If you've ever said to yourself during a performance of Hamlet,

what is Hamlet thinking? You're not the only one.

But did you ever stop to wonder what Hamlet thinks about thinking itself?

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger director.

Hamlet is a play obsessed with the difference between inside and outside.

When Hamlet tells us he has that within, which passes show, or that he'll put on an antic disposition,

Shakespeare points out the gap between outward

appearance and inward reality. To a modern audience, that seems obvious. We all feel that our

innermost thoughts are, well, private, and that we can choose which version of ourselves we want

to present to the world.

But thinking that way about our own thoughts requires a whole series of ideas and assumptions

about how the mind works, assumptions that wouldn't have seemed obvious at all to Shakespeare

or his contemporaries.

If we're to have any hope of figuring out what on earth Hamlet was thinking, first we have

to learn what Shakespeare would have thought about the act of thinking.

At least that's the argument Helen Hackett makes in her new book, The Elizabethan Mind,

Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty.

Hackett, who teaches at University College London, has produced a wide-ranging study

of the many conflicting ideas that Elizabethans had about their own minds. She concludes

that the period marked an unusually rich moment for theories of consciousness and for the

representation of thought in literature.

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