? Well,
Speaker 15:I don't, and I'm not going to, although I was willing to speak in a, well, maybe I should sing like Ophelia. I think, Helena Bonham Carter plays Ophelia in the Mel Gibson Hamlet, and I sort of remember her doing a nice job with the songs, He is dead and gone. I think it has to sound sort of Whimsical. Yes. He is dead and gone, at his head a grass green turf, at his heels a stone. It's that kind of stuff. Like, it doesn't really make sense.
Speaker 16:No, I think whimsical rather than Taylor Swift was the right way to go with that. Yeah, you liked that? Yeah. But
Speaker 15:it's very affecting. And Ophelia's madness, or whatever you want to call it, a kind of inconsolable, unmanageable grief. takes her apart completely is that it's entirely authentic. Whereas Hamlet's never is, you know, there's always a question mark about Hamlet's state of mind. But Ophelia is a fantastic character because her nervous breakdown, it's completely believable and true.
Speaker 16:It is completely believable. But also, Hamlet, who spent the entire play sort of banging on about whether or not to kill himself and doing that when she's in the room.
Speaker 15:Yeah.
Speaker 16:She actually does do it. Yeah, she does. I mean, there's an ambiguity about exactly what happens. Yeah. But the implication is that she's let herself
Speaker 15:die. And I was thinking about that, Jonty, because I was thinking about how clever it is that Shakespeare has Ophelia on stage when, you know, Hamlet does the to be or not to be speech because he's sort of thinking about suicide and you know what it gets you what it doesn't get you and it's almost like Ophelia has been listening and she's sort of decided.
Speaker 16:Yeah and for him it's a philosophical exercise that he's picked up in Wittenberg and you know you have a philosophical muse about life and whether you should kill yourself and then he moves on and forgets about it and as you say the ideas all stick with her. Yeah. Come home to Ruislip. Really come home
Speaker 15:to Ruislip and actually. Even as Ophelia makes her final, just unbearably piteous adieu to the ladies of the court, she says, good night, ladies. Good night, sweet ladies. Good night. Good night. That's the last that we hear of Ophelia before she drowns herself. Hamlet, meanwhile, is kind of, Continuing to bang on, how all occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge. What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast no more. You know, He's really sort of a one noter at this point. He
Speaker 16:is. And the death of Ophelia, is a very tragic moment and interestingly, the person who recounts it is Queen Gertrude and, and again, in terms of what we are saying about these supposed villainous characters, or not villainous, but deeply flawed, who Hamlet's always berating. Queen Gertrude really emotes with Ophelia's death and she does that famous speech which begins, There is a willow grows a slant at the brook. But when she gets to the actual death where Ophelia falls into this brook, and Gertrude said, Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid like a while they bore her up, Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, And as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature, native and endued unto that element. But long it could not be, till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death. It's a very affecting scene. She falls into the stream and rather than getting out, she lies there just singing nursery rhymes as her clothes drag her down. And lets her clothes
Speaker 15:drink the stream. Again, Shakespeare's interest in water. Yeah, which actually comes up in Act 5. We've made it to Act 5, Jonty.
Speaker 16:We have. Meanwhile, outside the studio, civilization has toppled several centuries have passed. It's a wasteland out there and we are still talking about Hamlet.
Speaker 15:But we're nearly there. It's the gravedigger scene. the Alaspore Yorick scene, where, you know, in a slightly implausible piece of staging, a grave digger and his assistant are digging the grave for Ophelia in the kind of Elsinore churchyard and Hamlet, who's just foiled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and made it back to Denmark, he kind of appears out of nowhere and says, Oh, who are you digging a grave for? And actually, in the sort of preamble, before Hamlet comes on, the gravedigger and his assistant are discussing whether Ophelia can or cannot have a Christian burial because she's suicided. And the gravedigger makes the quite nice argument that, um, it was her clothing that drank the water.
Speaker 16:Yes. Not her. Yeah., I want to talk about the Reformation, Sophie,,because, you know, this play has begun with. The ghost of Hamlet's father, and you've talked about all of the issues arising out of the Reformation that are embodied there, and very neatly, death becomes the focus of Act V, and the gravedigger scene is actually very long, and most of it is just a series of jokes, first with the gravediggers, but then Hamlet and Horatio come on, and a lot of it is just an inquiry into what happens to the human body after death, what mystery is left, and so the famous, alas, Poor Yorick. That occurs when one of the grave diggers who's digging this new grave pulls out a skull.
Speaker 19:And says, this was the skull of an old court jester, Yorick, who died 20 years ago. And Hamlet says, oh, I remember him as a kid. He was a delight. A man of
Speaker 20:infinite jest.
Speaker 19:Yes. Yes. He used to carry me around on his back, etc. And Hamlet's holding the skull. And the question is, once you strip away all of the Catholic rites and all the intercessions and all that, The machinery that was in place, what you just have left in the Protestant system after a very basic funeral service is just bones stripped of skin and flesh in the earth. And I think that Shakespeare is again, asking questions about Protestantism and saying, is this new system giving us enough? Is it giving us enough of, language and poetry and spirituality to make sense of, of life and death?
Speaker 20:Yeah.
Speaker 19:Laertes then also appears at the graveside. Laertes is Ophelia's brother. And everyone turns up because it's the funeral of Ophelia. And it's all very sort of brief. And Laertes says what ceremony else? He's saying, it's not enough. It's not enough. How can we possibly mark the passing of my sister? What else is there? And he says it twice. He then says it again. What ceremony else? And the answer is in Protestantism, you haven't got it. You haven't got enough ceremony. Because the
Speaker 20:funeral service had been enormously stripped away. in Protestant liturgy from the Catholic liturgy, including that in Protestantism, you cannot pray directly to the dead,, or intercede on the dead's behalf, whereas you, you can and could in, in Catholicism. And because of
Speaker 19:that, Laertes then says he's unfulfilled. He hasn't had enough ceremony. So he says, I'm just going to kill Hamlet. I'm going to hold him responsible and kill him. So I think Sophie, what Shakespeare is saying is Hamlet has to die because of the Reformation.
Speaker 20:That's great. That's fantastic. Yeah. Hamlet is the corpse of the Reformation.
Speaker 19:Yeah.
Speaker 20:I'm assuming that most of the people in, who are listening to this episode will have been to the funeral of someone they deeply love. There is that, everyone has that Laertes moment as you look at the coffin of, how can it have come to this? How can, how can there be nothing left?
Speaker 19:Okay. Hamlet needs to die.
Speaker 20:Yeah, he does. Fortunately, though he is long winded at all other moments of his life in this play, he's quite blissfully brief when he dies. So actually how he dies is that he and Laertes kind of get into it and they stab one another with poison swords. So Hamlet,, says, I'm dying. And he says, But I do prophesy the election lights on Fortinbras. He spares a moment to nominate his successor, which is actually quite a princely thing to do. It's probably the only politically responsible thing that he has done in the play.
Speaker 19:Fortinbras is like the wolf in Pulp Fiction. He's the fixer guy who turns up and everyone's lying dead and he's like, okay, let's get this sorted out. Let's get this cleaned up. Get the hoses out. For
Speaker 20:Um, Anyway, so he,, he nominates his successor. He has my dying voice, says Hamlet., which is, which is not good. Does this mean that we can expect a sort of, unremediated succession of soliloquy from tho and brass once he becomes king? So Hamlet's now banging out a series of political instructions, and then he says, the rest is silence. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Speaker 19:Oh, I forgot about the oh, oh, oh, oh.
Speaker 20:Yeah. So the rest, it turns out, is not silence, in fact. Especially when you're dealing with Hamlet. And Horatio says, now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet Prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Speaker 19:And that's it. That's it. the rest is not quite silence.,because we haven't yet asked if it's underrated or overrated, best bits, worst bits.
Speaker 20:So if you've been enjoying this episode and having a good time, we do have something that we want to ask the listeners and I'm happy to say that it is not smash that like button, as my children say after they've been watching 11 hours of YouTube nonstop. What we would like you to do is send a link to one of our episodes to a friend who you think might enjoy it. Spread the word, please, about The Secret Life of Books if you're enjoying it. John T. Worst bit, best bit.
Speaker 19:Of Hamlet. So I think the best bits are, I love the ghost, I love the Ophelia things, the soliloquies I do find a bit of a struggle.
Speaker 20:They're a bit tiresome aren't they? I
Speaker 19:don't want to say they're the worst bit because that just sounds Ford and
Speaker 20:Brass is the worst bit, let's face it. Oh yeah, Ford and Brass
Speaker 19:is the worst bit. Okay, definitely, Ford and Brass is the worst bit. Yeah, what about you? Ford and Brass.
Speaker 20:Yeah, so Fortinbras is the worst bit, but some of the lesser soliloquies massive like, skip intro. Yeah, skip soliloquy. best bit. Yeah, the ghost's incredible. Ophelia is unbelievably moving and, and probably just the language that's a bit of a cop out answer, but, in the soliloquies and all the way through it, just the range and the dexterity of the language. It's just amazing.
Speaker 19:Underrated or overrated?
Speaker 20:It's a tough one, actually.
Speaker 19:Yeah.
Speaker 20:It's a tough one because it's so rated.
Speaker 19:But it's so brilliant.
Speaker 20:It's so brilliant. So I'm going to go underrated.
Speaker 19:Well, in the sense that we believe all the classics are underrated. Yes. ultimately. Yes. So I, yes, it's underrated. And also
Speaker 20:in the sense of when you actually read it, as opposed to, you know, hear us talk about it. It's just amazing. I mean, the, the intricacy of it and the artistry of it. It's incredible.
Speaker 19:Okay. So we are now going to wrap up. We're going to break the seal on the studio door. Apparently after long haul flights, when the airport staff opened the door, the smell that comes out of the studio door. you know, several hundred human beings and bad food. Apparently it's so disgusting and you have to be trained not to show expressions of deep repulsion when the passengers then get off. And I think as we crack the door on the studio and the people standing outside are going to be horrified by it. Yes,
Speaker 20:yes. Nice, nice analogy. You've been listening to the secret life of books.
