The Book Club: Hamlet by William Shakespeare with Andrew Klavan | The Book Club

Welcome to the Book Club. I'm Michael Knowles, and today we will be discussing The Greatest Play Ever Written, Hamlet, by good old Billy Shakespeare. To help us discuss that, we're joined by Andrew Klavan. It's good to be here. I know you from somewhere. We have met before. I think we've met before. Drew, thanks for coming on. It's great to see you. Billy Big Boy, they call him. Billy Big Boy. Before we get into why this is the greatest play of all time, for people who haven't read the play or who have only read part of it, because it's a very, very long play. It's four hours performed. A quick synopsis, I think it could be subtitled Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or you think your family's bad. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or why you should make a decision quickly. Make up your mind. The play is about Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. His father has just died. His mother has immediately shacked up with his father's brother, so the uncle. To be fair, they're married. They're married. Yeah, they're married. The play kind of opens on this wedding, and a ghost purporting to be Hamlet's father tells him that the uncle murdered him, and he says, avenge me, avenge me, and Hamlet doesn't know if the ghost is real or a demon or he's just imagining all of it, and he goes back and forth between indecision, trying to figure out his plan, and then everything completely falls apart, and all the while, there is this kind of foil to Hamlet, who's the Prince of Norway, Fortinbras, who's plotting to try to take over Denmark, so that's kind of the backdrop to all of this as the action is happening in Denmark. That's five hours of a play. It's a four-hour play. It's Shakespeare's longest play. Why is it the greatest play ever made? It's not only the greatest play ever written. It is a pinnacle of the human imagination. I mean, Newton's Laws, the founding of America, Plato, Aristotle, Hamlet. Seriously, these are things that you look at and think, like, wow, that's what the human being can do, and the reason it's the great play is it's written at the moment when the modern world appears. One of the shocking things about Hamlet is the minute you hear his voice, you think, ah, that's us, and it's suddenly, out of history, our voice appears, and Shakespeare anticipates every single philosophical and emotional problem that is gonna grow up out of what is the great division that causes modernity, which is the Reformation, and he sees it all coming, and there are scenes in it that could've happened, that could've happened yesterday and may well still happen tomorrow, and it really is, if you don't know Hamlet, if you haven't been introduced to Hamlet, in some sense, you don't know yourself. If you don't know the King James Bible and Hamlet and some of Shakespeare, you really don't know where we come from and who we are, and on top of this, by the way, I should just mention, it's also a really good play in the same way that Die Hard is a really good movie. I mean, it's exciting. It starts with a ghost. It has murder. It has love affairs. It has everything in it. Well, it was extremely popular when Shakespeare wrote it. Just think about how amazing it is that all these centuries later, it remains basically the most popular play in the world. I have read this probably eight or nine times. I have been in multiple productions of it. I have seen multiple productions of it. It endures as a popular work, not just as some dusty book to put on the shelves. You mentioned the Reformation, the Protestant Revolution, as the kind of inciting incident of the play. This is the key to the whole thing. Hamlet has just gotten back to Denmark from school in Wittenberg. Which is right. Now, we don't even know when the play, it's very hard to tell when the play takes place. It could have taken place before the Reformation, but Shakespeare doesn't care. He knows that he's writing about this great thing that has happened, and of course, it's worth as much as your life is worth to say too much about it. He can't really take a stand in any position on it, but he doesn't have to, because he just wants to see what it's about. But it's not just Wittenberg. It's the fact that it begins with a ghost. One of the big problems that Martin Luther and the Protestants had with the Catholic Church was the idea of purgatory. And they said, this is not in the Bible. This is simply a creation of the human imagination. And if there's no purgatory, then there can't be any ghosts. And Puritans were absolutely certain about this, in spite of the fact that people saw ghosts. So nobody thought there was no such thing as ghosts. The question is what they are. And of course, in spite of the fact that there's a ghost in the Bible, when the Witch of Endor brings back the ghost of Samuel to talk to Saul, and what the Protestants would say is, no, that was a demon. So Hamlet shows up on these barricades, and he's already very depressed. His mom has dumped his father instantly to marry his uncle. The wedding between the king and queen is two months after his father's death. And so this is the opening of the play. He's out there, and he hears about this ghost. Right, and he's a guy who is very sure that he's an authentic person. He says, I don't know about seams. Nothing, I have that within me that surpasseth show. He is a real person. And then he meets this ghost, and the ghost says to him, I'm in purgatory, and I'm suffering. And he immediately falls apart. He starts to say, in the original story that the play is based on, he pretends to be mad to avoid being found out by the king that he knows too much. But we don't know why he pretends to be mad in Shakespeare's version, and we're not sure whether he is mad or not. And the things that he says in his madness, that we're not sure is madness or not, are things that are being said today all the time. When you think about the postmodernists, when you think about the idea that language doesn't convey meaning, and you say to Hamlet, what are you reading? And in his madness, he says, I'm reading words, words, words, they have no meaning anymore. When you think about relativism, the idea that there's nothing that is good or bad, but thinking makes it so, that line comes from Hamlet. Shakespeare knows that once the moral certainty of Catholicism has shattered, there is no way anymore to decide what the moral universe is made of. It's just, it's all relative. And then there's this amazing speech that he makes when he's pretending to be mad, where he says, I'm sad, I've lost all my mirth, and the entire world has changed. Now I look at the sky, the sky's supposed to be beautiful, and the sky's no longer beautiful. I look at the earth, which is such an amazing thing, and I look at even mankind, and he has lost his beauty for me, and that's the state we find ourselves in today. What is reality, and how much of what reality is, is within us, and you have theories now where people say, well, everything we think is a fiction. Human rights, it's a fiction. Money, it's a fiction, and people like me say, no, it's not a fiction, it's a description of something that exists within the human soul, and Hamlet no longer knows whether things exist within his soul, or whether he's completely living in a delusion, and that's the modern world. And that is the modern world. It gets to what you've just mentioned, my favorite speech in the entire play, which is what a piece of work is a man, and it's one of the most famous ones as well. He's got these two old school pals, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They're kind of comic relief, and they're sent in to spy by the king on Hamlet to figure out why he's mad, and they say, tell us Lord, why are you mad? What's going on? And he says, I will tell you why. So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery and your secrecy to the king and queen molt no feather. I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you. This brave oar-hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire, why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. And he goes on to go from the creation to man himself. He says, what a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals, and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? One aspect of this, I think the greatest speech in the entire play, is that it can be read as a rewriting of Psalm 80. It was actually your son who pointed this out to me. Well, again and again, there are biblical references like that, that this is, in the psalm, they say, why does God even pay attention to man? But it is an amazing thing. You're a wonderful sky, you're wonderful. But all of this is lost. Hamlet has been thrown back to the moment when Jesus stands before Pilate, and Jesus says, I am the truth, I speak the truth, and all who love the truth, listen to my voice, and Pilate says, what is truth? And suddenly, in the Catholic world, in the world of Christendom, we believe, oh, Jesus is the truth. But once you remove that certainty, you're right back with Pontius Pilate saying, what is truth? And that's the question of the play, what is truth? How do I know what reality is? What's fascinating about it is Hamlet is very frustrated that he can't decide to carry out this revenge. And the things that make him most frustrated are times when people are pretending something is important, but it's not. So he sees the players, he sees the actors, and the guy gives this beautiful speech about Hecuba. There's a troop of actors comes through town, and so he watches them and directs them. And the guy cries, and he turns pale, and Hamlet says, who is he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him that he should be able to behave that way? When Fortenbrad goes off to war to fight over a piece of territory that doesn't matter, he says, look, those people are going off to die for something that doesn't matter, and I have this real grudge to work out. My father was murdered, and I can't do anything. And so he finds this division. This is one of Shakespeare's biggest obsessions, the division between being and seeming, what you seem and what you really are. And he works it out even further in the question of race in Othello. But right here, it's what is, how real is your internal world, and how real, if you don't know how real the internal world is, how do you know what's real? Right, well, he says it at the very beginning of the play when they're talking about the ghost, one of the most famous lines. There's so many famous lines from every line. But he says, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And this is actually the exact same paragraph where he's deciding that he's gonna feign madness. Maybe he's really going mad himself. There are all these things, and he's so afraid. He's so afraid of what to do. At one point, he's got the dagger. He's ready to kill his uncle, the king, but he won't do it because his uncle is praying, and he doesn't know if he's gonna send his uncle straight up to heaven. He's doing him a favor. This question of what happens after death, right? This is why, to be or not to be, the famous speech where he says, the fear of something after death, and conscience makes cowards of us all, that we're operating now in this field of absolute unknowing. And when you have absolute unknowing, when you have no thesis, let alone faith, but you have no theory of what is real, you're completely lost. And one of the things about the play, too, is that even though it's a great play that you just follow intensely, if you can understand the language, you can get past the language barrier, it's a play, it's a gripping play. It's a mysterious play. Every actor who's ever played Hamlet says, he defeats me. There's something about him. And a lot of the mystery happens in what, for us, would be the third act, the last part. Hamlet goes off, and he gets kidnapped by pirates. And there's a plot. The king has sent him off to his death, and he escapes this plot. And he comes back, and he seems to be changed. He comes back kind of at peace with death. There's a providence, there's a destiny that shapes our end. There's providence in a fall of a sparrow. If death doesn't come today, it'll come tomorrow. He has this real kind of stoical approach that he didn't have before. And yet, in the middle of this, he gets into a fight with Laertes. Ophelia has died. So Ophelia's his girlfriend. His girlfriend, and Laertes' sister. And she dies. She commits suicide, essentially. And they bury her, and Laertes is in the grave, shouting, bury me with her. I'm so full of grief. And Hamlet, who begins the play by saying, I don't seem to be grieving. I am grieving. The seeming is not important. Jumps into the grave with Laertes and says, you can't pretend to be more sad than I am. I can be just as sad as you are. And you think, like, he is mad. He really is crazy. And it's very hard to know. He then gets swept into the end of the play. What you want from Hamlet, what you want the play to do, is you want Hamlet to say, that's it. Now that I've accepted death, I know reality. I'm off to kill the king. Zounds, you're dead. And he doesn't say it. He gets swept into the end of the play, just like he's been swept into everything. And that last act opens with the gravedigger discussing whether, has Ophelia drowned herself, or has she been drowned? Did she will her death, or was she just swept away? And we're left without an answer. We really don't know whether Hamlet has made a decision, or simply destiny has swept him away. This question of seeming and being, of performance and reality, is, I think, the central question of the play. It's not the central subject, like would be the Protestant Reformation. But it is the central action of it. And you see so much of the performance there, even in the to be or not to be monologue, which actually is probably the most famous of the play. That isn't a performance. He doesn't put that on to trick people. I mean, he's saying that to himself. He's working out to himself, whether it is better to be alive, or to be dead. Why you don't kill yourself, because you're afraid of something after death. This is the thing about the soliloquies. I think there are more soliloquies in Hamlet than in any of his other plays. And there's soliloquies of a man wrestling with himself, which simply doesn't exist in literature that I can think of, up until that moment. This is the first time a man has divided mind. You get it from the minute he meets the ghost. He says to the ghost, as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, I will speed to my revenge. And you think, well, that's not a very bloody metaphor, you know, I mean, like a meditation. Wait a minute, he becomes divided almost the minute he confronts the ghost. And he remains divided, to be or not to be. You know, he has this argument with himself. And that's such a modern thing. And it's one of the reasons when you meet Hamlet, you immediately say, oh, that's me, that's us. And you don't, from any character, there's no character in fiction up to that moment where you, you know, we always translate the classics into ourselves, but Hamlet, that's us. And he concludes nothing in the soliloquy. He says, thus, he's trying to decide, am I gonna kill myself? Well, maybe I'll go to hell. I don't wanna go to hell, but I don't wanna live. And he says, thus, conscience does make cowards of us all. You would think conscience does not make a coward. It actually encourages you to do the right thing. But throughout, you see the performance. So the performance of Hamlet encountering the actors, and then he has the actors put on a play, and he says, the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. He's gonna have the actors enact the murder of his father. And if the king reacts in a guilty manner, he's gonna know that the ghost was telling the truth, and the king really killed his father. He goes on, even at the end of the play, with the fencing battle between him and Laertes. That is a performance that is being put on. And not just that, when he dies, his last words to Horatio, and Horatio, of course, is derived from oratio, to speak. He says, tell my story. And Fortenbroth says, carry his body like a soldier to the stage, because had he been put on, he would have been this and this. So in other words, Hamlet is transformed into the play through his death. So his life becomes something that we are supposed to now experience and move on from. And it really is, it's a bottomless play. We could sit here and talk about it for hours and hours. But it is this thing where Shakespeare's saying, what is happening to us now is what is happening to us forever. And so you have to come back to this moment and remember this, because these philosophical divisions are the philosophical divisions that are the human condition. It's an amazing piece of work. And as we are seeing this division always, am I performing on the stage? Am I performing for the king and his advisor Polonius to try to trick them? Am I performing for my friends? Am I really doing something? Am I really grieving? And that blurred line, that distinction falling away, is, as you say, Shakespeare saying, this is the real thing. The very sense of ourselves. I mean, the issues that we deal with today in politics, can a man become a woman? Can a woman do things that a man can do? Is a person a real thing? Or can you change who you are? Can you suddenly be? All of that is contained in the play and all those questions are in the play. Because once that connection between being and seeming, between internal world and external world, once that breaks down, even in imagination, everything is broken down and you have no place to put your feet. And that is why the big division in human life and certainly in Western life is Jesus saying, I am the truth and Pilate saying, what is truth? What does that even mean? And the actual discussion that comes on, not just about Hamlet, but about the writing of Hamlet, New Hamlet, actually partakes of that same question, which is that people don't believe Shakespeare is Shakespeare. They say Shakespeare was a woman. Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare is me. I would like that theory. I want credit for Hamlet. I like Woody Allen said that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. He was somebody else named Shakespeare. You know, I think most of these theories are because we know, you know, it's funny, we don't know less about him than we know about other playwrights of the time, but it's not very much. And so there's a theory that he was Catholic, which would change the way we read his plays and they say they found a document in his father's rafters that says his father was a secret Catholic. We just don't know. But the one thing I think is ridiculous is the whole idea that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare derives from snobbery. It derives from the fact that this working class guy who knew little Latin and less Greek, Ben Johnson says of him, that he couldn't possibly have written these plays. To be perfectly honest with you, when I read his plays, and especially when you read his plays altogether, I find it hard to believe that any human being could have written them, that any one mind could have contained the world as they did. If you read the plays of Shakespeare and you come to understand them, you really come to understand human nature in a way that you won't any other way. You know, I agree with you. I think it is almost impossible to believe that one man wrote all these plays, but I think it is less possible to believe that a committee wrote all of these plays. And a bunch of people wrote them. There's no, and you can just see the return, he returns to themes again and again. He returns to ideas again and again. Phrases repeat themselves. You can see his way. And you know why he's so good too, and he doesn't get enough credit for it, is he's an actor. Shakespeare was an actor. This guy knew everything about the stage. Through and through, he knew everything about actors. He knew everything about performance. He even gives acting advice in Hamlet, through the person of Hamlet. Hamlet tells the players, speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as leaf the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently. He goes on and on and on, explaining how to play. And it's funny because his advice to them is essentially, don't seem to be something, be something, but of course they are only seeming it. It's really interesting, Polonius, who's kind of the boomer of the plays. He's the boomer? Yeah, he's the old man from another world. The advisor to the king and a total boomer. But his advice, and he is like a prating idiot, as Hamlet says, but his advice is good. And he says to his son, to thine own self be true, right? And of course, what makes him a fool is that's the old world. That's the world that's fallen apart. How do you be true to yourself if you don't know what yourself is? How do you be true to yourself if you don't know what the outside world is? And so it's really sad for Polonius that, I mean, the two people whose deaths Hamlet is responsible for, Polonius and Ophelia, are both people who have a kind of certainty about the world that is gone. And when he sees Ophelia reading, he says she's praying, basically. He says, in your prayers, all my sins be remembered. This is the world that is collapsing around him and is taking him with it. Great literature, you go back to it and you go back to it and it raises more images and more questions every single time. And nowhere is that truer than Shakespeare and nowhere is that truer than in Hamlet. I've read it, what, eight or nine times? You've probably read it. I've read it so many times and seen it. I've seen almost every version of it. It's so beautiful. I mean, this is the other thing. You just have to stop for just a minute and talk about how beautiful it is. Some people are put off by the language because there's words that the Elizabethans use that we don't use anymore. Once you get past that, and the edition you're having, the Folgers edition, has good notes that you can see that are on the facing page. Once you get past that, it is like listening to music, but like music that is filled with meaning and there's just nothing else like it. It is even better than listening to us talk about it, which is very difficult to imagine. Hard to believe. But it is. We'll have to end it there. We could go on 10 more hours. Drew, thank you so much for coming on. That is The Book Club. Be sure to tune in next month. I'm Michael Knowles. Happy reading. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Book Club on Prager U. Prager U is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming. Thank you very much.