Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash 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 wanted 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 to 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, Benhamene, and others thought about Hamlet as a play, philosopher Simon

Critchley and psychoanelist 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 kind of 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 going to be something that does just that by the end of this episode here today. Anyway, a 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 him, stares him 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 school. So on this particular night that the play begins, the guards have come more prepared this time. They brought along a guy named Horatio, who's a scholar, he's a friend of the royal family, and their plan is to show him this ghost, hoping that he'll know maybe what the right thing to do next is. Sure enough, they're standing on this platform on this night, and the ghost shows up again. And as Horatio sees it, he notices something

they had warned him about. The face of the ghost looks exactly like the former king of the castle

...