SEMINAR PROFILE

H09 -
Doing the Impossible: Hamlet and Macbeth

Of the half dozen plays Shakespeare wrote that are called Tragedies in the First Folio, Hamlet and Macbeth have stood out in the last hundred years as especially popular with audiences, and attractive to literary critics, philosophers, psychoanalytic writers, and poets and novelists. In both plays, the hero's fall comes long before death, and involves a break not only with human ties but with reality itself. Struggling to master an absolute power that has already mastered them, both men risk sanity in their compulsive belief that they can do the impossible. This belief is their ennobling tragic error. How much of that error is delusion, madness, and how much special insight, exaltation of a sort, is one question we will focus on in this class.

Scholar:

Theo Theoharis

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

12/3/2015, 12/9/2015

H09 -	Doing the Impossible: Hamlet and Macbeth

	Of the half dozen plays Shakespeare wrote that are called Tragedies in the First Folio, Hamlet and Macbeth have stood out in the last hundred years as especially popular with audiences, and attractive to literary critics, philosophers, psychoanalytic writers, and poets and novelists. In both plays, the hero's fall comes long before death, and involves a break not only with human ties but with reality itself. Struggling to master an absolute power that has already mastered them, both men risk sanity in their compulsive belief that they can do the impossible. This belief is their ennobling tragic error. How much of that error is delusion, madness, and how much special insight, exaltation of a sort, is one question we will focus on in this class.

		Scholar:	Theo Theoharis
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	12/3/2015, 12/9/2015