In the Senior English course I teach, we’re currently reading Hamlet. Teaching Shakespeare is always a challenge. Though I now find his work delightful, I definitely recall struggling with Macbeth and Julius Caesar in high school. The language of the plays, especially the tragedies, is often abstruse even when Shakespeare employs words that remain in modern usage. Even now I still have to refer frequently to the notes and a dictionary. Despite the assiduity the plays demand, I find Hamlet scintillating, sublime, hilarious, meditative, and ultimately transcendent.
For many, Hamlet is the triumphant expression of Shakespeare’s genius, a genius uniquely manifested by meandering digressions of its eponymous hero. Hamlet’s faith, in himself and in his fellow man, is shaken by his father’s death and his mother’s marriage. Perturbed by these traumas, he begins to question not only himself, but also the motives of those around him. His rantings and actions intimate that true knowledge of self or other is unattainable;
“Seems” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.” (A1.S2.79)
“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” (A2.S2.273-275)
Though our imaginative faculties are boundless, we are quite literally bounded by the limits of our perceptions. If our minds are limitless, how can we ever know ourselves? Limited by what we see and what we hear, can we ever know, with any certainty, anyone other than ourselves?Rendered faithless by this psychological conflict, embodied by the contradictory desires of his mother and father, Hamlet is paralyzed with indecision. The source of his conflict is not the question of revenge and forgiveness, but his own existential crisis. If we cannot know ourselves or others, is there a purpose to our thoughts, to our acts, to our humanity? And without purpose, there is madness. Though his rantings may reflect Hamlet’s guile, his madness is also a manifestation of his struggle to make meaning, to find purpose. His madness is our madness.
However, my students, as they directly expressed to me the other day, often do not grasp the basic meaning of the lines Shakespeare crafted to express that madness. Reading in a veil of sheer bewilderment, it is unsurprising that they neither appreciate the grandeur of the language nor engage personally with the text and its cast. How can you relate to a character whose words lack meaning in the most literal sense? In the past, I have had success dispelling this fog by attenuating the reading schedule and lecturing in the Socratic method. However, with this course, I had hoped to eschew traditional pedagogical paradigm of lecture laced with questions, followed by moderated discussion and instead allow the students to generate and direct class discourse without my overbearing influence. Until Hamlet, the students were slowly coming to appreciate this approach; they were even beginning to address one another rather than always facing me. But the Prince of Denmark has quickly quelled that momentum. I even tried encouraging a discussion about the lack of discussion, but this, too, went nowhere.
Though many of my students are all too eager put down the text and pick up Sparknotes after the first formidable passage, I do empathize with them. Having read a drama of Shakespeare’s in every year of high school, many of them are simply bedraggled by the bard. Furthermore, many of them don’t understand why Shakespeare merits so much more attention than any other writer. Why would they find his works profound when they sometimes only see that which we explicitly illuminate for them? For many of them, “Shakespeare” is a useless dead language, spoken once a year in English class. If they aren’t ardent about the stage or literature, what personal incentive (beyond the grade, which, if they can write and listen, is irrelevant) do they have to put forth the effort that would be necessary to begin to glean the purpose and character of Shakespeare’s verse?
Amidst these doubts, I found an unlikely voice–one of my student’s–championing Shakespeare’s claim to our attention. Unprompted, he had posted a lengthy reflection on his Senior blog [a medium for students to explore there own interests] addressing the relevance of that “old dead English dude.” For him, Hamlet is relevant not because of Shakespeare’s unparalled eloquence or his influence on modern literature, but because “Hamlet is everyone:” that within the pyschological complexity of Hamlet’s conflict, we can recognize and thus better apprehend our own tensions and struggles.
