Episode #243 ... Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Stephen West· Host0:00

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!. patreon.com/philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis 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 wanted 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, Benjamin, and others thought about Hamlet as a play, philosopher Simon Critchley and psychoanalyst Jamison 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