Shakespeare & Possibility, Part 3: The Tragedy of Hamlet and the Sistine Madonna

Shakespeare and Possibility continues with the 13th Annual Notre Dame London Shakespeare lecture, delivered by Margreta de Grazia, Emerita Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books on Shakespeare have drawn attention to the belatedness (and inadequacy) of concepts that have been key to the study of Shakespeare (and literature more generally). These range from the apparatus of the modern editorial tradition (Shakespeare Verbatim [Oxford, 1991]), to the psychologizing of Hamlet (Hamlet without Hamlet [Cambridge, 2007]), to the chronologizing, periodizing and secularizing of the Shakespeare canon (Four Shakespearean Period Pieces Chicago, 2021]). Her most recent book, Shakespeare without a Life (Oxford, 2023), focuses on our current preoccupation with Shakespeare’s biography, an interest not shared -- as her book argues – by the first two centuries of Shakespeare’s readers. She has also co-edited two Cambridge Companions to Shakespeare with Sir Stanley Wells, 2001 and 2010.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:06

I will shortly hand over to my colleague, Bojka Sokolova, for a fuller introduction to this evening's lecture. Before that, allow me to say just a couple of words about Shakespeare and Notre Dame. Every year, the Shakespeare lecture is one of the highlights in our programming here in London, and in turn, this highlights the significance of Shakespeare in the work of the university, both here and in the U. S. Indeed, Shakespeare plays an increasingly important part In how Notre Dame seeks to contribute to significant debates in the academy and beyond, not least around questions of community engagement and social justice. Here in London, in our teaching, we are keen to ensure that with Shakespeare, students can deepen not only their academic study. but also their appreciation of the transformative potential of Shakespeare in bringing people together across cultures and worldviews. In our research, we are developing a long term collaboration on the wide ranging question of Shakespeare and the common good, together with Shakespeare in Notre Dame, the Robinson Shakespeare Company of the Robinson Community Learning Center, the Von Heugel Institute for Critical Catholic Inquiry, and St. Edmund's College in Cambridge. And in special events like ours this evening, we invite leading scholars and practitioners to share their wisdom with us. for an ever greater appreciation of the richness of Shakespeare's works and their significance. It is now a great pleasure to invite Bojka Sokolová to introduce our lecture this evening. Bojka regularly teaches courses on Shakespeare here at Notre Dame London, and in doing so is regularly an inspiration to our students, who often cite Bojka's courses as one of the highlights of their time with us. Bojka is one of the founders and currently a board member of the European Shakespeare Research Association, and her scholarship constantly sheds new light on Shakespeare's works and the history of their performance. in Europe and beyond. The most recent manifestation of this is the publication of the second edition of The Merchant of Venice in the Shakespearean performance series published by Manchester University Press, which Bojka co edited with Kirillka Stavreva. The book stands out for how the authors play, pay close attention to the social and historical pressures shaping the history of the play's performances, inviting readers to recognize the necessity to remember and contextualize ephemeral theater history. It is Bojka's vision and energy that from its inception to this day has made and continues to make the annual Shakespeare lecture here in Notre Dame London possible. Please join me in welcoming Bojka to introduce our lecture this evening.

Speaker 2 2:46

Thank you, Vittorio. That's very generous. Welcome, everybody. welcome, Stanley. I'm delighted to see here among the audience Some of our previous speakers, Professor Anne Thompson, Professor Lois Potter and Professor Michael Dobson. I would like to welcome our sizable online audience as well. there are people from the U. S. UK and from all across, Europe. I would like especially to extend a warm welcome to our Ukrainian colleagues who have joined us online. For a third time since the 24th of February 2022, this lecture meant as a gesture of respect for a major Shakespeare scholar, is also a space to remind ourselves of the courage of our Ukrainian academic colleagues whose circumstances of life are almost impossible to imagine. Here I would like to remember the work of the Shakespeare Volunteer Group organized by members of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Center. Their days often start at the crack of dawn, through their hands pass tons of medicines, clothes, food, all necessary for the soldiers on the front line. These same hands then write lecture notes, grade student papers, publish academic work, all this while their homes are being bombarded and their hearts battered by loss. However, at the moment, Ukrainian intellectuals and educators are at the forefront of yet another battle. The battle to preserve their culture and foster a new, outward looking generation. From the very start of this war, Russia has specifically targeted young people and the culture of Ukraine. It is not only destroying the material world of the country, but kidnapping the children and consistently plundering its cultural treasures. In these circumstances, any support we can offer is crucial. And there, the back on these little tables, there are flyers with bank accounts to which you can contribute, to the work of the Shakespeare Volunteer, group. No less important, however, is the academic backing we can offer. One of the many ways of doing this is to is by keeping Ukrainian academics connected with international professional networks. And our Shakespeare lecture is a modest contribution to this, as our Ukrainian colleagues are eager to continue to be part of the developments in the world of Shakespeare studies. Allow me now to introduce our speaker, Margareta de Grazia, Emerita Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the finest Renaissance scholars. Margareta received her first degree in English from Bryn Mawr College and proceeded to PhD from Princeton with a specialism in Renaissance studies. At the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for many years, she produced much of her excellent research while teaching generations of students. Her achievement as a teacher has been recognized by two awards for teaching excellence. Degrassi's work is an outstanding example of sophisticated theory and attention to factual detail in combination with an elegant and meticulous writing style. A distinctive feature of her erudite explorations is the capacity to define areas where she can ask questions regarding the foundations of scholarly verities by which Shakespeare studies operate. Her approach is prompted in the wonderfully teasing titles of some of her books, Hamlet Without Hamlet, and her latest, Shakespeare Without a Life. Among her early achievements is the theoretically stylish exploration entitled Shakespeare Verbatim 1991, a book which unwraps the manner in which the processes of editing Shakespeare's texts have formed the way we tend to read the plays. By locating the particular cultural moment when this occurred about 200 years ago, Grazia's book reminds us how editing practices have enabled the construction of Shakespeare, a particular individual to whose mind we search access through his writings. In Hamlet Without Hamlet 2007, she asked us to imagine what will happen if we take out of the play the character of the prince as we think of him now. What would the play be about without the brooding introspective sponge in a shirt, as Brecht calls the prince? What will remain without the incontrovertible possession of modern consciousness and his developed psychology? By looking at examples of the reception of Hamlet during the first 200 years after it was written, she shows how Shakespeare's audience were not interested in Hamlet's interiority, but perhaps more in his antics and erratic behavior. She then pinpoints the moment when the prince became the subject of psychological interest, starting with the writings of Coleridge and the following long history of his appropriation by German philosophy and Freudian analysis. The last three years have marked a new peak in Margrethe's work, with the successive publication of two important books. In four Shakespeare period pieces, 2021, she explores the emergence of now axiomatic ideas, in Shakespeare, and puts them to the test of rigorous examination. In her latest book, Shakespeare Without a Life, 2023.

Speaker 1 9:13

She weaves

Speaker 2 9:13

together various strands, anecdotes, and histories to readjust our optics regarding the belief that a biographical impulse, a desire to know Shakespeare the man, has always been there. As she states in the introduction to her book, for a long spell between 1616 and 1800, Shakespeare's plays and poems were reproduced, discussed, and valued without a biographical narrative. Not only were his works not desperately in need of a biography, they were surviving then perfectly well without one, perhaps all the better for the lack of one, end of quote. And this throws into relief our modern interest in the And sometimes preoccupation with creating a life that links the works to the twists and turns in the life of Shakespeare, the man. Apart from being the author of numerous articles, Margrethe is also editor of important collections, two of them co edited with Professor Stanley Wells. In recognition of her work, erudition, and scholarship in 2021, she was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Who better to lead us on to what will undoubtedly be an intriguing journey involving the Sistine Madonna and the tragedy of Hamlet before and after 1800 than Margrethe. Please welcome Alice.

Speaker 1 10:51

Thank you. Thank you, Vittorio and Bojka for opening this session so warmly and comprehensively, and Bojka, I have to say, that's the best introduction I've ever had in my life. Thank you for that. I'm in awe. I also want to pay respects to Stanley Wells. As I've said before, the Shakespeare I know is the Shakespeare that he has edited, illuminated, contextualized, and brought to life. and in addition to all that, I have to say, I have to acknowledge that he was the first person on this side of the Atlantic to pay notice to my work, and it helped, and I, appreciate that and so much more. Okay, the Sistine Madonna and Prince Hamlet, an odd couple. Why this unlikely, perhaps unprecedented pairing? True, they are both cultural icons, but they are in different media, from different cultures, different centuries, separated by the Reformation. But both painting and tragedy, I will be claiming, undergo secularization in 18th century Germany, and in the process lose the salvational program they once referenced. I conclude with a question. Should this secularization process be reversed and the Christological frame of these two works be restored? She is. This is Sistine Madonna, painted by Raphael in 1512, not long before his early death. The painting was commissioned by Pope Julius II for the high altar of San Sisto, a Benedictine church in Piacenza. In this painting, curtains are drawn to reveal the central mystery of Christianity, the Incarnation, the Word made flesh. The Madonna bears in her arm for all to see the Christ child, God's only begotten son. Here, a remarkable full bodied baby presented to the fallen world he has been born to redeem. Representing that unredeemed world in the church would have been those who viewed the painting as they approached the high altar. The communicants, the Mass, for the painting overlooked the high altar, the most sacred place in the church, where Christianity's principal rite was performed, the Eucharistic sacrifice, the propitiatory offering of Christ's flesh and blood in the form of consecrated bread and wine. The painting gave the illusion of being continuous with the altar. On this slide, there should be a little bit more of the parapet at the bottom, and because it was so close to the altar, it almost looks as if they are continuous. The edge at the bottom of the painting on which the two putti are leaning was made to correspond with the top edge of the stone altar in front of it. During Mass, the two genuflecting life sized saints flanking the Madonna would connect the communicants to the Holy Pair. The saint on our left looks up to implore her intercession for the salvation of the communicants toward whom he would be pointing and upon whom the saint on the right would be looking down. Both these saints are 3rd century martyrs, sacred to the church. San Sisto or Saint Sixtus, on the left, is the eponymous patron of San Sisto Church. Saint Barbara, on the right, is the dedicatee of the altar. Relics of both martyrs were believed to reside in the cavity of the altar. Clearly, the painting was designed to preside over celebrations of the Eucharist in this particular church. Within the altar were the relics of these two saints. Clearly the painting was designed to preside over this celebration. The painting makes visible The mystery of the incarnation, the word made flesh with paint on canvas rather than consecrated bread and wine on the altar. Both, by the way, are called tavelas, both the table of the altar and the table of the painting. In the painting, the Madonna slopes downward from the altar. From the billowy landscape of the picture plane in the direction of the real space of the high altar, though descending toward the altar, she looks not straight ahead in the direction of the communicants, who are in St. Barbara's lowered line of vision, but she looks vaguely elsewhere. It is hard to tell where she is looking. An infrared analysis has shown that Raphael took great pains with her eyes, as he did nothing else in the painting. Perhaps she's looking nowhere. Her eyes, out of focus, glazed over as if blind to the eternal world. Perhaps her gaze is inward, then, introspective. But what does she see inwardly? In paintings of the Madonna and Child from this period, the future is often indicated iconographically, as when the Christ child holds grapes, a sacrificial lamb, a branch from an olive tree from which the cross was legendarily built, A sprig of a thorny flowering plant called Spina Christi, from which Christ's crown was legendarily made. You see it dangling like a yo from a string ear. And, what has to be my favorite, is baby Jesus crumpling the pages of a book as babies are warned to do, the sacred book, unaware that its pages foretell prophecies of his own sacrifice while his mother looks patiently, pensively on. Sometimes the Christ child's future is anticipated in the position of his body, rather than by the symbols he holds. Here he is outstretched on his mother's lap, as he will be in the Pietà. Here he stands upright, ready for the resurrectional takeoff. Here he takes the pose of the Salvator Mundi, right hand raised, with orb and cross in the left. In the case of the Sistine Madonna, those symbols of the imminent crucifixion have been internalized. Her expression anticipates what's to come, the sacrifice of her son. It is toward the future fulfillment that the Madonna carries her offering toward the sacrificial altar, stepping toward the world and not without resistance. Her windblown garments hold her back. She looks almost trance like in her resignation, as if sleepwalking, as she descends toward the stone altar, before and beneath her, as if to deposit her plump child there, offering him up thirty years before his time, no sooner born than sacrificed. And where is the child looking? He appears to be staring deep into the vast space of the nave. In some alarm, terror even. No mindless toying with playthings, I foretell his own sacrifice. Recent research makes sense of his mortified look. In the first decades of the painting's installation above the altar, there was something in the Christ child's line of vision at the far end of the chancel, separating the space of the altar from that of the nave. The clergy from the laity, there stood a rude screen mounted by the great rude of the crucifix, and I have an illustration of a rude screen. The last that was left in Italy, this one is in Venice, but you can, you can see the crucifix there that would have been in alignment with his vision. Protestant churches of all of these churches, all of these churches, the Catholic churches, had their rude screens removed after the Council of Trent in 1563 to counter charges of mystification. It was decreed that the high altar be visible from all sides. For all worshippers. Protestant churches kept their rude screens, however, lopping off only the offending crucifix. before the removal of the rude screen, the Christ child would have been looking straight at where he would end up on the cross. What his mother sees inwardly, he sees directly before him. The imminent and inexorable sacrifice. No wonder he looks scared. He seems even reluctant to be physically parted from his mother, his body still ensconced in hers, his legs locked in place as if disinclined to move on his own, his hand lightly holding her veil as if to prolong his attachment, he's already almost too big to be held. Clearly, this painting was meant to preside over the sacrament of the Eucharist in the Church of San Sisto, to be hung over its high altar, in which the relics of the two depicted saints reside, and directly facing the rude screen, to be observed by communicants as they partook of the Mass. But, this is what the Church looks like, San Sisto looks like now. There is, of course, no road screen mounted by a crucifix across from the painting. Nor is there a high altar beneath it, for it has been moved forward into the apse to make room for the choir stalls, now installed beneath the painting. It now hangs much higher on the wall, losing its connection to both the lowered altar and I'm sorry, losing its connection both to the relocated altar and the absent rood screen. What's more, the painting here is not by Raphael. It is a copy of the Sistine Madonna by an 18th century painter known for his accurate replication of religious paintings and frescoes. The copy has been flamboyantly enshrined in an oversized gilded baroque frame, capped with a lunette of two angels coronating the Madonna, an image that relates to no part of the Eucharistic celebration. So what has happened? In the middle of the 18th century, after almost 250 years over the San Sisto high altar, the painting is moved north to Germany. From image loving Catholic Piacenza to the Royal Palace in Protestant Dresden. In 1754, August the 3rd, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland purchased the painting from the Benedictine friars and had it transported north over the Alps from the small church to the Royal Picture Gallery. in Dresden, the capital of staunchly Protestant state of Saxony that included Wittenberg, known as the cradle of the Reformation for its association with Luther. The painting now is no longer an object of worship. Indeed, as such, with its foregrounding of Mary, it would have given offense. Situated in the gallery, among other paintings by the old masters, it is now a work of art. By this change of place and ownership from sacred to profane, the painting was, it could be said, secularized, a term first used to reference the takeover of church lands and assets by the state or crown. In this instance, the transfer occurs by purchase rather than by seizure. The Benedictine monks were remunerated, and lavishly, they were paid 25, 000 gold coins, fudi, when 800 to 1, 000 was the average, the highest price ever paid for a painting in the West, and I suspect some of it was used on that ornate frame that you just saw. The high price reflected Raphael's prestige in the middle of the 18th century. No royal collection of old masters was complete without a Raphael Madonna. In the Royal Gallery, the painting was eventually placed atop an altar like base inscribed with a description of the painting from Vasari's Lives of the Eminent Painters. So it's being presented here as a renaissance masterpiece with the, imprimatur of Vasari, and you can see this, the velvety, renaissance y wall covering in the back and the Italian tile work. So it was meant to be seen as a renaissance masterpiece. In the transfer from the church to the gallery, the painting changed not only provenance but also status, no longer an object of devotion. It was now a work of art in spiriting not faith in God but admiration in the artist Raphael. As such, it drew commentary from every major German thinker from Winckelmann to Heidegger and Benjamin, not as theology but as aesthetics or art history. A mere decade after its arrival in Dresden, Winckelmann, a founding figure of art history, heralded the painting as a sublime imitation of classical ideals of beauty in form, finding in the Madonna the same tranquility the ancients imparted to their deities. A. W. Schlegel, and I'll say more of him anon, wrote an account of which, in which the greatest intellects, Of his day, Novalis Fichte Schelling, his brother Frederick, as well as his wife Caroline, they all stand in front of the painting discussing the ineffability of its beauty. A different kind of community than the one that gathered in front of the painting. The romantic philosopher and poet Herder also extolled the beauty of the painting's form that derived it not from ancient statuary, but from Raphael's inner vision, as illustrated in this drawing. In which you see the assisting Madonna. Oh, I'm sorry. It's so small. But in any case, she's appearing to him in a vision. He already has the canvas prepared, with you can see St. Barbara and even the little Puzzi at the bottom. But it's after he has the vision that he can then transfer it onto his canvas. In Hegel's aesthetics, the Madonna is the culmination of the final phase of art, the Romantic. In distinguishing it from the previous classical phase, Hegel contrasts the mysterious eyes of the Christ child, to the vacuous, blank eyes of Greek statues. In idealizing the outward body, Greek statues lack the interiority emanating from the Christ child's eyes. And yet those eyes can do no more, says Hegel, than give an inkling of the inwardness of faith. Protestant faith, of course. Infinite divinity cannot be set forth in the finite materials of the artist. Nietzsche strained to extricate the painting from what he regarded as its pseudo sacral setting, convinced that Christianity and art were mutually exclusive. He said, a question who is also an artist just does not happen. He insists in his diatribe antichrist. Raphael, he said, chose these sacred subjects in order to satisfy his pious patrons, but the models were decidedly from this world, from affirmational real life rather than self abnegating Christianity. Nietzsche, too, notes the distress in the Christ child's eyes. He sees nothing messianic in them, however. They are, for him, a not unfamiliar freak of nature. The anxious eyes of an old man in the face of an infant. I think that's hard to see, but Pables saw it. Nietzsche saw it. Popular legend also brought the painting down to earth in the model for the Madonna, it was said, to be Raphael's mistress. A baker's daughter and the two putti on the parapet. I have it here. No. and the two putti on the parapet were little ragamuffins looking into her baking shop in Trastevere. So it was like a cozy genre painting. What do Benjamin to skip to the next century credited an erroneous theory that the painting was initially for exhibition rather than veneration. The painting was also one of the works with which he thought through his theory of the work of art in the age of medical mechanical reproduction where by the beginning of the 20th century no work of art not even the Mona Lisa was so widely produced in whole or in parts in all media so that the German philosopher Theodor Lessing wrote that no parlor, no bedroom, no shop window in That is not without a copy. The increase in number as well as accessibility inevitably devalue the image itself, even the original, whose aura weakened with replication. This is Benjamin. In 1955, Heidegger and the first sentence of three sublimely Vatic pages on this painting summed up its centrality to aesthetics. All the unanswered questions about art and the artwork cluster around this picture. More recently, the painting that in San Sisto referenced Salvational History has been assigned a pivotal role in another world historical narrative, not the salvation history, but the history of modernity that sees the break from the medieval faith to modern history, to modern secularity, from sacred icon to modern image. The German art historian Hans Belting concludes his monumental, nearly 500 page study of icons and devotional images with the Sistine Madonna. The painting, he says, emancipated from the repressive mystical strictures of theologians, is a modern work of art. Its importance is epochal. It marks The turn from the era of the icon, he says, to usher in what he terms a post religious era, of painting, rather than icons. This is a good point from which to transition from the painting to the tragedy, for no work in the English literary canon has been so closely identified with the beginnings of the modern age as Hamlet, the character who is seen to embody a deeply interiorized and individual subjectivity or consciousness no longer encumbered by the trappings of faith. A. W. Schlegel's translation arrives in Germany not long after Raphael's painting to make its way into those same parlors and bedrooms to spark the same kind of critical attention and from of the same great German thinkers who reflected on the painting, including Hegel, Schlegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin. Not long after his painting, this Raphael's painting, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Francis to Germany, where it is translated into verse with commentary by the same A. W. Schlegel, who was mesmerized by Raphael's Madonna. It is also performed in the Berlin Theater, which would have lacked the three level eschatological axis of the globe, a stage situated with the heaven at its roof. Above and the hell of the trap below. Hamlet, when the ghost of his father first appears to him from below, strains to know from which region he has emerged. The ghost describes only its sulfurous and tormenting flames. To disclose more, he warns Hamlet, would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood. Strong word, Harrow, for the soul. For this is the tragedy that concerns itself with the consequences of action, not in this life, but in the next. Nothing we learn of King Hamlet explains why he should have been committed to such infernal or purgatorial punishment, except that, sleeping, he was cut off with all my perfections on my head, dispatched without the time to prepare his soul for departure, no reckoning, no account, no audit made with which to face the final reckoning at Judgment Day. The Ghost of King Hamlet. Describes the pitiful state of his soul in terms now quite obsolete, but that in 1600 would have been quite technically precise, unhouseld, disappointed, unannulled. Oh, horrible. Oh, horrible. Most horrible. What happens to the body after death in this tragedy is obvious. Hamlet faces the hard fact in the graveyard. Flesh decomposes. It returns to elementary quintessential dust to feed worms or stop bungholes. But the soul after death remains vital. It is not simply the death of his father that Hamlet would avenge, but the imperiling of his soul. Indeed, the revenge would not be complete if Claudius soul were not similarly jeopardized. No good to kill him at prayer. Better to wait until he can catch him an act that has no relish of salvation in it so that at his death his soul may be damned in black as hell where to it goes, his heels kicking at heaven on the way down. Of course, there is an irony here that irredeemable acts he imagines catching Claudius in asleep and is drunk asleep in his rage or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed. Are nothing compared to what Hamlet is himself pertaining, nothing in the scale of iniquity. The damning of a soul, the devil's signature act, what the devil had been doing on the stage for centuries and continued to do even long after Marlowe's Faustus is dragged screaming to everlasting hell. Amlet arranges the same fate for no worse than obsequious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, forging a royal command consigning them to death, no thriving time allowed. While Polonius's body suffers terrible indignities, stabbed, lugged, and stowed away, Ophelia worries for his soul. Peace be with his soul, God have mercy on his soul, and on all Christian souls. And of course it is the state of Ophelia's soul that causes such consternation. Her death was doubtful. The debate over whether it was suicidal or accidental is rehearsed three times between Gavedigger and his mate, Church and Crown, Laertes and the priest. Its resolution determines the extent of her funeral rites and the place of her burial. But also, her soul's final destination. It is only her brother, deranged with grief, who imagines her a ministering angel. But Hamlet's soul is the tragedy's main preoccupation. When the ghost wafts Hamlet to the brink, his companions forcibly retain him. They fear for his soul. The ghost might expose him to unnamed horrors at the precipice that would drive him to soul damning suicidal despair. Hamlet makes light of their concern as he tears away. He couldn't care less about the loss of his life. And, says he, as for my soul, what can it, the ghost, do to it, that being a thing, immortal in itself, as itself? Of course, it is precisely because of its immortality that the soul is of paramount concern, for the soul survives death. In the most famous soliloquy, this is what gives Hamlet pause. His opening proposition, to be or not to be, does not cover all the possibilities. If it did, Hamlet would be content with the oblivion of not to be. Death, per se, is nothing but a rapturous sleep. He calls it a consummation, echoing that other Wittenbergian scholar who recklessly set his soul at a pin's fee, Faustus, who contracted his soul to Lucifer, writes it in blood, consummatum est, quoting from the Vulgate, Christ's last words on the cross, it is finished, but it isn't. There is a sequel for Faustus for Hamlet. that dread of something after death more dreadful still if the death is self inflicted. If Hamlet were to take his own life, he would violate what the play calls Everlasting's canon against self slaughter. Were he to do it with a bare bodkin, the unsheathed dagger he has about his person, it would add to the sacrilege for the dagger is called a bodkin because of its cruciform resemblance to the cross. Or rather, Christ's body on the cross, bare, because Christ was disrobed. If Hamlet were his quietus to make with the bare bodkin, he would be killing himself with the cruciform symbol of the redemptive sacrifice. We hear a glimpse, the flip side, of the promise of salvation, the threat of eternal damnation. And herein lies the appeal of Lucretius's heretical theory that the soul was created not immortal, but of the same dissoluble particles as the body. Like solid flesh, the soul melts in Lucretius, thaws, it resolves itself into a dew. Marlowe's Faustus, just before being snatched off by devils to gaping hell, gives anguished voice to the same longing. O soul, be changed into litter water drops, and fall into the ocean, ne'er to be found. One of the earliest non litter literary allusions to this ally appears in a news sheet, the London Post dated January, 1644. It reports on the execution of Archbishop Law for high treason law. The reporter writes was absolute and sanguine as he approached the executioner's block until that is he lay his head on the block. Then he trembled with fear, I quote, every joint of him, at the sense of something after death, the undiscovered country under which his soul was wandering, possessing every joint of him with an universal palsy of fear, end of quote. Palsy is universal, even the soul of shriven Archbishop. is shaken at the prospect of what, after death, lies ahead, with what Hamlet terms thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul, beyond imagining, beyond comprehending. By the next century, however, the soliloquy had gone cold, at least when delivered by the century's most famous Hamlet, David Garrick. A German visiting London writes to his colleague, N. Goettingen, of Garrick's performance as Hamlet in 1774. He praises all of his soliloquies, save this one, To Be or Not to Be, for it is singularly, he says, lacks passion. The soliloquy, by then, he reports, was so familiar as to be vacuous. The audience, he noted, knew it as well as the ABCs or the Apostles Creed, so that they mouthed it to themselves as Garrick dispassionately voiced it. The soliloquy's popularity Had by then also reached Germany, where it had been translated four times before A. W. Schlegel's complete verse translation of the tragedy in 1798 still is standard. Schlegel, in his translation and critical remarks, lay down the groundwork for the play's reception in Germany as well as in England. For it was he who christened the play a tragedy of thought. I'm not going to pronounce it. I'm not even going to try to pronounce it, but there it is at the top of the image. I don't really know German. I have friends who do, and I have a dual, edition, and it's just fascinating. I'm only concentrating on the soliloquy, but the way that Schlegel tends to empty out, the spirituality from the language, I think, is really quite remarkable. Okay, so he termed Hamlet a tragedy of thought. Not of soul, but of thought. And it was he who first expounded the theory that excessive thought paralyzed Hamlet's resolution. What Schlegel termed Hamlet's continual and never satisfied meditation, had for Schlegel nothing to do with the afterlife. Rather, as he wrote, it was the dark perplexity of the events in this world that crippled Hamlet's action. Even a sampling from his translation of this soliloquy illustrates how Schlegel's German voids Shakespeare's vocabulary of its eschatological and pseudorheological charge. In Schlegel's translation of Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, there is no hint of the Vulgate's consummatum est when he translates consummation with Tio, as you see there, a word connoting a goal. Rather than a culmination and often a physical one, like a target or a winning post. He translates devoutly as something personal rather than devotional and you guessed it, meaning intimacy or sincerity. As for Hamlet's cruciform dagger, his bare bodkin, Schlegel drops the bare altogether and trades, translates bodkin, bizarrely, as nadel, a needle, a more profane pointed instrument to be sure, as well as a less threatening one. In Schlegel, it is not the dread of something after death that freezes the blood, but a mind trapped in introspection. Thought thinking itself, as Hegel would put it, and as Hamlet, is often represented contemplating a skull, less a memento mori than the locus of thought, as in Shakespeare's Victorian Monument in Stratford, almost surely modeled after Rodin's Thinker. This was the interpretation that seeped into English criticism via Coleridge. The result of his own immersion in German idealist post Kantian thought at the University of Göttingen. There are a number of Enlightenment thinkers that either studied or taught there, Schiller, Schlegels among them. Coleridge denied the influence, of course, but it's hard to, it's hard not to see it, for example, in his 11 syllable term for thought, Radiosynative Meditativeness. That's Coleridge. In 1818, he apologized in his criticism for introducing the neologism psychological, explaining that the English language had no single term to express the philosophy of the human mind. Indeed, in 18th century dictionaries, psychology was defined as the study of the soul, the psyche, in contrast to anatomy, the study of the body. In Germany, however, Sykola Bish denoted mental philosophy since early in the previous century. The same shift in focus from soul to mind can be traced in response to Hamlet's intention to damn Claudius. In the 17th and 18th century, it is the most severely condemned scene in the Shakespeare canon. One editor suspected that Horatio's words at Hamlet's death were meant to be ironic. Surely, he said, no flights of angels would be escorting Hamlet into eternity. Indeed, we also have Samuel Johnson, who found Hamlet's fiendish lines too horrible to be read or to be uttered, and until the 19th century, they were not uttered on stage, either Hamlet's soliloquy or the entire scene was cut. But the shift in focus from soul to mind in psychology. and gave way, gave a way to excuse what theology condemned as reprobate. Hamlet's ostensible desire to damn Claudius was a psychological pretense. He stalls in order to cover up his irresolution, not from others, he is alone, but from himself. And this is, I think, a very new concept. He is a hypocrite toward himself, a new form of self reflexivity. Self deceived. it might now be called cognitive dissonance or a personality disorder. Coleridge takes this up too. Hamlet's demonic flair here, his flair up here, is a mere pretext. He is prevaricating to cover his want of determination, the irresolution that is for Coleridge the germ of Hamlet's character. By the time of the monumental veriorum, the psychological explanation for Hamlet's demonic impulse has settled into a dogma, reads the veriorum edition. Hamlet attempts by a pretended refinement of revenge to hide from his own knowledge his incurable habit of procrastination. By 1900, the apology can deepen when psychoanalysis introduces an unconscious that operates unbeknownst to consciousness with such various defense mechanisms, with its various defense mechanisms. One could go on to enumerate all of the theories to explain Hamlet's delay once the tragedy is labeled a tragedy of thought, explaining it through states of mind and their disorders, conscious or unconscious, affective or pathological. for listening. Yet, lapses in time and passion routinely precede action in this tragedy. In the player's speech, Paris holds his sword in mid air, it sticks there for 16 lines before it falls on its victim. Ophelia, in the Queen's protracted report of her drowning, is buoyed up by her garden's garments for a while. They bore her up, long enough for her to sing snatches, until her garments pull her to her muddy death. Laertes, about to fatally wound Hamlet, stalls. So too, Horatio's resolve to drink poison must be postponed, as Hamlet requires, absent the from Felicity a while. Hamlet himself stretches out the interval between the imminence of death and its arrival. He has, he is told, less than half an hour between receiving his fatal wound from Laertes and dying from it, and he draws it out. Almost interminably, I am dead, Horatio. Horatio, I am dead. The potent spirit, the potent poison, quite or prose, my spirit. And finally, the rest is silence. This is a very long consummatum est, yet it is still not finished, at least not in the folio edition. His final words, the rest is silence, at the bottom of this quotation, is followed by four interjected O's. To be drawn out at the actor's discretion. His final words, the rest is silence, are followed by four interjected O's, as if to mark the unperformable event of what the Queen terms the soul's passage from nature to eternity, she makes it sound so easy. Horatio marks Hamlet's passage with a blessing, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. In the final quarto, his blessing is replaced with Hamlet's last words. Heaven receive my soul. What I have been suggesting is that the delay that comes to look like Hamlet's psychological problem is more, as in the news reporter's description, a universal palsy, paralyzing fear in the face of death of what might follow and eternally. Rather than face it, the time is drawn out before it. Think of every man summoned to appear for his final reckoning without delay or any tarrying, but still pleading for more time, a long respite he asks for. Or think of Faustus backed up against the literal final hour, begging for a reprieve before the clock strikes twelve. Think of Donne's sonnet in an octave invoking apocalypse, blow your trumpets, angels, and arise from death. Only to postpone the climactic event in his sestet, but let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn apace, asking for a grace period, as it were, in which to repent, wishing to prolong the interval between the incarnation and the apocalypse, that period of indeterminate suspension before the end, either of a lifespan in death or of creation in apocalypse. On a lighter note, before ending, Andrea Henning, the foremost authority on the Sistine Madonna, notes the uniqueness of the two chubby angels at the bottom of the painting. The angels, he observes, should be doing something, making music, singing, playing with a Christ child. But there's no painting in the world, he ventures, where angels appear to wait in such a bored manner. Perhaps they are tired of waiting for something to happen, for that retiring, hesitant babe in arms above them to get on with the long awaited business of salvation. To end, a quick summary, and then a question. I've been setting up a parallel between the passage of these two works, the painting from church to gallery, the tragedy from Reformation England to Enlightenment Germany. In the process, both works transform, the one from an object of veneration to a work of art, the other from a tragedy of the soul to a tragedy of thought. In both cases, they lose their otherworldly coordinates. Should we then be tempted to return these two works to the context for which they were intended and first experienced? Should we duly re enchant or re sacralize them the Dresden Gallery, in celebration of the painting's 500th anniversary in 2012, went some way To replicating the painting's original setting in San Sisto, the gallery walls were repainted ecclesial gray. The painting was reframed on the model of a recently discovered 16th century altarpiece in a church nearby San Sisto in Piacenza, and it was hung over an altar like base, but very low. To give the impression, according to the curators, that the Madonna was descending to welcome the approaching viewers, offering in hand, offer in hand, though not a sacrificial one. I know of no production that has attempted to make Hamlet a tragedy of soul. But suppose a production, say at the Globe, were to reactivate the symbolism of its three tiers by having actors gesticulate in the direction when alluding to heaven and hell, or that place the prayer scene's altar in the castle rooms, where the action was set so that it would be more visible, or that decorated the set with abundant crucifixes that unpack the crucifixion from the play's many oaths. Like, by odds bodkins, by God's dear body, by jeez, by Jesus, by the rude chrysts, z blood chrysts, z wounds chrysts. Such tactics might make for an interesting dramaturgical or academic experiment. But as theater, it would be a complete flop. There is no reinstating what in the time of assisting Madonna and Hamlet was so deeply ingrained in belief or disbelief as to go without saying thank you. I'm very happy to address any questions It's a book that has been very important in my formation, and I remember it a lot every time I go to the theatre to see Hamlet, as I've done already 27 times. And of late, I have, I find myself asking whether all the productions of Hamlet that I see are Hamlet without Hamlet, because Hamlet there seems to be no attempt at, ization or contextualization. They are, they are, built, upon the, personality of, actors and, they are, gender blind, age blind, everything blind, performances, which I find, I find it unsatisfactory and that's why I always go back to your book because, it's nice to feel that I'm not alone, let's say, and these, interpretations do make me feel that this is not my world anymore. Thank you for that, but, you know, I have to say I really do make a distinction between. What should happen and what works in criticism, and the theater, right? the kind of work that I did to retrieve, the San Sisto painting, in its original setting, or to try to reconstruct, An eschatological background that foregrounded that huge question of what happens to the soul in a way no other tragedy does. That's something that's done, you know, in writing, in criticism, in teaching. But as for the theater It's just another world altogether, and I'm much more tolerant of what I see on stage than what I read in criticism. Because I think if it works on stage, that theatre is such a special medium, that, you know, I applaud it. It is true, and of course it's true, that, you know, Cat Hamlet's character is so compelling, that actors are always going to fill it, and almost always override the production. So that's what works, and that's what an audience wants. And that's what makes audiences think. And I can't be, objecting to that. Thank you, Margaret, as always, and thank you for your entire career while I'm at it, which has been, you know, lovely. I would suggest in response to your last question that perhaps What you need is not to see a production of Hamlet that plays Hamlet in a more sacred way. here in somewhere like London, but there are still societies that are majority Christian, where even actors are majority Christian, and where they can't speak the lines of Hamlet without them still meaning a lot of this stuff. I'm thinking in particular of a production of Hamlet by Rostislav Derzhipilsky in Ivano Frankivsk in Ukraine. Rostislav is inaugurating a Shakespeare festival there in June. please come. Oh, thank you, Michael. as usual, you have something to add that I didn't know, so I return your compliment. and I think that is absolutely fascinating that should be the case. I was, however, although perhaps not emphatically enough, I slipped in the last line, the very last line of the lecture, a sentence I thought about quite a lot that had to do with the possibility of artificially reconstructing what once went as belief or disbelief without saying, because there is a way of. Acknowledging all of the eschatological presence, the eschatological charge in the play, without believing in it. it can work all kinds of ways. It doesn't require, devotion, to follow it, in terms of these pressing questions that, are raised about thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul. and that's why I introduced the creation. because one can see that, that denial of the soul or the denial of the discreteness of the soul from the body in terms of the atoms that compose it, that's an antidote, to, the worrying about what happens after death. Thank you very much for that fascinating lecture. I'm really struck by the way that the language when transferred into a different context or into a different language, in this case Germany post Reformation, sheds light on a different context. The original, in some ways, in fact, that the lack of presence of that eschatological in, in the German language shows something about what's in the English. And I'm wondering, in fact, whether it shows us something that is encoded in the language, which we take for granted still, that actually there is still some of that left in that language if we're open to it. Yes. No, I think that's a very nice comment to make, that so much of it is. present, has potential in the language, even a word like adieu, you know, the adieu that are so poignantly spoken in the play. Like Faustus's divinity adieu. I love that one. But there, even the odes, by the rude, not there's all kinds of stubborn matter. He's talking to his mother. I mean, very complicated deepening that goes on, that assumes that there is this reservoir, this current running through the language that can be tapped, at moments and recharged. Thank you so much, Margrethe. This question I think possibly picks up a little bit some of the, impulses of the first question because it made me think about the rehang of The Madonna and Child in the gallery within a sort of suitably holy context. And I'm curious to know if, it's very hard to know how this was discovered, but what visitors to the gallery then made of it? Was there a difference in the way 21st century people engaged with a piece of Renaissance art? And was there any sense in which that rehang and that recontextualization changed anything about the reception of the work itself? Okay, I think that's fascinating. I mean, one thing that this paper could have done, it could have said that the painting was secularized when the monks decided to sell it for that tremendous amount of money. It no longer was what it was before. It was more, you know, they were more interested in the, 2, 500 Scudi. and then to see the whole structure disassembled, the painting still draws tourists. I've never seen it, in that context, but there's no way it could have the power, especially during, during the ceremony, that it once held. and, you know, I'm absolutely. I find it absolutely riveting to see so many people wondering about what is the baby Jesus looking like? Why does he look so fretful? And then to see, actually he was looking at something, it's just been removed and no one's gonna put that root screen back, and it wouldn't help if they did, since the painting has gone way up in the wall of the, of the apps and so on. so anyway, that what you're. What your question prompted me to say was that one could take it back with a Sistine Madonna and say that was when secularity occurred. Or, you know, to be a little bit more daring, one could even say it's present in the painting. The painting has a number of features that are hard to, entirely. this one will do, that are difficult, to integrate, with this Eucharistic formation. This very serious and powerful Eucharistic formation, there, the, Pope Sixtus, for example, I don't know if I have a good enough slide, he has six fingers on his right hand, and I don't think there's any biblical meaning to that, I think it's just a play on Sixtus, You know, the angels, are so mischievous, and seem so entirely, you know, to make them observers of this grand revelation, seems in itself a little cheeky. wonderful things have been said about the drape, which I, didn't address. some of them not so interesting. I mean, again, you look at this painting and There's so many, theories that have to do with how art is understood that can be generated from it. But the painting seems to be a window covering and then the lower parapet would be something like a windowsill. And there was a time when art historians were saying that it was very much a renaissance painting because you had the window frame, even though there is no perspective behind it, but then it was pointed out. that curtains did not cover windows in the time, that what they covered were icons and paintings depending on, where, where it was appropriate in the ritual. And then, what many art historians say now is that what makes it modern is that it's not, it's not the Virgin. it's not the Sistine Madonna. It's a representation of her that doesn't have any, sacredness, sacrality to it, but is instead a painting, conscious of itself as such, giving itself curtains, not because it's a, It is just icon in a ritual, but because it's a work of art that has the same, powers of transcendence that can be. Hidden, or revealed. A question, before the, final thanks, an initial thanks for a splendid lecture. to what extent do you think it would be? possible, fruitful, to see that transition of, you know, from the tragedy of soul to the tragedy of thought as something that is already dramatized within the play. And I could leave the question there, but there's something I think. Quite powerful there, potentially, in relation to the implications of your argument for thinking about what we do with the play today. to what extent could, if we take that shift as inherent in the play itself, perhaps, take the play, even today, as an invitation to analyze something about ourselves. I didn't mean to use the word analyze, interesting there. Analyze something about ourselves that can Perhaps help recover, if not the full range of the sacred, at least call into question the extent to which we do over rely on a certain kind of thinking at the expense Of the sacred. Does that make sense? nice, nicely put, and I do understand what you're saying, and it's a nice way of melding, the two that I've rendered distinct because I've used that secularizing formula that works so well in describing, these two transfers. but I do know what you're saying, that is. It's undeniable that thought, thinking, of a very profound kind is going on in that play, and the two should not be mutually exclusive, and that psyche, for good reason, goes from one emphasis on soul to the other on mind, because they're so difficult to separate. so I very much appreciate your question. I, in writing this paper, I'm rather I'm pleased that if anyone thought to themselves, gee, isn't she contradicting her Hamlet without Hamlet, they didn't say anything because that meaning of Hamlet is in its way, materialist. That is, it makes, makes such a case for land and being so important in all of its connotations. And here I am, emphasizing soul. and I could do something like what you're saying if I wanted to be consistent in what I've said over my career. so thank you for leaving me that out. Okay. Thank you very much indeed for a fascinating, thought provoking, and inspiring lecture.