Shakespeare: Nature's Infinite BookHarold Bloom famously claimed that Shakespeare invented the human being, or at least our modern conception of ourselves. This semester we will look at how Shakespeare framed human conceptions of the self and explored the complex relationship between the "self" and the "other," as represented by religious, familial, cultural, and eco-political power structures. Welcome to an exploration of the human consciousness in contact, for better or worse, with society.
Romeo and JulietAct 1The opening act of Romeo and Juliet establishes a world in which identity is not chosen but inherited, in which the very air of Verona is saturated with obligations the young have never consented to, and in which the first stirrings of innocent desire are already threatened by mindless hatred. We open this play with a foundational question that we will return to again and again for the entire semester: What does it mean to try to become yourself in a world that decided who you are before you were born? Act 2Romeo and Juliet attempt something radical: they try to build a private world inside a public war. The balcony scene is not merely romantic. It is an act of philosophical rebellion, a mutual agreement to strip away surnames and meet as unmediated selves. "What's in a name?" is not a throwaway line. It is the central question of the play, and possibly of your life as a young adult. But Shakespeare is already warning us: a secret foundation is still a foundation, and what is built in hiding must eventually face the light.
Act 3Everything breaks. Mercutio dies making a joke. Tybalt dies in a rage. Romeo kills his wife's cousin within hours of marrying her. The world the lovers tried to build in private is demolished by the public violence they thought they could ignore. This act asks the hardest version of our semester question: what happens when the world you were born into refuses to let you leave? And what happens to love when it discovers it cannot exist outside of history?
Act 4Act 4 belongs almost entirely to Juliet, and it is the loneliest stretch of the play. Abandoned by her family, separated from Romeo, and handed a vial of poison by the one adult she trusted, she faces a choice that no fourteen-year-old should have to make. The Friar's plan is desperate and theatrical. Juliet's willingness to follow it is something else entirely: an act of terrifying courage driven by the only agency left to her. Pay attention to what Shakespeare does here with silence, obedience, and performance. Juliet is not passive. She is acting in every sense of the word.
Act 5The ending we were promised in the Prologue but refused to believe. Romeo and Juliet die not because fate demanded it, but because every system around them, family, church, state, failed them at the exact moments it mattered most. The tragedy is not that young lovers died. The tragedy is that Verona needed their deaths to see what it had become. Shakespeare leaves us with the most uncomfortable version of our question: what kind of world requires the destruction of its children before it will consider changing?
HamletAct 1The opening act of Hamlet introduces a world where something is rotting from the inside out, and everyone can smell it but no one wants to talk about it. A dead king walks the battlements. His brother sits on his throne and sleeps in his bed. And a young man home from university is asked to do the one thing no philosophy course prepares you for: act on the knowledge that the people who raised you may be monsters. Hamlet is not paralyzed by indecision in Act 1. He is paralyzed by clarity. He sees exactly what Denmark is, and the weight of that seeing is almost unbearable. We begin the semester's second major text with a question that will shadow every scene that follows: what do you owe a world that has betrayed you, and at what point does loyalty to a corrupt system become its own kind of corruption?
Act 2Hamlet begins "performing" madness, and Shakespeare challenges us to figure out where the performance ends and the real thing begins. Hamlet stalls. He schemes. A traveling actor weeps for a fictional queen, a play within a play, while Hamlet watches the reaction of his uncle. And still he doesn't act. But this delay is not cowardice. It is the behavior of someone who understands that once you act, you become part of the drama, playing a part in the intrigue you are trying to expose. You become, by "acting," what you hate. The play-within-the-play is not just a clever trap. It is Hamlet trying to find a way to force the truth into the open without becoming a murderer to do it. The question of this act is deceptively simple: if you know something terrible is true, how much proof do you need before you are willing to destroy your own life to confront it? Isn't it easier just to "act" instead as if our world isn't crashing down around us? Self-preservation, not just protecting our life but protecting who we essentially are, is often accomplished by NOT being who we DON'T want to be rather than being the person we want to become.
Act 3Catastrophe, when it happens, comes not in a grand confrontation but with a curtain and a wrong guess. Hamlet finally gets his proof. Claudius flinches at the play. And then, in the space of a single scene, Hamlet destroys every relationship he has left. He needlessly brutalizes Ophelia with verbal cruelty. He kills Polonius through a curtain, mistaking a foolish old man for a guilty king. "To be or not to be" gets all the attention, but the real crisis of Act 3 is what happens after certainty arrives. Hamlet now knows the truth and has acted on it, and the result is not justice but collateral damage. This act exposes an uncomfortable reality: righteous anger and cruelty can wear the same face, and the people who get hurt the most are almost never the ones who deserve it.
Act 4Hamlet is shipped back to his university in England. Ophelia loses her mind and takes her life. Laertes comes roaring back to Elsinore demanding blood for his father's death, and Claudius, ever the politician, channels that grief into a weapon. Shakespeare does something devastating here by placing Hamlet offstage for most of the act and showing us what his actions look like from the outside. Ophelia's madness is not decorative. It is the portrait of a woman crushed between the men around her, every one of whom claimed to love her while using her as a pawn. Shakespeare's brilliant staging places Hamlet largely out of frame while the shitstorm he started rages on without him.
Act 5Hamlet returns home changed. The graveyard scene is not morbid decoration. It is the moment Hamlet finally stops performing and starts seeing clearly. Yorick's skull is the end of abstraction. Death is not a philosophical concept. It is the destination of every person he has ever known, including himself. When Hamlet tells Horatio that "the readiness is all," he is not surrendering. He is arriving at something harder than action and harder than delay: acceptance that you cannot control outcomes, only choices. The final scene is a bloodbath, but it is also, strangely, the only honest moment in the entire play. Every mask comes off. Every poison finds its target. Shakespeare ends the play not with triumph but with a stage full of bodies and a foreign army walking through the door.
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Course Documents
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