Okay, let's get started. Today's lecture is on Hamlet. Hamlet's probably first performed around

1600, and it's a play, as you probably know, with an interesting textual history. There are three

distinct editions in 1603 and 1604 in quarto texts and then in the folio of 1623.

I'm not going to talk much about the textual differences in the play, but I think if you're studying it and writing about it,

it's well worth having a sense whether the things you're writing about are the same in all three texts or whether they're different.

One way to do that is to look at the Arden three Hamlet, which prints all three texts.

But there are also online versions, the enfolded Hamlet, which is probably one of the easier ways

to look at textual differences.

But that's not something I'm going to talk about today.

Telling the plot of Hamlet might seem unnecessary, but let's do it anyway.

In outline, Hamlet is a revenge plot in which the ghost of Hamlet's father tells him that his

death was murder and reveals that the murderer was his brother, Hamlet's uncle Claudius.

Claudius has now married Gertrude, Hamlet's mother.

There follows a long period of testing the ghost's information via a performed play and some soul searching about the morality of

killing Claudius. Hamlet mistakenly kills an old courtier, Polonius, whose daughter, Ophelia, goes

mad with grief and whose son Laotis

comes to claim revenge. Meanwhile, fought in brass, a foreign prince, is marching through Denmark.

In a climactic scene, Laertes in the Hamlet fight a fencing match, but foils which are poisoned by

the king take both their lives, not before both Claudius and Gertrude have also been poisoned.

The entrance of Fortimbras into this shattered kingdom brings the play to a somber conclusion.

So I've said before that some of my focusing questions for this series of lectures seem very naive,

and perhaps this is the worst one yet.

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