Episode #243 ... Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Hello everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/philosophize This. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today. So today we're talking about the play Hamlet by Shakespeare. And this being the third episode we've done on his work, I want to do something a little more inspirational this time. See, usually we talk about the events of the play. We give analysis from people who have dedicated their lives to Shakespeare, and both those will certainly be in this episode. But the thing I want to do that's a bit more today is to inspire you to read classic literature like this a bit differently. I want to talk about reading this play more like a philosopher might be reading it. If part of the job of a philosopher is to take concepts that seem really familiar to us, something like love or justice, and if part of what they do is work through them and show us a whole other side of the thing that can help us see the world in a new way, well, then Hamlet is a very familiar play from classic literature. Right? So what if a philosopher reworked an entire play to similarly give us an exciting new way of seeing it that breathes life into the work and makes it even more relevant? Building on what Nietzsche, Hegel, Benjamin, and others thought about Hamlet as a play, philosopher Simon Critchley and psychoanalyst Jameson Webster are going to team up and interpret Hamlet as a play through a much more modern, tragic philosophical lens than you typically hear about. And while they're not against more traditional takes on the play, they just call them a kind of biscuit box Shakespeare. That's the term they used in an interview one time. Meaning, it's kinda generic. Right? Like, there's a take on Hamlet that everybody knows. It's the kind of reading of the play that'll get you an A on your test in school. There's nothing evil about that. But they do think that Shakespeare should shake something up in people if it can. And the reading of the play they lay out in their book called Stay Illusion, The Hamlet Doctrine, is gonna be something that does just that by the end of this episode here today. Anyway, lot to cover, so let's get right into the events of the play. The play begins at the front walls of a castle in Denmark. Now, the guards of this castle, stationed up in the watchtowers at night, for the last few nights, they've seen something that's been kind of freaking them out a bit. There's a ghost that's been visiting them on the front platform of the castle that when it shows up, it just comes up to them, stares them in the face, and when they try to go up to talk to it, it turns around and leaves, just like everyone in my elementary …