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

2) The Scientific Revolution

3) The Reformation.  Also see: How the Conservative Reformation Spawned the Liberal

William Shakespeare was born  in 1564 and he died in 1616.  He is born the same year as Galileo.  He is born 30 years after England breaks from the Roman Catholic Church, and although he largely lived in relative theological-political stability of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) reign, in the decade before his birth, numerous Protestants are burned at the stake in and around Stratford, under Mary I (or Queen Mary, or Bloody Mary).  In 1563 (the year before his birth), in order to reform its Catholic heritage under emerging Protestant England, Stratford's Gild chapel has its stained glass removed and mural painted over.  He arrives, in short, in the midst of England's most uncertain time, a time when everyone is being asked to rethink the nature of God, religion, political stability, and the nature of truth and nature itself.