HAMLET

In this course, we will spend a semester reading, thinking about, seeing, and writing about one play, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We will begin by reading Hamlet slowly, using various critical perspectives to attend to some of the historical and contemporary problematics of the play. In addition to glancing at sources (Saxo Grammaticus’ narrative of Amleth’s revenge in Historia Danica) and contemporaries (Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy), we’ll consider the relationship between the two media of Hamlet’s production, the book and the stage, taking the opportunity to consider what the three texts of Hamlets—the 1603 quarto, the 1604 quarto, and the folio version—have to say to us about our preconceptions of theatre and print. Then we will turn to two problems. The first is Hamlet as a conceptual challenge, focusing on Hamlet in modernism, notably as framed by Mallarmé, Eliot, Freud, and Joyce; as part of this consideration  we’ll take up some modern dramatic encounters with Hamlet, notably Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dea (1966), Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977) and Magda Romanska’s Opheliamachine (2013), Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). We will conclude the semester by thinking about mediated performance, beginning with Laurence Olivier’s controversial (and award-winning) 1948 film, and tracing through Michael Almereyda’s 2000 media allegory,  concluding with two productions that move Hamlet into the sphere of digital performance, The Wooster Group Hamlet (2007) and Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (2013).