Hamlet and the Seeds of the Enlightenment...and everything else we'll read this semester.
Why Start With Hamlet?
Shakespeare's Hamlet (c.1603) is perhaps not really an "Enlightenment" era work -- it is written 50 to 100 years too early (Late Renaissance), and it presents a rather more cautious, even cynical, take on the type of rational thinking that the Enlightenment will celebrate.
Still, it's a good place to start the course because:
A) From the perspective through which we'll explore it, Hamlet
(the play and the character) is concerned with the central questions driving
many of the works we'll read this semester:
How do any of us really know what "Truth" is?
How have the new sciences shattered traditional and religious concepts of "truth"?
Can rational, scientific thinking help me make better "real world" choices...or do they more often condemn us to depression and tragedy?
How can I make real world choices when science has thrown all of our traditional beliefs into doubt?
B) The three, major social, intellectual and/or political and theological movements that shaped the "Enlightenment" are already in place by the time Shakespeare writes Hamlet. Prescient in this and seemingly all else, Shakespeare also prefigures the problems related to purely rational thought that will so much occupy post-Enlightenment thinking, so in Hamlet he seems to see not just the coming Enlightenment era but beyond it, past it, and into our current Modern and even Post-Modern condition.
They three, major social, intellectual and/or political and theological movements that shaped the "Enlightenment" are:
1)
Neo-Classical Humanism and
Renaissance Humanism