First Friday Lectures: "Prologue to the Omen Coming On: Shakespeare's Hamlet on the Peaceful Transition of Power"

Shakespeare’s Hamlet provokes a mare’s nest of interpretive questions so various and so profound as to foreclose, apparently, any final word. This is well known. But is the play really so disorderly? Is it ultimately impossible to tell what Shakespeare intends audiences to recognize as his intentions? In this lecture, I will argue that such despair is due to a certain neglect, a sloppiness even, in reading practice. If we address the text of the play with naïve minds, purposely abandoning all that we think we already know about it, there are discoveries to be made of structure, order, and intention, beginning with the first scene. From the first scene to the final scene, Shakespeare’s Hamlet frames its story expressly as the social cost when the peaceful transition of power in a state is violated. Within this frame, a causal chain can be traced stretching from the covert coup d’état, through each of the subplots, and finally to the pile of bodies onstage, with the promise that it is a story that must be told publicly as soon as it has happened.