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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:34:58

Hamlet Revealed: The Truth Behind Shakespeare's Greatest Play

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	Hi everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	I'm back with a good friend, Dr. Duke Pesta.
	He is, I would say, the, but we have to say technically a, tenured university professor.
	He's an author and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, which is a live online school offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
	You can check out his website, Freedom Project Academy website at fpeusa.org.
	We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
	Dr. Pesta, welcome to our cadaverous dissection of the greatest collection of words in, I dare say, any language.
	But let's just narrow it down to the English language as we talk about the show which threatens to put you to sleep but will keep you up all night, Hamlet.
	Amen.
	And you know, somebody once pointed out to me that there has been more written about the play Hamlet on any other topic in Western culture except for the Bible.
	Think about that for a second.
	That's pretty cool.
	Now, it's an exciting and gripping and powerful tale, and it digs deep.
	Now, it's one of these few books I vividly, or few, I guess, stories that I vividly remember reading for the first time.
	The Fountainhead.
	Crime and Punishment was a big one for me.
	I read that 36 hours straight without any sleep.
	And I remember I was going to theater school, and I hadn't read Hamlet at this point.
	I'd read a bunch of other Shakespeare.
	And one of the guys in my acting class did the soliloquy where Hamlet is considering killing the husband of his mother, not his father.
	There's a whole twist in that.
	And I was just like, oh, oh, the arrows of language going straight through my soul.
	And I just got a copy and stayed up all night and just devoured it.
	And it's you want to race ahead because the story is so great, but you want to linger on the language, which is beyond I mean, if there's an argument for God, it's that mortal man cannot create such great language in his own mere mind.
	So I wonder, for those who haven't read The play I'm not really even going to describe it.
	I sort of wanted to get a content of the theme So we're going to assume knowledge of the play and you can you know, there's a bunch of video adaptations, which are not bad You know, it was not designed to be read.
	It was designed to be seen and there are lots of great adaptations I've seen I didn't even know how many versions on stage and on screen but We're going to sort of assume that people have some sort of idea what the play is about.
	So what comes to your mind when you think of the play and what do you think the big themes are that we can worthwhilely extract from it?
	I think you're right.
	I think that I had the same reaction as you came at it from the acting.
	I came at it from the professorial world.
	But Hamlet I fell in love with.
	Hamlet made me... I dedicated my life to becoming a Shakespeare professor.
	Even though, you know, like you, you have other avocations.
	You never forget that moment.
	And it was Hamlet that did it for me.
	In fact, one of the reasons I left acting is because I knew I was not tall enough and pretty enough to ever play Hamlet on stage.
	I would always be Horatio, and I said, if I can't play Hamlet, ain't gonna do it.
	So, I think in terms of thematically, the one thing that I default to, and everything spins off of this, it is savagely existential, this play.
	I mean, the whole play is on a razor's edge between life and death, and what to stay alive for or why to kill yourself.
	Every speech, every scene, From the epistemological encounters between Hamlet and the ghost of his father, to the highly, highly tense encounters between him and his biological mother, to the way he interrelates to his usurping, adulterous uncle, who has murdered his father and married his mother.
	I mean, it's absolutely staggering how Hamlet spirals through the course of the first four acts of the play.
	His language becomes ever more steeped in death.
	And how absolutely crystal clear the imagery is.
	Some of the language in that play, it's still shocking to me.
	When Hamlet's confronting Polonius, confronting Claudius, the king, about killing Polonius, where he's going through that litany of things he did with the dead body, right?
	A man may eat of the worm that fed of a king, right?
	How this weird notion that a beggar could be starving to death.
	And so he digs a worm out of the ground, Puts the worm on the hook to catch a fish.
	And so what happens, Hamlet says, where is the body of the king?
	The worm that was pulled from the ground was just eating the corpse of a king.
	Now it's in the belly of the fish, which gets into the belly of the beggar.
	And then when the beggar literally shits, he shits the king out, right?
	And he's talking to the king when he's saying that.
	That's how much I think of you, is what he says to the king.
	But just the graphic visceral nature.
	By the time you get from act one to act four in that graveyard scene, where everything explodes, The language just spirals out of control in some of the most amazing ways I've ever seen.
	It is a disassembling of mortality, I think, in the language, because we are all one heartbeat away from the great beyond.
	And it's something which we kind of have to ignore whenever we're going about our daily business, but there are times when it is essential.
	That it returned to us and the scene, you know, everybody knows the cliches about Hamlet before they see Hamlet, which I think is a terrible shame.
	I wish the culture kept you blindfolded from all things Hamlet-related and then just unleashed the play on you like a hail of language blizzards straight into your eyeballs.
	Because, you know, alas, poor Yorick!
	Everybody knows these sort of cliches.
	about Hamlet is that old Isaac Asimov story where some woman came up and said, I don't know, it was just a collection of sayings.
	It wasn't really a play and that's because that's how much we've been able to extract.
	But when he's talking about with the gravedigger and the gravedigger shows him the skull of the court jester who was Hamlet's constant and boon companion when Hamlet was a young man and he stares into The skull, which contained all of these jokes, all of these songs, all of this laughter, all of this merriment, all of this joy that the comedians spread throughout the court.
	Where has it gone?
	This is the foundational question.
	Now, of course, in To Be or Not To Be, he answers it to a large degree in that he believes it goes to hell if it's bad, and goes to heaven if it's good, and that we'll want to get back to in a sec.
	But when he talks about how Alexander, the great, Turns to dust, turns to earth, and that earth may be scooped out of the ground and used to stop a hole in the wall where the wind comes through.
	And that is... We return to base utility.
	We feed plants.
	We can be used to stop up a hole in a wall at the end of it all.
	And trying to find the purpose and the beauty and the joy when we are, you know, one snip of mortality away from falling into the great beyond is something that reaches so deep into people.
	I think this is why it's considered so powerful and why it reaches from the high to the low.
	Shakespeare has this kind of hoity-toity, you know, like, you know, your finger has to be up when you sip the tea of Shakespeare.
	But, I mean, the man was a brute.
	He was a pirate.
	I had a professor in university who he would call Billy the S and he loved the pirate picture.
	You know, there's always that one of the stamp where he looks very prissy.
	But, I mean, the guy was an animal.
	I think what you hit on was big.
	What we call the Ubisoft theme.
	The where have they gone theme.
	base and the working people, the average person, loved to come and see Shakespeare.
	He spoke all the compass of human experience and I think that's one of the reasons why you can't help but become a richer and deeper, more alive in the presence of death person after consuming this language.
	I think what you hit on was big, what we call the Ubi-Sump theme, the Where Have They Gone theme, the Vanitas theme, the Memento Mori theme from the Middle Ages, Life is Fleeting.
	Hamlet reminds me of a medieval play about the plague, right?
	I mean, you think about how the plague decimated medieval Europe 250 years before Shakespeare wrote, 300 years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.
	And you think about all that death and how medieval people, they started, how do you deal with it when you can't stop it?
	When 25, 50, 40% of Europeans are dead, your neighbors, your friends, within a six month period.
	Well, one thing you do, is you make death ubiquitous.
	You put skulls on, you give your lady love a ring with a skull on it.
	You draw pictures in the church of skeletons getting out of their graves.
	If you can't whistle past the graveyard, you look death in the face.
	And Hamlet is a shockingly memento mori play.
	It's a Ubisoft where have they gone play.
	That image that you mentioned.
	Now there's Hamlet in the graveyard.
	And what I love about that scene in the graveyard is Hamlet doesn't know that the woman he loves is dead.
	He has just come back from a trip to England, and he's making his way, he's got to get... And he just, sorry, but he killed both his friends.
	Right!
	He was sent to England to be killed by his uncle, and he just came back from killing his two friends, which is one of the reasons why he's looking to Skull, because he just created two more.
	That's right, and these are fake friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, right, who are taking him to England to be executed.
	So what I love about that scene is that in order for Hamlet to get to the castle, To finally get his revenge on the king, he's got to walk through the graveyard.
	So that thing that he has been talking about all for the first four acts, this abstract reflections on death, he actually meets the real thing, what happens to bodies when they're dead in the graveyard.
	And so as the grave digger fishes out the skull of Yorick, after Hamlet had just got saying, got done saying something to the effect of, we don't even in our graves, we no longer stay.
	That in order to make room for the body of Ophelia, his love, he doesn't know this, the gravedigger digs up an old grave, right?
	Because there's no room.
	In Shakespeare's day, you couldn't waste a lot of space on real estate, on cemeteries, because you had to grow crops.
	So literally, Yorick is being dug out of his grave, the place that he was supposed to rest till eternity, to be replaced by the woman he now loves.
	And so you have this shocking metaphysical moment where the corpse of Ophelia is about to be wheeled into the graveyard, and he's going to see she's dead for the first time.
	Meanwhile, the grave that's being excavated for his lady love contained the body of the court jester, like you said.
	Imagine being an only child in Elsinore Castle with all these adults and all these diplomats and important people.
	The only person little boy Hamlet had to be a friend with probably was that court jester.
	And so all of a sudden, the grave digger hands him the skull of Yorick, and you get the line, right?
	The line, like you said, is a cliche.
	Last poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio.
	He was a fellow of infinite jest, of excellent fancy.
	I mean, he has boarded me on his back a thousand times when I was a little boy!
	He'd give me these piggyback rides.
	And then, you're staring at that lipless, that bone where the gum used to be, right?
	And he says, here, here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how often.
	Right?
	And then he asks those rhetorical questions at you.
	Is this what death is?
	Could one so dear and warm and articulate and funny Is this silence of the grave?
	Is this all there is?
	It's one of those really, really deep metaphysical moments between, like I said, between nothingness and everything.
	And how do we interpret it?
	Well, this is the power, for me, of that moment, is Hamlet is looking into the skull, into the emptiness, and saying, where are your jokes now?
	But the reality is, they're in Hamlet's mind.
	Right.
	They have exited Yorick on death, but they remain in the mind of Hamlet.
	And we're all on this race, you know, to, to, to, I think, I hope at least, to leave a positive impact on the world.
	We're like on these, um, stepping stones and each stepping stone just falls into the water and we're racing ahead.
	And eventually we run out of stepping stones and fall into the water and into history.
	But what we leave behind, the ripples we leave behind as we race, are the impact and impressions we leave in other people's minds.
	That's the only immortality, at least for the people who don't believe in life after death, the only immortality.
	So he says, where are your jibes now?
	Where is your personality?
	Where is your history?
	But he's describing what he did.
	He kissed his lips.
	He hung on his back.
	He died, but his personality has passed into Hamlet.
	And then, through Hamlet speaking, it almost passes into the world.
	So now Yorick has immortality because he was described as dying.
	And the fascinating thing to me is that Shakespeare, in writing this play, surmounted death in a way that most of us can never even conceive of, because now the mind of Shakespeare is going to be central to human culture until there's no such thing as human culture anymore.
	So he has, in writing down his inmost thoughts, surmounted death while describing The fact that death seems to be so final and irrevocable and that you end when you end, but Shakespeare didn't because of what he did.
	And I think that's a great way to phrase it.
	Another thing I love about the play in this graveyard scene is notice how Hamlet can't get revenge.
	His own father, the immortal soul of his father, the ghost of his father, visits him on those battlements, visits him a couple times and says, hey, hey, you've got to avenge your father's death.
	I mean, the dad comes from For lack of a better word, purgatory, right?
	It's this place that the ghost of Hamlet's father is stuck between heaven and hell.
	And so he shows that, and I always ask yourself the question, if the ghost of, and Hamlet is absolutely convinced it is really the ghost of his father, comes and visits him from some place between heaven and hell, right?
	It begs the question, why is Hamlet so unwilling, has such difficulty conceding that there is something after death?
	For the first four acts of the play and into that graveyard, Hamlet is more and more paralyzed by death.
	The more he reflects on it, the more the images become more graphic, the more visceral, to use a very bad pun, his discussion of body parts becomes.
	The less able he is to move, to do anything, it freezes him.
	Something happens to him, I speculate, in the graveyard.
	Something happens to him when he has no longer a philosophical understanding of death, a memento mori philosophical understanding.
	He has an empirical understanding as he starts handling the bones, the skull of Yorick.
	He encounters the corpse of Ophelia a few minutes later when they wheel her into the graveyard.
	It's one of the most harrowing moments, one of the most heartbreaking moments in literature, where Hamlet's having this discussion about his long-dead friend now brought up from death.
	And all of a sudden, they wheel the body in.
	And Hamlet and Horatio, they duck behind a tombstone.
	Presumably, there's nothing else in a graveyard.
	They duck behind the tombstone.
	What a metaphor.
	What an analogy.
	For the first time in the play, Hamlet now is completely obscured by death behind that tombstone, and they wheel Ophelia in.
	And his heart is broken.
	And eventually what Hamlet's going to do is he's going to jump into the grave and take the corpse of Ophelia in his hands.
	In order to recognize that there must have been more to this person than just dead things.
	And to me, and you look at Hamlet's language from that point forward to the end of the play, in short order now, all his metaphysical doubts have been resolved.
	He is able to go and immediately get revenge.
	He starts talking like there's special providence in the fall of a sparrow, right?
	His entire outlook is not paradoxical.
	The readiness is all.
	Love that line.
	I'd love to get that on a t-shirt.
	The readiness is all.
	But it jars him, doesn't it?
	He didn't talk like that in the first four acts.
	So it took, this is where I argue, the quasi-scientific in Shakespeare's day and the metaphysical and religious, they intersect.
	Because you've said three times already today, your metaphors for this play, Stephan, I don't even know if you recognize them, were anatomical, right?
	Cadaverous, right?
	Dissection, you used the word.
	And I think that's right.
	I mean, in many ways, in the 16th century in Shakespeare's day, for the first time in a long time, human bodies were being publicly dissected.
	Shakespeare lived one block away from Barbara Surgeon's Hall, where bodies were being ripped apart by anatomists in public spectacles.
	Before there was a dramatic theater in Elizabethan England, there was a dissection theater.
	And you look at the beautiful way that Renaissance drama, particularly the revenge drama, is loaded with corpses and graveyard scenes and body parts and bodies being torn to pieces.
	I really do think the burgeoning scientific method of tearing bodies apart to find out what they mean So let's talk a little bit about some of the madness or mental illness aspect of the play because I always feel frustrated when I hear about this because people seem to kind of skip over.
	So Hamlet to me, if I sort of encapsulate him in my mind, he's a Renaissance character in a medieval world.
	And this, of course, is what was going on in England at the time.
	The modern world was being birthed out of the dying medieval world.
	And to me, Hamlet is a modern person in a medieval world.
	Now, the fact that he thinks that his father's ghost is telling him to kill his uncle.
	Now, people say, well, he's full of doubt and he's full of hesitation and he wants proof.
	Good!
	Good!
	See, we don't want place where people hearing voices telling them to kill people just go and do it and that's a good thing.
	You know, now we recognize in the postmodern world that if you hear voices in your head or you see visions of people, go kill your uncle, you know, don't do it.
	You need help.
	This is not sane, right?
	And the fact that other people claim to have seen it, well, they do have the out.
	Hamlet has the out.
	He doesn't know if it's really his father or if the devil is sending a ghost that looks like his father and speaks like his father in order to tempt Hamlet into murder and thus lose his soul as a mortal sin forever.
	So the fact that he's hearing voices and wishes for empirical verification, which he basically goes through in the play, right, when he puts on the play within the play with the players about the murder of his father.
	So there's no legal system to contain the violence of his uncle, the murder of his uncle.
	I mean, we see this with Hillary Clinton, you know, some of the crimes that she's reported to have committed.
	There's no legal recourse, so what do you do?
	So, in the medieval world, there was not a legal system the way that we would understand it.
	There was, of course, in the ancient Roman world, the ancient Greek world, but not in the medieval world.
	They had these, you know, trials by fire, reach into the boiling water, pull out the iron rod, and if your wound healed, you were elected.
	They didn't have evidence, they didn't have cross-examinations, you couldn't confront your accuser necessarily, there weren't lawyers, there weren't laws.
	So, he wants proof, he wants empirical validation before he takes vengeance.
	That is a very modern idea.
	It was not quite as common in the Dark Ages and still isn't very common in many places in the world, which is just tribal vengeance cultures.
	So, to me, the great challenge and what I see as the birth of the modern in Hamlet is the question of comparing one's impulses and one's beliefs.
	To what's actually happening in the world.
	To not take one's impulses and beliefs as primary, as automatically true.
	To try and tear apart the superstition of emotion and compare it to what can be empirically validated in the world.
	And the fact that he has to be, you know, judge, jury, and executioner in a non-functioning, medieval, no legal system environment.
	I like the fact that he's tortured.
	I like the fact that he has doubt.
	I like the fact that he wants proof.
	That's why we have a modern world!
	I agree 100%.
	Although the one thing that I would add to that, that I think you can't get around either, is he does get proof well before he exacts his revenge.
	He becomes increasingly absolutely convinced.
	The scene with the play within the play, right, the mouse trap, where he confirms Claudius' guilt, right?
	He basically stages the murder of his father exactly the way Claudius did it.
	Claudius, despite being a cool cucumber himself, He breaks down, he starts screaming for light, he runs out of the room.
	Hamlet is dancing around the room because he's proved it.
	And within ten minutes or so, he happens to be walking past the bedroom of Claudius, finds Claudius alone on his knees trying to pray for his damned soul.
	He pulls his sword, and he stops himself.
	So, there's something here that I would add to what you said, and I suggested it in my earlier comment, but the proof itself is not enough.
	That when he is finally convinced that empirically that he's right, there's still something missing.
	And I think that something is what he finds in the graveyard.
	But I agree with you.
	I think the whole tension of the play, Hamlet struggling between and what a problem.
	He's the prince, right?
	He was going to be the next king of Denmark.
	Now he's been supplanted by Claudius.
	He has no support group, right?
	His very girlfriend Abandons him in the course of the play.
	His mother's become a whore in his mind.
	His uncle's turned out to be a murderer.
	He's got Tim and Horatio, and that's it.
	And so this business about the ghost, is it, and you said yourself, whatever else the ghost is, we can talk about whether it's real or not.
	It's absolutely clear that other people in the place see it, right?
	Marcella sees it, Horatio sees it.
	And let's not forget too, for your audience, Horatio, what a remarkable figure Pamela's best friend is.
	He's a scientist.
	He is a 16th century natural philosopher, a philosopher of nature, which is what they used to call scientists.
	And you have a tremendous pitting against each other, empirical knowledge and what Hamlet sees.
	I love that line from Horatio when he first sees the ghost.
	And what Hamlet says to him, well, when Horatio first sees the ghost, he doesn't believe it's going to happen.
	He's a rationalist and empiricist.
	The ghost shows up.
	To which Horatio says, had I not seen this with the true avouch of mine own eyes, I never should have believed it.
	I wouldn't have believed this, Horatio says, possible if I hadn't seen it.
	Hamlet's response?
	There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
	In other words, he's calling science a kind of dream.
	Everything becomes a dream for him.
	In other words, empiricism works for empirical things.
	How do you scientifically classify something like this that clearly seems to supersede the empirical?
	Move beyond it, or can't be categorized by anything we now know or understand about how the universe works.
	I find it absolutely fascinating.
	I myself have had conversations with people in my life where I attempt to stimulate their conscience to have them act better, and other people have had those conversations with me as well.
	That to me is one of the most essential aspects of living a good life, is the stimulation of virtue in others.
	I have a conversation With millions of people around the world every day just about trying to create conscience, to create unease.
	I want to get back to the incest elements, which to me is just ridiculous and Freudian and I never really bought that.
	Oh, he's going to kiss his mother on the lips and it's all incestuous.
	I think that is a way of trying to explain Hamlet while avoiding the religious connotations, which I will get to in a second.
	But he creates a conscience.
	This sort of bawdy, lusty, past-middle-age prime woman is obviously, and this is repeatedly referred to in the play, enjoying a very grunty, sensual, physical relationship with Claudius, the murderer of her husband.
	And the fact that a woman cleaves to the most powerful murderer in the room, to the most dominant male who's willing to act in a brutal manner, well, that's not something that, as far as I've talked about with modern thinkers, necessarily ended with Hamlet.
	That's something we can come back to as well.
	But what I find fascinating in that conversation is she knows what is coming.
	Don't speak.
	Don't speak.
	Do not activate my conscience.
	This is the great cry of the amoral to the moralist.
	Do not.
	You have a button.
	If you touch that button, my conscience rises up like some horrendous zombie phoenix to peck at the comfort of my heart and rend it limb from limb.
	She says, my heart is broken.
	My heart is cleft and twain.
	And of course, this is maybe a little sexist, but she goes to the feels, right?
	Not the morality.
	You're making me sad, Hamlet.
	But he creates in his uncle a conscience because he shows the murderer to his uncle and his uncle is tortured and goes to pray and can't because it's a mortal sin, he can't undo it.
	He creates a conscience and moral horror in his mother.
	And thus, to me, that's why he's killed.
	This is the story of Socrates.
	Socrates creates a moral conscience in those around him, and rather than become better people, they wish to kill, or now they just do it with slander mostly, but they destroy the people who provoke a moral conscience in people.
	And that, to me, is incredible, because the reason why his mother and his uncle die at the end is because the moral conscience that he stimulates in them is passing.
	Because it's not referred to again.
	When you see Claudius during the fight scene with Laertes and Hamlet, Claudius is back to being his pompous, empty self after this crisis of conscience that he has when praying in front of the altar.
	His mother has returned to her empty-headed, vacuous, fleshy self.
	This conscience that is aroused and tortures people, which Hamlet creates through language.
	He implants a conscience through language.
	It's an incredible feat.
	And then it vanishes.
	And that, to me, provokes the death.
	If people don't listen to their conscience, things generally escalate to violence.
	I think it's a great observation.
	And, you know, you mentioned the Freudians and why they misread that scene.
	The scene you mentioned is when Hamlet finally confronts his own mother about her incest, the fact that she didn't wait almost a day to hop into bed with the new king.
	And it happens in their bedroom, mom's bedroom, right?
	So Hamlet throws mother on the bed.
	Hamlet's got a picture of his father around his neck.
	She's got a picture of Claudius, the new husband, around hers.
	And I love what he does.
	It's kind of a catechism, right?
	For the Freudians, it's always sex.
	For the postmodern world, the idea that you can Purge a conscience or purify a soul.
	It's kind of alien to our epistemological understanding.
	But what Hamlet does is exactly that.
	It's kind of a reverse catechism.
	He shows her the two pictures.
	See here the counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
	Here is my father.
	And here's the pig you married.
	And he finally gets inside her.
	And that's, I think, where the Freudianism comes in.
	He doesn't get inside of her sexually.
	He gets inside of her conscientiously, like you said.
	And when he finally gets her to open her eyes and look inside herself, she sees Oh, Hamlet, thou hast turned my eyes unto my very soul, and there I see such black and grained spots as wilt not leave their taint.
	She sees it, right?
	And he starts to weep, right?
	He's gotten her to open herself.
	This is why I don't default to Lacanianism or Freudianism.
	Go back to this dissective business.
	Prior to modern medical science beginning to dissect bodies in the 16th century, the Middle Ages actually believed That beautiful people were good people, and ugly or deformed people were wicked.
	That's all they had, the superficial, right?
	So if you're a dwarf or a hunchback, if you're in some way misshapen or ugly, that reflected an ugly soul.
	That was what they believed.
	And one of the great empirical and epistemological revolutions of the 16th century is because they were digging into bodies, and all the interiors of bodies looked the same, right?
	There were no distinctions between—you couldn't find a black heart from a virtuous one.
	Hamlet is, remember his famous line, talking about his uncle, that one may smile and smile, be a villain.
	I always think of politicians when that line comes up myself, but anyway.
	And it's such a revelation to Hamlet, that son of a gun, just because you look and sound good, doesn't mean you are.
	And so that moment of triumph, when he gets her to look, instead of looking out at the world, she uses her senses to do a moral inventory of herself.
	He turns those eyes inside her very self.
	And so, all of that, I think, anatomical, dissective, empirical knowledge that was being generated really did help, like you said, begin to push the world into the modern age.
	Hamlet's the first modern man in some ways, not only because of those issues that we've brought up, but because of how much of the play takes place in his head.
	There is, up until this point, you have to go all the way back.
	to Augustine's Confessions, St.
	Augustine's Confessions in the fourth century, to get anything like the kind of interior monologue that that play presents you from beginning to end.
	Just read Hamlet compared to Beowulf and look at the introspection of the two characters.
	Beowulf, virtually none.
	It's sunny, I want to kill a monster!
	Anyway, so, and what I find fascinating as well, and this is obviously William Shakespeare was one of the greatest geniuses of the ages and created a character to mirror his own genius and One of the great challenges of intelligence is you see further over the horizon to consequences.
	And Claudius, as the medieval man, wants Gertrude, wants the king's wife, so he kills the king and has no problem with it.
	He doesn't have any hesitation in particular.
	We don't know why he waited so long, it doesn't really matter, but he kills the king and takes the wife and seems to be relishing and enjoying all of it.
	Now those of us who have perhaps very sensitive consciences and high intelligence Look at the amount of injustice that is seized in the world by people who seem to have a great time of it, who love it, who stay on with it.
	You know, Idi Amin keeping human body parts in his fridge and eating them and relishing being the head of Uganda, I think it was.
	And just the people who do wrong and relish it and enjoy it and seem to have a great time with it, you know, can't stay out of the public eye no matter how much money and fame that they get.
	There is this concern, this worry, and I think this fear that is so modern and so important.
	One of my favorite set of lines is when he's trying to figure out whether he should kill his uncle.
	This is at the tail end of To Be or Not To Be.
	He says, Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.
	And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with disregard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.
	It's horrifying to think that that which makes us the greatest And the most sensitive and the most moral has us lose before the mere simian brutes of Nietzschean willpower.
	And I think of Europe in this case, you know, we've got to take in these migrants, these refugees, we have to help them because we've got such a great conscience, but is it going to be At great cost to this conscience, this idea that we are good people.
	Does it make us easy marks for the brutal among us?
	And does it mark us as a doomed individual or civilization to be so sensitive and to be so forward viewing, if that makes sense?
	That's a great question.
	And we must not forget that that end of that speech is in the broader context of, is it conscientiously better to live or die?
	Right?
	That in that speech, which what Hamlet is really doing is trying to reckon If the world, to be or not to be, that is the question, right?
	Do I live or do I die?
	If the world is meaningless, Hamlet is arguing, right?
	If there is no justice, right?
	Think about the pains that he chronicles there, the pains of despised love, the insolence of office, the laws delay, the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.
	Why would a man who could end it all with a simple knife across the throat?
	If you could end all the misery of life, if dying was just going to sleep, then conscientiously, who would stay alive and suffer?
	If death is the end of everything, it's like sleep, right?
	To sleep, to dream.
	To sleep, there's the rub, right?
	Perchance to dream.
	This is the problem.
	Killing yourself might not just be an end of suffering.
	It might open the door to another world where you might suffer more, right?
	Heaven, hell.
	And so for Hamlet, That's the existential pull.
	I think he's got a point.
	And I think you had mentioned the ghost.
	We talked about the religious aspects.
	Maybe this is the time for me to ask you this question, because I'm pretty sure we probably don't come at it from the same way.
	In that speech, that's the crux.
	That's the one thing that you say to be or not to be, everybody, even more than the skull of Yorick, right?
	That's the one cliche bumper sticker moment, to be or not to be.
	In that speech, Hamlet is clearly articulating a position that If life is suffering, or if it's painful, or it doesn't provide you any joy, then the logical thing to do, he says, is to take your own life.
	End your suffering, because on one hand, death is just sleep.
	And how much we love sleep, he says, right?
	Go to sleep.
	On the other hand, sometimes when you go to sleep, you dream.
	And sometimes you have good dreams, and sometimes you have wicked nightmares.
	That's the reason, Hamlet says, that we choose to stay alive when we suffer, right?
	Else, who would bear the whips and scorns of time, right?
	So at the end of the speech where you picked it up a little bit ago, when he says, thus does, if the world means nothing, thus does conscience make cowards.
	The brave thing, if the world means nothing and death is death, it's the end of suffering, then the person with a real conscience, right?
	The person who's afraid to kill himself because of metaphysical boogeyman like heaven and hell, conscience has gotten in the way of the easy way out.
	And so this begs the spiritual question, and we've talked about it in different contexts, scenarios in your show before.
	Is there, I think Hamlet clearly asks this, is there a compelling reason to stay alive in this world if there is nothing better after death?
	If death puts an end to our trouble, why stay alive?
	And it's important to remember just how uncomfortable life was in the Middle Ages, or the late Middle Ages, the beginning of the Renaissance, sort of 16th century.
	You know, the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to.
	Toothaches.
	If you've ever had a toothache.
	I mean, it's a brutal experience.
	And Shakespeare can create these incredible plays.
	And he played the ghost, apparently, in Hamlet and so on.
	But he has a toothache, maybe he has indigestion because food was often half rotten and you had very little variety, you know, after 19 days of potatoes where you're going to shit a hydrogen bomb or something, right?
	So there was a lot of discomfort.
	I mean, London was filthy, horse crap all over the place, people taking craps in the street and it was in the glory of his mind.
	He had, you know, the king of infinite space, as he talks about with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
	I can count myself king of infinite space, but that I have bad dreams, I'm pretty sure, as well.
	Intelligence is a sign... Insomnia is a sign of intelligence, and like Galileo, I'm pretty sure.
	I played Macbeth once, and his description of insomnia is so good, I'm sure he had insomnia, probably a variety of bowel ailments, he died fairly young, tooth ailments, and so on.
	It is important to remember that The life that we have now is completely glorious and would be complete paradise compared to the life even of, I guess, an upper middle class person like Shakespeare.
	And God help you if you went to a doctor.
	You know, it wasn't until the 19th century that going to the doctor did anything but decrease your chances of survival.
	Oh, let's bleed you out.
	That's going to be wonderful.
	Let's attach leeches to your eyeballs.
	And there was a story when you were talking about sort of innards and exposing people.
	I remember Dickens, of course, the great novelist, studied originally to be a doctor, but he attended a bowel operation on a child and no anesthetic, of course, right?
	And he's like, well, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my life, but I'm never doing that at all in any way, shape or form.
	The brutality of life, you know, in Romeo and Juliet, somebody says, you know, a pox on you.
	And, you know, that sounds kind of silly, but that was an unbelievable curse at the time because It was like saying, you know, I hope someone injects you with cancer or AIDS or something like that.
	It was a very, very uncomfortable life, and I think part of that tension between the discomfort of the body and the glories of the mind is why, you know, I won't do the whole speech, but Incredible speech that he gives to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where he says, I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory.
	What you can imagine in your mind versus what you see, the horse crap and people taking craps in the street and what you see out of your window versus what you can see with the eyes of your mind is astounding.
	This most excellent canopy of the air, look at this brave Orhamming firmament, but he came from the country.
	People say, well, he went to government schools.
	Yeah, but only 12 weeks a year.
	So he came from a country where you could see the sky and he says, now it's a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
	Well, sure.
	He's in London.
	It's like Beijing.
	It's like Beijing now, right?
	What a piece of work is man.
	How noble in reason, the reason aspect.
	Which he returns to again and again, is very powerful, and again is the modern man.
	The age of reason was still to come, but this is a foretaste.
	How infinite in faculties this is, the idea that science is able to conceive the entire universe in the mind and organize it according to objective principles.
	In form and moving, how express and admirable.
	In action, how like an angel.
	In apprehension, in thinking, how like a god.
	The idea that human mind can achieve godhood through its perception of infinity through science.
	The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals, and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
	That, to me, is the body and the mind.
	I don't think that the mind-body dichotomy, which has been a powerful problem and spur in Western thinking since the days of the Greeks, has ever been expressed more powerfully.
	I think that's true.
	I do think, though, that certainly for their culture, and certainly if you look at the work of Shakespeare across the play, I would argue, across all of his plays, I would argue, especially in Hamlet too, It's awfully hard there to distinguish mind discreetly from soul, too.
	There's a metaphysical aspect of this, right?
	You think about going back to the ancient world, but certainly in the 2,000-year history, 1,600-year history of Christianity, by the time Shakespeare wrote that play, there was this argument that man was the rational amphibian, right?
	That we had one leg in heaven, one leg on earth.
	We were part angel, part animal.
	That dichotomy comes up again and again and again in the play, too, right?
	Our worse are angels.
	Right, that idea that the mind is what bridges the gap between that part of us that may be immortal, might be eternal.
	Immortality is constantly dangled in the play, just like nihilism at the end of death is.
	They're both there.
	To me, that is, and it's the mind, it's not the mind at opposition to body, it's the mind as, to me, mediator between those things.
	The passage you quote there, right?
	We have the apprehension.
	We move like angels.
	We apprehend like gods.
	And so, yet, in spite of all of this, this is the limits of reason, the limits of science, right?
	And yet, in spite of all of these wonderful, almost divine characteristics, unlike God, if He exists, we die.
	How do you square that circle?
	We've talked about psychoanalytic philosophy or psychoanalytic pursuit, the argument that that's what makes people neurotic.
	Modern science, modern psychologists have argued it's the recognition that you're going to die.
	Human beings are the only animals that know they're going to die, that could be asked to vividly imagine their own deaths, imagine yourself in a coffin.
	Other animals can't do that.
	And so consequently, what we deem neuroses, all the odd things we do, Some psychologists argue it's simply a result of our inability to process that.
	Hamlet ties that together better than anybody, and you mentioned toothaches.
	Well, remember that great line from an earlier comedy, right?
	There was never yet a philosopher who could endure the toothache patiently.
	You can be as philosophical as you want.
	You can be as rational as you want.
	You can be as stoic in your emotions as you want, but when it's your tooth buddy that's obsessed, they start whining like babies.
	You know, we mentioned the default of the female potentially to the emotional, but it's also that other thing, right?
	That women seem to handle pain better than men do, right?
	Women are always sort of tending after men, that gripe that women have that, oh, my husband's a big baby when he gets a cold.
	I can't afford to have a cold.
	I mean, you can look at it from those perspectives.
	And just to loop this around back to what you had mentioned about Charles Dickens.
	Not only was Dickens going to be a doctor, but he was like Shakespeare.
	He was fixated I think about that opening scene of Our Mutual Friend, where a bobbing corpse is retrieved from the water.
	And Dickens, what Dickens' prized possession was a bookmark made from the tanned human skin of the grave robber Burke from the Burke and Hare murders.
	Burke and Hare, we're talking about dissection.
	What began in the 16th century with bodies being dissected, helping to project our view of human nature forward empirically.
	By the time you get to the middle of the 19th century, you actually have people who are killing people to provide bodies to the anatomists.
	So they're fresh.
	Burke and Hare, the Burke-Hare murders.
	Hare turned state's evidence.
	Burke was hanged.
	His body was given to the anatomists.
	They flayed him.
	And Dickens had a bookmark made of his skin.
	And that's what prompted in roughly 1830 these new laws that allowed hospitals to access the bodies of unclaimed patients so they didn't have to grave rob anymore.
	What starts in the 16th century, with this new empirical business about looking in bodies, ends in 1830 with almost a complete medicalization of how we access cadavers.
	It is absolutely true, and it's true in Hamlet too.
	that the first people who were researching bodies by anatomy in the 16th century, they were primarily looking for the soul.
	They weren't dissecting bodies in Shakespeare's day simply to find out what the heart did or what the veins did.
	Their primary research enterprise was to see where the soul is.
	If the human body is made in the image of God, where is it?
	When we open these bodies, it's one of the reasons we didn't dissect bodies for so long, because if this is a little God, you can't pull it to pieces.
	And so epistemologically, They're looking for the same things Hamlet is.
	It gets worse and worse and worse, his fixation on tangible material death.
	The smell of it, the texture of bones, the rot, rot, corruption, putrescence, these are all throughout the play.
	What happens to a body when you kill it?
	But there's always, it seems to me in Hamlet, this hesitance to act on that knowledge.
	Because there might be, right, something greater in the human animal than just what you find in its constituent parts.
	That maybe there's something that will supersede it.
	That maybe, right?
	Maybe the ghost is real.
	He may not be, but maybe he is.
	It is true that other people have seen it, although nobody else speaks to it, right?
	The only one it talks to is Hamlet.
	And in Gertrude's bedroom, right?
	Yeah, she can't see him at all.
	She can't see him or hear him.
	But certainly Horatio and Marcellus see him.
	So I think for me, and just a roundabout way of getting back to where you left off, It's more to my mind and certainly given the 16th century, this seems appropriate.
	It's much more than simply about mind versus body.
	It's mind, a middle road between the possibility of the soul and the possibility that there's nothing.
	And so his mind is constantly being pulled back and forth between those two polar extremes with remarkable consequences.
	And the fear of divine punishment stays Hamlet's hand.
	This is important as well because, which we've talked about before, the growing secularism which comes a lot with nihilism, with the worship of the state, with this fixation with language injuries and all this kind of stuff.
	When Hamlet sees Claudius praying after the play and he's going to go and kill him, And then he's like, well, no, because if I kill him now when he is praying, he's going to go to heaven.
	So I'm going to wait and I'm going to kill him when he's doing evil rather than when he's doing good.
	And he then eventually does.
	To me, the basic reason why there's such a slaughter at the end is Claudius has such a love of power.
	He wants to become king more than he wants Gertrude's love, which is why when Gertrude is about to drink from the poisoned chalice, he just says, oh, well, hold on.
	And she's like, no, I think I'll drink.
	And he's like, OK.
	I really, really, I'll choose power over love, and that is the domino that sets the death, the general mayhem in motion.
	But Hamlet restrains his murderous impulses, or vengeance impulses if we accept the ghost, which I think we have to at that point in the play.
	And this to me has been my fundamental question to atheists is, okay, what does Hamlet do If he's not religious.
	And the argument, I would say, is what Hamlet does, if he's not religious, is he would be Claudius.
	Because Claudius, even though Claudius goes and prays, it's the only time.
	Nobody talks about God except Hamlet!
	This entire damn play drives me crazy!
	He's like, he's like bungeed in from some theological universe into a room of well-dressed Simeon power mongers.
	And uh... That's very well said, by the way.
	Yeah, I mean, he...
	I pray to Shakespeare before I do speeches, so just give me whatever you've got left, this quintessence of dust, blow it up my nose and see if you can give me some words.
	But without the fear of punishment, without the fear of God, without the thirst for heaven and the terror of hell, How is Hamlet not Claudius?
	Because Claudius never mentions religion in any way shape or form other than that one time which I think is kind of inserted for pathos because it turns out he's not actually able to pray to heaven.
	He's given up on religion, Claudius, by committing the original sin of murdering the brother of the Mark of Cain and all.
	And what is the answer if we get rid of God?
	What stays the hand that wishes to brutalize in pursuit of power, which has significant biological value, right?
	Power gets you resources.
	More resources means you have more children, which means your genes spread.
	Genes love power.
	We know this from studying monkeys, where those who climb up the hierarchy of the tribal power structure get literally endorphins.
	It's addictive.
	Power is addictive.
	Genes hunger for resources and for power and control.
	What pushes back against the brute dictates of thirsty biology?
	In the play, Hamlet, who's the only one who has a conscience, who's the only one who has doubt, who's the only one who has a relationship to the divine, is the only one whose hand is stayed until the very end of the brutal murders that everybody else just seems to do.
	I mean, outside of Polonius and all this, which when he thought he was killing the king, he thought the king was back there.
	And that, to me, is the most fundamental question that has become even more powerful since the play was written.
	See, in my reading of that, I think I agree with what you say, but I go one step in a different direction.
	That Hamlet, you ask, what would happen to Hamlet if there was no God?
	Well, he's already answered that question.
	He has too much conscience to become Claudius, so he's going to become a suicide, right?
	If there is no God, he's going to kill himself.
	The one thing Hamlet can't be, that's why he can't get his revenge.
	I mean, you've got the ghost, right?
	Theoretically, a creature from the metaphysical world who's telling Hamlet, you must kill Claudius.
	Then on the other hand, you've got the Christian God telling him that murder is wrong, right?
	And so you've got these metaphysical things weighing upon him.
	And so Hamlet, I think in the To Be or Not To Be speech, in that speech you just cited, but what to me is this quintessence of dust?
	Because he's unusual.
	He can't be.
	In fact, that's Hamlet's problem.
	If Hamlet were Claudius without remorse and conscience, He would have killed Claudius the moment the ghost talked to him, right?
	And that's Laertes!
	No, no, sorry, sorry to interrupt.
	He would have killed Claudius the moment that Claudius became king because Claudius stands between Hamlet and the throne.
	Even better, even better.
	So, and Laertes, the action of Laertes, right?
	When Laertes decides that Hamlet's responsible for Polonius' death, he doesn't hesitate a whit.
	He sets about killing him.
	You cut his throat in the church, which is a direct reference back to Hamlet not being able to kill Claudius when he's praying.
	I would cut his throat in the church.
	I don't care if he goes to heaven or hell, he's just not hanging around here.
	Doesn't matter!
	And so, in this way of looking at things, you know, I think that Hamlet, because of his higher intelligence, like you said, higher intelligence and higher conscientiousness, right?
	That those two things Hamlet possesses.
	So I think he really wants to be like Claudius to kill Claudius.
	He understands in a world like this, that's how power is wielded.
	But he can't do it.
	So he's got two options.
	Suicide or write this metaphysical out.
	To somehow find a way to believe in something beyond the grave that he can reconcile this with.
	And so in the final analysis, what Hamlet does is he walks that middle path all the way through the play.
	And that's what tears him apart.
	It's the conscientious aspect of him.
	And when you look at the religious connotations of the play, why is it, again, that after the graveyard scene, what happens in the graveyard scene, right?
	That's where he confronts death in its finality, right?
	That this was Yorick, now it's gone somewhere.
	This was Ophelia.
	You remember in that scene, Laertes, before Hamlet comes out from behind the gravestone, the brother of Ophelia, Laertes, he leaps into the grave.
	And he picks up Ophelia, and he says, "'Lay her in the earth, and from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring.'" See, Laertes is a man of action.
	He has no—he just wants to get beyond decay and death, right?
	He's got the body of his sister.
	He knows she's dead.
	But he doesn't want to talk about all the things that are going to have to happen to that corpse before the beautiful violets spring from the manure in the spring.
	Hamlet's problem is, is he can't ignore the middle process, right?
	There's bodies and then there's violence.
	But Hamlet's the only one conscientiously who focuses on the blood, the guts, the decomposition, the decay, which he meets in the graveyard.
	And so at the end of the play, when why does the action happen so quick and so fast in my reading of it?
	It's because he's had to take a stand.
	And whether or not there is a heaven, he now knows that the argument that the human animal ends completely at death is false.
	Now, maybe you're right.
	Maybe it becomes more of a projection of self and others.
	That's a hard one for me to wrap my mind around.
	We can bypass the soul question because that's the only one we can directly verify, is that we do know for sure that we can spread out as ripples in the minds and reflections of others.
	So I'm not saying it's either or for the purposes of this conversation, but certainly that, I mean, because this is what he says when he dies.
	Sorry to interrupt, but he says when he dies, tell my story.
	Tell my story.
	Record and speak accurately of what happened here.
	So he's still hedging his bets at the end.
	He's like, what does the skeptical scientist say?
	Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
	Well, that's not go make yourself, go get worms to suck out your eyeballs so they can make some flowers after shitting out some manure.
	It is quite the asterisk at the end, isn't it?
	But I think Hamlet at the very end, which is why the power of the end is like, I'm dying, but tell my story just in case there's nothing after death so I can live on in the minds of others just like Yorick did with me.
	And that to me is his last grappling hook.
	It's like he's reaching into his utility belt and like, as I slip into the great beyond, just in case there's nothing here, tell my story so I can live forever.
	That to me is like the last.
	It is quite the asterisk at the end, isn't it?
	But we go back to the situation with Polonius to give you a sense of why I think what I do.
	Go back to Polonius.
	Why does he kill Polonius?
	He kills Polonius by mistake because he didn't kill Claudius when he had the chance, right?
	Claudius is on his knees.
	Hamlet has a chance to do it.
	He doesn't do it.
	And then a few moments later, it's Claudius is now somehow Hamlet thinks that Claudius has made his way over to Gertrude's bedroom and is hiding behind a curtain.
	When he's talking to his mother in that intimate place, right?
	But he has to kill Claudius, because Claudius has heard that Hamlet knows.
	So now it's either Claudius or Hamlet, because if that is Claudius behind the tapestry, then Claudius knows that Hamlet knows he killed, right?
	So now it's like, you know, it's like the Mexican standoff.
	That's true, but the fact is he kills Polonius instead of Claudius.
	And so the end of the play, to me, it makes sense to me, that Claudius, if you think about it, he becomes the very thing that Hamlet becomes the very thing that Claudius became.
	What does Hamlet do?
	He murders a brother, right?
	He murders the brother of Ophelia he kills, the father of Ophelia, excuse me.
	Hamlet murders the father of Ophelia in the same way that Claudius, right, has committed a murder in that way.
	Ah, well, okay, but the death is the same, but the motives are completely different, One is the lust for power, the other is in self-defense and to restore the order of the realm.
	But the one thing that's always frustrated me about that scene is, not to put too fine a point on it, Hamlet's kind of an asshole at this point.
	You know, he's just killed... I mean, Polonius is considered to be like this foolish old man and so on.
	I disagree.
	I mean, he's trying to survive a very chaotic environment.
	He's a brilliant guy.
	He went to university.
	He was an actor.
	He's trying to survive as an intelligent guy.
	He's like, if Hamlet had lived and didn't have political power, he probably would have turned into Polonius, who's trying to weasel his way into survival in this incredibly brutal and murderous environment.
	He's like the conciliary who can't leave, because where the hell is he going to go?
	Denmark is like your, you know, it's the old scene from the Monty Python movie.
	How do you know he's a king?
	Well, he hasn't got shit all over him.
	It's like, where's Polonius going to go if he's not trying to find some way to influence people?
	But it's, you know, the last poor Yorick, when he's looking at a skull, 23 years old, and he has all of this ruminations about death and so on, it's like, Hamlet, buddy, you're standing over a corpse you just created and you have no ruminations about death other than to make jokes about how heavy the guy is?
	I mean, that to me is a coldness that I don't know, I've never been able to figure that one out, how he's so, Thinks about death, obsesses about death, wanders about death, and Alexandra turns into earth, which you put in a hole in the window to keep the wind out.
	You just stabbed a guy, you've become a murderer, you acted from impulse, impulse, complete impulse, so there's no decision, no decision, then boom, I'm gonna stab some guy, I don't even know who it is.
	I think I know who it is, but I don't know.
	You just became a murderer, no ruminations about death, but jokes about how worms are eating him.
	That, to me, has always been like, what is your major malfunction, son?
	Like, what is that all about?
	See for me, and this is where we haven't answered this question, because one of the most, the thing that's most absolutely fascinated people about this play is A, is Hamlet mad?
	And B, when is he mad?
	I think, and my take on this, I don't think he's mad at any point in the play until he kills Polonius.
	What you say, does Hamlet, is it possible that he does descend into madness at that point?
	Because there's no logic to it.
	He just left Claudius on his knees.
	He went right to his mom's bedroom.
	How in the world could Claudius have got there ahead of him?
	He might have snuck in while he was having this intense conversation with his mom.
	Inceivably.
	But like you say, the way he does it, somebody who's been barely unable to unsheathe his sword suddenly now is thrusting, and the response as you said, is so out of character.
	He's so wild at that point, right?
	And the very next scene is the one where he's dancing around, right?
	It doesn't make any sense.
	So people have asked the legendary question, and I don't know if I have an answer for it.
	A, is Hamlet mad?
	And B, when and where if he is?
	To me, the only place in the play it strikes me that he may have allowed himself to descend into madness is right there.
	And it would kind of explain the irrationality.
	There's certainly, he's so cool.
	Remember the famous line, right?
	Though this be madness, yet there is method in it, right?
	It's where we get the phrase from, method to the madness.
	All up until that point in the play, there has been method to his madness.
	When he's playing with Ophelia that, talk about the body, you mentioned the body earlier.
	How about when he's sitting at the play with Ophelia and they've had a big row, right?
	And he walks into the play and walks right up to her and he says, lady, may I lie in your lap?
	And she says, no.
	He goes, oh, no, I meant my head upon your lap.
	Okay.
	Did you think I meant cunt rematters?
	Did you think I meant cunt rematter?
	I mean, he's talking about literally cunt, right?
	Yeah.
	And so, consequently, you don't have to block that out, I hope.
	I certainly don't.
	Listen, if it's Shakespeare, it's never getting bleeped.
	And you see how damn, damn visceral it is.
	Back again, too.
	And so, every point up until that point when he kills Polonius, I can find method in the madness.
	And I can find method in what he does after.
	I can find no method there.
	I think the question of Hamlet's madness is, and I hate to say this, it's relative.
	Because madness, if we were to say that madness is a deviation from sense, self-preservation, and rationality, then Claudius is mad.
	Because Claudius is a power-hungry, amoral, sociopathic murderer.
	A rutting base, what King Lear referred to as the bare forked animal, like the lollipop picture that the kids make, just nothing but simian DNA reproduction through power and sexuality.
	So to me, that is madness, because that has nothing to do with what it is to be a human being, that's just a tall ape with polysyllabic language.
	And when Hamlet says, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.
	Fie on it, oh fie, tis an unweeded garden, to me that's Garden of Eden, that grows to seed.
	Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.
	So, Hamlet, is he mad?
	He's mad relative to what is going on around him.
	But is madness necessarily an irrational response to an insane, murderous, dictatorial environment?
	This is a mafia movie.
	This is not a royal movie.
	And of course, you know, I mean, showing the death of a king, always a challenge when you're being sponsored by a king, as Shakespeare was.
	But To me, it's not madness.
	It is the challenge of struggling to survive an insanely brutal, amoral, empty, mere animal, you know, rutting and killing and eating and drinking, just the mere pursuit of base sense stimulation and the pursuit of the endorphins of power and the endorphins of orgasm and the endorphins of a full belly and it's a sort of base pursuit.
	Is he mad?
	I would say if we put the madness in Hamlet we're forgiving and excusing the environment which if he does become unhinged is what produced it.
	That's beautifully said, but finish the second part of that speech, right?
	The speech where he's talking about how flat and unprofitable seem to be all the uses of this life.
	Thigh on it, thigh.
	There's an unweeded garden that grows to seed.
	But in the second half of that, he starts talking about the timeline.
	And in about the last 12 lines of that speech, he says, two year, but two months dead.
	Nay, not so much.
	So excellent a king.
	And then a little bit down, it's one month.
	And by the end of that speech, it happened yesterday.
	That in that 12 lines, if he's not mad, He is so distracted with grief and revenge that he's shrinking in a very irrational way, a disturbing way.
	I mean, it could be rhetoric.
	No, I've seen this my whole life off and on, and I'm sure you have too, whether publicly or privately, people who talk themselves into getting more upset.
	Oh, and another thing, and then this happened, and then I couldn't believe what he said.
	And friends do this too, Iago style.
	It's one of the great horrors of a dysfunctional social life is how much, you know, the poison that's poured into the ear.
	To me, this is a perfect metaphor for what Shakespeare so powerfully described in Iago.
	The people who whisper you into heights of moral outrage and to self-destructive behavior by continually poking at your amygdala of moral self-righteousness.
	That to me is the great danger.
	So he's trying to whip himself into a frenzy the way that you'd spur a desperate and bleeding horse because you're trying to escape an enemy.
	He's trying to whip himself into a frenzy so that he can finally act against his own nature.
	And the fact that he has a great barrier to murder while he's part of a royal mafia, is that him going insane or is that the most sane person responding to the most insane environment?
	Well, it certainly is a kind of madness.
	There can be righteous fury and madness, right?
	In fact, Ira Brevis, right?
	This idea that the righteous wrath and rage was both madness and not.
	It was madness in pursuit of what was right.
	At the very least, he distracts himself.
	At various points in the play, he loses it so much.
	That scene where Ophelia dumps him, where Polonius is spying, right?
	And she loves him, coward that she is.
	But she doesn't think he loves her because he's been acting so weird, and Dad has put pressure on her.
	So she gives him back all the little love, the Kewpie dolls they won at the fair.
	Right?
	And he looks at her and he says, what?
	Right?
	Are you honest?
	Are you fair?
	Right?
	And he just goes off on her.
	I know your paintings well enough.
	God hath given you one face, and you paint yourselves another.
	You jig, you amble, and you list.
	You nickname God's creatures, and you make your wantonness your ignorance.
	Go to, I'll know more on it.
	It has made me mad.
	It's a kind of, there's Sober morality behind it, but it's also it is a kind of madness, too.
	And so I like what you said about it being relative.
	There are clearly times in the play, whether that moment or the other ones we discussed about where he is crossed over a line, where he's become something other than Hamlet to try to drive emotion and it distracts him.
	Is it full-blown madness?
	Even if that madness ultimately contemplates in moral truth, or getting Gertrude to look inside herself?
	Because what he says to her is shockingly disjointed as well, too.
	However, the thrust of the moral is right.
	It's the way he goes about it, right?
	It's the... You know, if you're gonna play psychoanalyst here, it's almost bipolar, isn't it?
	It's almost sort of, and people have said that about Hamlet, manic-depressive.
	I mean, the highs are high, the lows are low.
	I don't think that comes anywhere near doing justice to Shakespeare's character, but there does seem to be that kind of personality instability in terms of what goes on, how he reacts to things high and low.
	And that's the genius of him.
	He touches the whole spectrum gamut of human experience.
	But look at the examples that he's been provided.
	So the example of power, of the desire for power, led to the murder of his father.
	His father's character is obviously a bit of a question mark.
	We only see him speaking forward in the afterlife.
	And Paul Scofield's hand gestures in the Mel Gibson film, I mean, good God, the man is like astonishingly powerful as an actor.
	I mean, it's a tiny role, but he's one of the biggest characters in that movie.
	But I don't know if Hamlet's father is actually as good as he thinks he is, or if this is something that his distemperate nature is elevating the idealism of his father's character in order to further outrage and depress and make himself negative.
	Because if his father was so great, why is he marrying a power-hungry whore like Hamlet's mother?
	You know, this is all, you know, oh, this is the greatest man ever, he was the most wonderful man.
	And as he says, thrift Horatio, thrift!
	The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.
	Like they took the very food from the father's funeral and it hadn't even had time to go off before it was the marriage.
	So if he was such a great guy, what was he doing married to Gertrude?
	And if he was such a great father...
	Why is Hamlet such a mess?
	On the other hand, if it was a good enough father, then I can see why Hamlet would become unhinged.
	You know that old story, well your father lost a father, and his father lost a father, and his father lost a father, sure.
	But if his father was the only person that Hamlet could talk to, Then the isolation that follows the death of Hamlet's father is something that I think really underpins the play.
	He is so isolated in this play.
	I mean, a soliloquy is a very powerful way of opening up someone's mind, but the soliloquies that he generally has, when he unpacks his heart, he has it with himself, not with anyone else.
	He has some oblique references with Horatio, and the rage when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trying to tease information out of him, the rage that he responds with, you know, would you play me like a flute at the highest pitch of my register?
	Would you unpack me like a... The isolation, I think, that followed his father's death, because he lost his father, he lost his mother, and his friends are gone.
	This isolation I think is important as well and we are social animals and the amount of isolation that surrounds Hamlet in this play and it's not like the isolation is going to be solved by killing his uncle, right?
	So then he'll be even more isolated because he'll have power.
	He'll be king and power of course isolates people enormously.
	Great wealth, great beauty, great power.
	As Nietzsche says, people in possession of these things never hear the truth because everything gets subtly bent out of the gravity well of that kind of influence.
	And I think this level of isolation that Hamlet goes through, all who live alone eventually go mad in one kind or another.
	I mean, as Aristotle says, gods or animals can live alone, human beings cannot.
	And that isolation Shakespeare must have experienced it too.
	Can you imagine being Shakespeare and going down to the market and seeing people burp into the apples they're handing you over for a penny?
	The isolation that he must have felt must have been extraordinary as well.
	Very much projected into Hamlet.
	And so, you know, madness, when you're so far ahead of your time and you're so steeped in depth and surrounded by shallow bestial animals, when the example that you have is Hamlet has, the pursuit of power leads to murder and the pursuit of sexuality leads to betrayal of the best man you've ever known.
	Okay, no power.
	Food is a gross way of stimulating your senses.
	Dance is a ridiculous distraction from what needs to be done.
	Sex leads to corruption.
	Power leads to corruption.
	It's not like there's some free market he can go and start Apple or something like that.
	So, what is he supposed to do when all of the impulses in those around him lead to the complete corruption of the soul?
	Well, you're absolutely right biographically.
	Shakespeare left his family in Avon, Stratford, right?
	And left his wife and his kids there and moved away to London, which was a long way away in those days.
	And we have almost no evidence that he had much to live.
	He lived a life by himself in London.
	His family stayed in Avon.
	But then, you know, so many things with this play.
	Whenever you hit on a really good vein, like you just did of trying to understand things, there's the other side of it.
	Everyone should understand that this is two perspectives on a near-infinite disco ball of Hamlet.
	We're not encapsulating.
	Don't use us for your essays and think that you've done anything useful.
	These are just thoughts.
	That's why we could do this every day for ten years and still be discovering more.
	That's how powerful it is.
	So, sorry, go ahead.
	Take the balance of what you said about influences.
	Maybe he—but certainly the king's a bad influence.
	Certainly the corrupt court's a bad influence.
	But this is a kid.
	He's 30 years old.
	He's not a kid, number one.
	He's not a kid.
	Number two, he spent a number of years before the play begins at Wittenberg, which to me is highly significant.
	Wittenberg is the seat of the Protestant Reformation.
	It is the university most closely associated—obviously, Luther's theses, right?
	It is the university most closely associated with the Protestant Reformation.
	So I think one of the things Shakespeare's trying to do with that, of all the possible associations for Hamlet, is suggest a kind of Protestant attitude towards these things that gets laid alongside the more rational and visceral aspects of his character.
	So it's true that when he gets back to the court, a place he's chosen to banish himself from.
	In fact, right away he actually asks Claudius in the very first act, to go back to Wittenberg.
	He doesn't want to stay there.
	As soon as the funeral's over, he wants to go back.
	So there's this whole other aspect of his character that's hinted at and alluded to over the course of the play that we don't see.
	I think that's the attitude that crops up in places like the To Be or Not to Be speech.
	That's the Wittenberg effect, the fact that he's inclining more and more to not believing in any moral order.
	Which makes suicide much, much more of a possibility.
	But there's always those, you could even call them the guilt of having been raised that way, if you want to.
	But he can't seem to shake that.
	And so, I think what has absolutely fascinated people for 400 years about this play is that, like you said, it's inexhaustible.
	There is no answer that ties up the loose ends.
	There is no one interpretation that is totally satisfactory.
	There's no one way.
	It's capacious.
	Every door you open and every mystery you think you solved just asks four more questions.
	It's the kind of thing that you said you could spend a whole lifetime.
	People do.
	Scholars do spend a whole lifetime talking about nothing but how this play, from the inside out, tells us everything we need to know about life in the world.
	When I came to the speech that you mentioned earlier about Ophelia, that Hamlet, I remember getting goosebumps.
	And the reason for that was, I grew up, and I think a lot of people do these days, in a very, sort of, gynocentric society, with the exception of boarding school, which was a very masculine environment.
	But a single mom and lots of single moms around, and there's this effect that is actually called in psychology, the wow effect.
	Women are wonderful.
	Women are wonderful.
	Always portrayed in a positive manner.
	And, you know, like you can see this in movies and television and books and plays that if a boy is intelligent, he's generally plain, but if a girl is intelligent, she's always beautiful too.
	It is just this women are wonderful effect.
	And so reading criticism of feminine nature after growing up, you know, with patriarchy and misogyny and sexism and men are bad, men are bad, men are bad.
	Reading a powerful critique of female nature as is compressed in Hamlet's criticism, not just Ophelia, but of the gender as a whole, to me was very powerful, not because I was just dying to diss women, but just because, wow, here's some balance!
	And this is something that I think has become more valuable in the modern world, the idea that there can be criticisms of female nature that are positive and helpful and illuminate some of the differences and challenges between the genders, but it always gets converted into misogyny, which, you know, makes it sort of boring and that.
	So I think the criticism of female nature that is in the play, which is a theme, I think, fairly safe to say, in the play.
	I mean, the only positive character is Ophelia in terms of women, and she goes genuinely mad, right?
	And she seemed like a genuinely good and sweet girl.
	So to me, the fact that Hamlet didn't go as mad as Ophelia is testament to his strength of character, because again, she's a good soul caught up in the mafia machinations of a murder based family.
	And the fact that she went completely mad and killed herself is, to me, testament to the strength of character and intellect of the fate that Hamlet avoided.
	So the first thing I wanted to mention, the second question which I have for you is this, and let's just, I'll put on my full-on Christian theology hat, so does Hamlet go to heaven or does Hamlet go to hell?
	Brought up a great point at the end of the play, that Hamlet is hedging his bets either way, right?
	That he, you know, you who tremble and look pale at this chance, had I but time, right?
	And he dies, right?
	Horatio, thou livest, report my cause aright.
	It's Horatio, right?
	The least person you would expect would have a theological epitaph for him.
	Who says goodnight sweet prince and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
	I think the skeptic, the empiricist, the natural philosopher is absolutely convinced of what's going to happen to Hamlet when he dies.
	And I do think Hamlet at the end of his life, he exchanges forgiveness with Laertes, right?
	Before the fight.
	No, after they stab each other.
	Oh, yes.
	So he asks before and then gets it after.
	Yes, right.
	And so they exchange forgiveness.
	He has reconciled in the bedroom with his mother, right?
	If you look at a strict morality play sense, drama coming out of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, from the strict parameters of the morality play, Hamlet has made his peace, but Hamlet has to die.
	Because he too is a murderer, right?
	He killed Polonius, right?
	That he is guilty in the eyes of God.
	He's a murderer.
	He has killed a father.
	Just like he laments his father being taken from him, he took Ophelia's father from her, driving her insane, right?
	So he finds himself, through the beautiful twist of the play, to have become the thing he's fighting.
	Unlike Claudius, like you said, who blithely lets Gertrude drink the poison because it's him first, He makes his peace with Laertes, he reconciles with his mother, and he does the thing that both the ghost and heaven want him to do.
	I mean, this is a lawless murderer, this is an incestuous murderer of his own brother, fratricide.
	With self-defense.
	I mean, he's trying to kill Hamlet through Laertes.
	If he doesn't kill him now, it's going to be that nice with a knife.
	Exactly.
	I can see no place in Christian theology where Hamlet's Reconciling himself with the people he's offended and getting justice on the true villain.
	I can't see a circumstance theologically where he's gonna go to hell.
	I just can't.
	Now, the other big question, I'll throw back at you, is Protestant Shakespeare, living in Protestant England at the height of the Reformation, why do you have something so like purgatory?
	Now, Shakespeare's father, John, was a Catholic, right, who was forced to become mayor of Avon, had to sort of become full-on Protestant to be able to be promoted in his own town.
	So certainly his father came from a very Catholic family, but there is this option, right, that maybe it's neither heaven nor hell.
	Maybe Shakespeare defaults to this very potentially dangerous, in his day and age, Catholic idea that there's an intermediary place.
	And it would make sense.
	If there is such a thing as purgatory, at least in the mind of Shakespeare, Hamlet's not quite ready for heaven.
	He hasn't fully atoned, but certainly he's not damnable.
	And so maybe, you know, in an act of poetic justice, he joins his father.
	And remember how the father described it, right?
	Should I tell you the horrors of my prison house, but it is not for mortal ears, right?
	And I've got to stay there, he says.
	I don't stay here forever and suffer till my mortal crimes are burnt and purged away.
	And Hamlet dies.
	And again, it depends on how seriously we take confession.
	We take priestly absolution.
	He makes his personal peace with the people he's wronged.
	But he hasn't had that sort of, for lack of a better word, Wittenberg final right kind of denouement.
	And so it would make perfect sense only in Catholic theology.
	It makes no sense in Protestant theology.
	It would make perfect sense in Catholic theology that because of his un—what's the word?
	There's a word for it—unannealed soul, right?
	He didn't get the last rites, that he can't go to heaven.
	Maybe he joins his father.
	Which would be kind of a neat metaphysical ending that we will never know about.
	But the Catholic versus the Protestant has a big weight in this, too.
	Right, of course, if the ghost is correct and the ghost gets released from purgatory when his crime is avenged, then Hamlet arrives and exit ghost to heaven, which would be kind of frustrating, I think, for Hamlet.
	So, I mean, as a writer myself, there are theological implications of this kind of decision, but the other kind of decision is He needed the ghost to come back, and the ghost wouldn't come back from heaven, and the ghost can't come back from hell, so he just needs some other place.
	And he puts it in Denmark so he can say, well, it's just a kind of paganism belief system or whatever it is.
	But I think, you know, we can get all theological on it, but I think it's just a necessary device for the communication to occur.
	And this is the other thing, too.
	Because Hamlet is so bloody fascinating as a character, I keep forgetting about everyone else.
	I mean, he towers above just about everyone else so much in the play.
	But I remember when I first read it, when the ghost comes back and he's like, Hey, Hammy, Hammy, I'm burning up here.
	It's, you know, every single day you don't do this.
	I'm stuck in these fires from hell.
	You feel like moving this along a little bit?
	And I sort of remembered that and it was like, Because the father being tortured is always in Hamlet's mind, and that kind of... I mean, imagine, your family member is kidnapped, you know they're being tortured, you wouldn't be able to sleep, you'd go insane, you'd try to do whatever.
	So the pressure of not just what's happening in Denmark, but what's happening metaphysically to his father, In the great beyond is something that you know he desperately but and also he doesn't want to join his father because his father says hey purgatory is no fun but it's better than hell so having no knowing now that his father's being tortured but if he makes a mistake and kills the wrong person Then he doesn't even get to join his father, he goes to hell forever.
	What an astounding amount of mental pressure to bring on a highly tense and highly brilliant mind.
	So again, the fact that he blows his way through to the end, you know, it's one of the great beautiful moments in all of literature.
	When Hamlet has vanity, he has a lot of rage, certainly in the first part of the play.
	Towards the end, almost like he knows this is his last day.
	You know, if we all knew that today was our last day, we would have particular conversations that would, I think, remain in people's head like a beautiful North Star of memory of who we were.
	It's almost like he knows it's his last day.
	And when he says, very simply, please understand that I did not mean to kill your father, that I have shot an arrow Over a house and hurt my brother.
	This is not defensive.
	It's not excusing.
	It's not hysterical.
	It's a simple statement of apology, which he's not been able to do.
	And the distance between that and complaining that Polonius' body is too heavy to drag around is an extraordinary journey for a character to go through.
	And that grace, I think, is what provokes Horatio, to say that he gets to heaven, because as you say, he has accepted his moral responsibility, he now regrets the death of Polonius, and he forgives the man who has murdered him, and then he does the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye on his uncle, who frankly has had it coming since the first syllable of the play.
	Well, I like that you used the word grace, because that can mean the graciousness of his end, and it can mean the supreme Protestant theological concept again.
	And what I love about this play is that there are no answers for any of this.
	That all we can do is point out, well, here's a theological reading.
	Well, here's one that contradicts it.
	Well, here's a body-centered reading.
	Well, here's a soul-centered reading.
	Here's a suicide-centered reading.
	Here's a salvation-centered reading.
	And I think that is the absolute beauty and mystery of this play is that, and that's why we're still writing about it.
	That's why people like me can make careers as a professor of Shakespeare after 400 years, the most written about document not called the Bible.
	You're still able to write new stuff about it.
	You're still to approach it from new ways.
	And how about if I postulated for you?
	You may get mad about this, but feel free.
	Burst an aneurysm.
	I think King Lear may be the better play, the deeper play, the more profound play in some ways.
	As much as I love Hamlet, The older I get, see, I didn't get it when I was 18.
	When I was 18 and 25, Hamlet and his action, his activity, like you said, Hamlet's a pirate, he's a swashbuckler.
	How is Hamlet defined by Ophelia?
	He is the soldier, the scholars, the poets, I, the rose of the fair state, the expectation of the nation, right?
	He's the courtier, he's all these things.
	I love that, but I tell you, as I creep, as I'm closer to 50 than I am to 30, I read King Lear, it still makes me cry.
	I mean, the absolute depth of a man in the full possession of his faculties at 80.
	A man of great power and strength who, through his own foolishness, threw it away.
	The love and the division between him and his daughters.
	And the surrounding characters.
	Unlike Hamlet, like you said, where many of the other characters sort of fade away.
	In King Lear, you got people like Kent and Edgar and the Fool.
	I mean, I've never encountered a character anywhere in literature like the fool in King Lear.
	And so, to me, maybe this is a conversation, six months we'll reconvene and talk about King Lear maybe, but if you get a chance to look it over again as your You're getting closer to 50, not 30.
	I'd be curious to see what you think.
	I played in a production of King Lear.
	I played Gloucester, the outfiled jelly dude.
	So it's the only genuinely evil character that I ever played, and I would love to get back and talk about it.
	I cannot even think of a fond, foolish old man speech without tearing up, because that is the kind of humility, and you say it's brokenness, but it is the kind of humility that we desperately desire.
	from power-hungry people who are destructive in their blindness.
	Let me ask you one last question about Hamlet.
	There's no priest in Hamlet.
	Actually there is, but it's an insignificant one.
	He's the priest at the gravesite who's going to minister the funeral of Ophelia.
	He's the one that Laertes turns on.
	I'm preempting your question.
	I'm sorry.
	No, no.
	The question is why.
	Why can he not go to a priest for advice?
	Why can he not go?
	Because he's got all of these theological questions and he's trying to puzzle it all through himself.
	And, you know, I try not to fill my own cavities should I ever get them and I would try not to.
	So, to me, the isolation as well.
	Why do you think there's no functional character called a priest who has any influence on the show?
	Well, I know what happens with the priest in the play.
	He's the one who's supposed to say the funeral.
	And Laertes, Hamlet's watching this from behind the gravestone, Laertes wants to know why she's being buried the way she is.
	Why is she being buried outside the consecrated place?
	And why is she not getting full funeral rites, right?
	And the priest says, her death was doubtful, right?
	In other words, we think she killed herself.
	And we were not allowed to bury, and despair was the worst Christian sin you could commit.
	We do not bury suicides in Christian burial.
	So in other words, it's purely dogmatic.
	It's completely insensitive, it's unemotional, it's not even rational.
	The priest in the play is nothing more than a dogmatic mouthpiece, right?
	And Laertes turns on the priest, and he says, you vile priest, he says, my daughter will an angel be, my sister will an angel be.
	whilst you lie howling.
	Like, when you're in hell, filthy priest, my sister will be an angel.
	And I think, to be completely honest, that as deeply spiritual as Shakespeare can be, and as textbook Christian many of his speeches can be across the plays, I think he had a tremendous loathing for orthodox clericism.
	I think it bothered him.
	I think the dogmatic nature of his own church, whether Catholic or Protestant, I think he was too humane.
	to be reduced to religious priesthood.
	On the one hand, I have never, and I teach them all, all the great writers of Western culture, I teach Milton, I teach C.S.
	Lewis, I teach Dante.
	Of all of them, I think Shakespeare has as much of a Christian sensibility, whether or not Christianity is true or false, he has as much of it in his books, his plays, as anybody does.
	But, he also has a tremendous skepticism, almost hostility, to narrow-mindedness in the cleric, in the clerisy.
	His faith, whatever you want to call it, his ideological embrace of Christian thought, that is a much more open-minded thing.
	He's constantly turning to attack.
	This narrow-minded kind of clericism, for lack of a better word, in that he's very much a modern man.
	I know many.
	I'm that kind of person myself in some ways.
	I've always hated the idea of religion as a series of rules that you follow like a train track in order to get into heaven.
	That it has to be a commitment that is willed to a virtue that is challenging.
	It cannot be just, you know, tick the boxes and get to heaven.
	And so I think that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare resonates with me so much as well.
	And maybe I'm projecting me back on him because I am, as you know, we've had this conversation, very serious in the ideals of Christianity and my faith, but I too find church tedious.
	I too find, you know, unless you're dealing with somebody like Thomas Aquinas, a brilliant mind, I find the kind of shut-up-and-believe mindset because it's in the prayer book or because our church is founded on this particular—that's always bothered me.
	And it makes sense as a man of the theater, too.
	Virtue cannot be a look-it-up phenomenon.
	No.
	And Shakespeare's a man of the theater, right?
	He's interested in the human consequences of God.
	He could care less about rites and rituals, and you see that throughout.
	In fact, most priests you do see in Shakespeare are villains, or idiots.
	Think about the two bishops that Richard III Manipulates in order to get the sympathy of the people.
	These two pious bishops, right, who try to show how he's converted back to God.
	And it's all a scam on Richard's part, right?
	But the bishops fall for it, the people fall for it.
	So I think there's a very, you mentioned modern.
	And maybe this is the place to end it.
	Why does this play still matter to us?
	Why should your readers, and I've read your comments, I read your comments in your talks religiously after I watch your talk.
	You must have the most varied, the most intellectually I mean, there are people coming at you from a thousand different ways.
	So in other words, your audience is kind of a microcosm of human experience in the modern world.
	And to that I say, whether atheist or believer, whether cynic or optimist, whether believer or non-believer, get in touch with the plays of Shakespeare, particularly plays like Hamlet.
	The four great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear, for no other reason than He is going to make you think about things you think you've rejected in better ways, different ways.
	He's going to make you question what you deeply believe about yourself.
	And he's going to do that all in the context of entertaining the fuck out of you, right?
	Across the board, right?
	A little Shakespearean baudry, right?
	But I believe that's absolutely true.
	And it's why I dedicate my life.
	When I was in graduate school, I fell in love with everything.
	Why did you do all four?
	Why did I pick Shakespeare?
	Because it was the one, the one thing.
	that would, in Hamlet's own words, in Shakespeare's own words, right, the one thing that would be endlessly fascinating, right, that you could not exhaust in terms of its multi-layered beauty and truth and strength.
	And so, and I haven't regretted it.
	Here I am, 25 years a professor, teach Shakespeare every year, more than anything else.
	And every time I teach it, find something new in it.
	Yeah, I would say that the joys of religiosity and the joys of very powerful and deep art have things in common, which is to remind us to scrape ourself up from the shallowness of the everyday and dig deep into what it is to be alive.
	So much of what we see as we move around in the world is something that's designed to put us on the surface.
	Are my teeth white enough, you know?
	How's my muffin topping my pants, you know?
	I mean, all of this shallow, materialistic stuff.
	And it's not like this unimportant, you know, you gotta brush your teeth and, you know, exercise and eat well and so on.
	But a life that is lived on the surface is not really much of a life at all.
	It is more animalistic than it is human.
	Humanity is depth.
	It's the one thing.
	We share everything else.
	We share kidneys and teeth and bones and hair with the animals.
	The one thing that we don't share with the animals is depth.
	It is that which defines us as human to reflect on deep things, to reflect on deep questions, to recognize that it is important to leave a snow angel on the dusty history of humanity's shared experiences.
	And Shakespeare will take you down to the depths from just about the first syllable.
	"The ghost of my father has come back to tell me he was murdered and I must seek revenge." Well, Hamlet was not thinking about how his abs looked that morning.
	I mean, or whether the girl liked him or whether he could buy some particular new tool or toy or something like that.
	There's so much in the economy.
	This is one of the problems I have with the sort of free market.
	And it's not the problem for the free market or the government to solve.
	It's a problem for people like you and I to solve.
	Which is, sure, you know, take care of your appearance.
	Goddess give you one face.
	Fine, fine.
	Make another one that looks a little better.
	That's no problem.
	But, dear Lord above, we really, really need to remember that we are deep creatures of fundamental essence and question and curiosity.
	And just about everything that is great in our lives has come about because people have questioned deeply and explored deeply.
	And that is where we find the grace of actually being the greatest and deepest humanity that we can possess.
	Whether you consider that spiritual or intellectual, at this point in the conversation, I don't think is essential.
	But Shakespeare reminds us that there are deep pools and we shouldn't just skate on the surface to the grave, because the grave's going to meet us either way.
	And it sure is better if we've left a deeper impression in the world and those around us than if we skated on the surface and people have admired us from afar for shallow and inconsequential attributes that die with us.
	The grave's a shallow place too, right?
	Six feet is shallow.
	And you and I, when we talked about Christ a couple months ago, The Christian ethic in that previous video, you made that same argument.
	I think it's beautiful, and I think you're right.
	Depth.
	The depth that separates us from all the other animals.
	Avoid shallowness, and it doesn't really matter at this point whether you call that soul, because you could, or whether you call that the projection of our essence through eternity, or leaving it for other people.
	But I'll leave, this will be my final comment.
	I do think that Shakespeare, in his own sonnets, tells you that he's doing exactly what Hamlet did at the end of his life.
	That Shakespeare, too, has his doubts, that faith has been one thing he's relied on, but then again, he's questioned it dramatically.
	Think about Shakespeare's sonnets, where he talks about, over and over again, the immortality that art can convey, right?
	In his plays, his tragedies, he's dealing with exalted themes, right?
	The tenuous balance between salvation and damnation, it's what Keats called Keats, when he read King Lear, I'm sitting down to read King Lear again.
	Keats was writing Endymion, this really floofy kind of beautiful superficial romance, written by a great poet.
	Keats put it away.
	Cold winter day.
	So I'm going to put this away, he says, and I'm going to go back and open King Lear.
	And he says, it is the impassioned battle between damnation and animated clay, right?
	It is the struggle between walking clay and damnation.
	I think that's where Shakespeare found himself.
	I think Keats was right.
	And so, his plays are immortal.
	Faith keeps creeping back into them.
	The debate between the world and the world beyond is all about them.
	But in his sonnets, those most personalist poems, he's trying to say, in spite of all of that, is there something I can write and somebody I can love in such a way that these poems about you will live forever?
	Right?
	And so, like Hamlet at the end, right?
	Shakespeare strikes me as too capacious a thinker to have been comfortable going to heaven or to have been comfortable rotting in the earth.
	And art for him, like we all find our avocations, right?
	What is it that allows us to ponder the imponderables yet keep moving?
	For him, it was art.
	And I think that was his gift.
	And we just passed the 400th year anniversary of his death.
	And so you remember what it says, can I just read you?
	Again, his epitaph, above his, carved into his grave, good friend.
	For Jesus' sake, forbear to dig the dust and close it here.
	Blessed be the man who spares these stones, and cursed be he who moves my bones.
	Right?
	So it says it all.
	Very Hamlet.
	Beautiful.
	So thanks a lot.
	I just wanted to remind people to go to FPEUSA.org to check out the Freedom Project Academy.
	Always a great pleasure.
	I look forward to people's comments.
	This is a very great, deep, and passionate part of my life, which doesn't get as much expression in the philosophy show that I run as perhaps it should or could.
	So please, if you find these kinds of conversations enjoyable, and this is much better as a dialogue than a monologue, we'll do a play, not a soliloquy, and let me know in the comments below.
	I'd love to do King Lear if there are other stories or books or poems that you would like to.
	You mentioned crime and punishment.
	There's a conversation!
	Yes, well I think that would be fantastic as well.
	So yeah, let us know what you think of these kinds of conversations below.
	Does it stimulate you to want to go and see the play?
	You cheaters who are now watching it with this without checking it out!
	If you've seen it before, does it make you want to go and check out these works again?
	Please let us know below and thanks so much for your time everyone.
	Thank you very much Dr. Pesta.
	I'm sure we'll talk again soon.

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