Hamlet

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet 2.2)

About a month after the death of Michelangelo in 1564, Shakespeare was born, and the ideals of Renaissance humanism flowed from one creative genius to another. In this monologue from Hamlet, Shakespeare poignantly praises the wondrous power of humanity, matching Michelangelo's humanist portrayal in The Creation of Adam, where Adam and God float in almost the same plane.

Shakespeare's character Hamlet, however while acknowledging the infinite power and beauty of humankind, is suicidal and desperate, and cannot comprehend his own wretched state of existence. This astonishing play leaves 17th century Renaissance and catapults into 20th century anomie and moral relativism:  Hamlet declares sarcastically, "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," but in his tormented view, corruption has poisoned everything; he is suicidal and the world seems "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." And while the notorious "To be or not to be" speech begins with a contemplation of suicide, it ends with questioning the very purpose of taking action, "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;/And thus the native hue and resolution /Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,/And enterprises of great pitch and moment/ With this regard their currents turn awry /And lose the name of action." Hamlet is the epitome of melancholy, and tracing the effects of his malady is one time when attribution of mental health to the Hippocrates' bodily humors makes some sense, at least metaphorically. 

As with most of Shakespeare's plays, the story from Hamlet had appeared in an earlier work, a simple revenge story called The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. In this play, a the wife of a man murdered by his brother marries the murderer while her son plots revenge by feigning madness. Shakespeare of course, has the reputation of taking your average popular story and turning  it into a staggering work of genius. From a standard story of a son's revenge, albeit with feigned madness as a ploy, Shakespeare incarnates a densely dysfunctional family whose darkest secrets will never be told. Indeed, Shakespeare eliminates not only the answers, but the questions. Hamlet is in despair, wishing his own flesh would dissolve, obsessed with his mother's sexuality and "incestuous" relationship with his uncle. He is haunted by the ghost of his dead father, whom he reveres and fears, feeling that he himself is a "rogue" and a "slave", a "dull and muddy-mettled rascal". Why can't he avenge his father? Why did his mother remarry so quickly? Why is he so deeply depressed?

As readers, we need to find the darker questions: Why is Hamlet so repulsed by female sexuality? Does Gertrude know that Claudius killed her husband? What are the "black and grained spots" on her soul? What truths does she refuse to uncover? What memories must Hamlet erase about his past life? What secret is it that he must never tell? Indeed, "the rest is silent" at the end of the play, as this story is buried with Hamlet. The psycho-sexual aspects of this play alone seem so shockingly modern. The story of a family torn by possible sexual abuse, suppressed memories, denial, emotional trauma, mental illness and tragic lack of validation for the victim is not only a work of genius in a time before modern psychology, but it is a courageous and astoundingly insightful narrative through which we might see in Hamlet's mirror our own dark traumas, perhaps come to understand the unspoken and denied secrets of ourselves and others, and as Hamlet pleas, uncover the poison within. In the play, these many dark secrets poison all of Denmark.  

For actors, English teachers, intellectuals and literary critics, touching Hamlet is a milestone of accomplishment. All literary critics must tackle this play, all actors strive to play this role, as soul sucking as it might be. Philosophers such as Nietzsche are drawn to him. Everyone wants to claim a bit of Hamlet. He has been described as an existentialist, a Buddhist, a Christian. He has been psychoanalyzed by Freud himself and others as being Oedipal. Lately, he has been diagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar. The play has been called a dark comedy. And, as Harold Bloom points out, someone who is reactionary, paranoid, angry, brooding, abusive and suicidal -- really is NOT a very nice person.  So why do we forgive him? Why is he so bewilderingly seductive and sympathetic? At the end of the play are our hearts with Horatio's as he watches this extraordinarily troubled young man die and cries,  "Goodnight, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

The Zeitgeist of Anglo Saxon Literature

"swa sceal æghwylc mon alætan læn-dagas"

-Beowulf, 2590-2591

Hadrian's Wall

It is not hard to imagine the end of the world.  Consider how many recent films have portrayed a multitude of ways the human race faces the ultimate end of everything. Will we be taken over by cyborgs? Will an asteroid come hurtling towards us? Will thermonuclear war, finally, undo us all? Will harrying aliens take us down? Will it be a plague that dazzles even the most brilliant biological engineer? A singularity that shifts the laws of physics? Will we suddenly realize that in fact, we only exist inside a computer program? Will God, again sick of our corruption, rain the fire of the Apocalypse on us? Will it be, rather, Ragnarok? Thankfully, at least Yael was able to build us a radio. Perhaps we will find a use for it? 

Roslyn Cathedral

At the turn of the first millennium in Anglo Saxon England, there was a kind of millennium madness similar to the one exhibited by people across the globe as we approached the year 2,000. Personally, I must say that I feel sort of special, for not a lot of people will ever have lived to cross a millennium year, and I am one. As we approached the crossover, many people imagined something called "Y2K" -- a bug that was certain to infect the (primitive) computers of the time, which would be unable to handle the change of numbers in the date. (Yeah.) It was much more than that. While the number of the year itself is insignificant, certainly the technological changes swelling through the last decade of the first millennium were. 

The Seafarer, Exeter Book 

Consider that one critical quality of any powerful civilization is the ability to communicate and store knowledge through generations. By the end of the first millennium in the Common Era, human beings were on the brink of being able to store their entire, global ten thousand year library of knowledge and make it accessible to everyone on the planet with Internet connection and a cell phone in seconds. 

Much more than a new millennium, we have surely entered a new age. 

I wonder what the future, confident that there will be one, will call it?

Viking Longship

As the change of the first millennium crossed through England, no one could have imagined the conquest of the Normans, and the coming of a time of dynamic growth for Europe that would rise from the ashes of the fallen Roman Empire. Indeed, England had experience a bit of the Apocalypse when the Romans abandoned the country in 410, as tribal Scots and Picts overran Hadrian's Wall to attack their settlements.

When the Roman patricians buried their treasure and fled, they took the spirit of civilization with them, leaving being the decaying mortality of it: Carved words no one could  understand; buildings, aqueducts, roads and monuments no one had the engineering skills to repair or rebuild; trade routes no one had boats or navigational skills to reach; and technological and medicinal tools and knowledge no one any longer could access. Not to mention having the protection of a safe, powerful, and unified government.

Alfred the Great

England is thrown into chaos as those left behind, the Anglo, Saxons and Jute tribes who were soldiers for the Romans, revert to tribalism, They are unprotected from hunger, disease, the wild forces of nature, or warrior raids from both neighboring tribes and Vikings. Death. Famine. War. Disease. It is a veritable apocalypse of civilization. 

But relentless civilization, truly, one of the most mysterious and awesome qualities of the human species, will rise Phoenix-like from these ashes. Around  the year 900, an Anglo Saxon scop will compose the epic poem Beowulf, even as the language and nation itself is engendering.  A strong king emerges to lead the country. and poets, philosophers, lawyers, historians and everyday people will be writing, translating, and sharing the knowledge of generations past as a dynamic new culture takes hold.  Then, everything will change again in 1066.

Bayeaux Tapestry 

I promise, the Normans won't invade. But what if, hypothetically, leaving cyborgs, zombies, aliens, germs and a paradigm moment in the space time continuum aside, let's say the Internet goes down. Perhaps a very wayward asteroid takes out a number of satellites. Perhaps at the same time, a limited thermonuclear war has ended the global economy as we know it.  Electricity is cut off and there are no longer any deliveries of natural gas, oil, gasoline or coal. Or, perhaps simply, a  pandemic strikes. What will the first week bring? The first month?  Where will humans be in ten years? 

And, when will the next civilization arise? Perhaps on another planet, in another universe, or within electromagnetic impulses that only some futuristic computer can read?  Epic poems are journeys, symbolic of life's journey. And the journey promises to enlighten. 

Saint George, Slaying a Dragon

From Enlightenment (1650-1789) to Romanticism (1789-1914)

Art is the Tree of LIFE.  SCIENCE is the Tree of Death.  

With these words the 18th century poet and fantastical artist William Blake helps to usher in the Romantic Era. Wordsworth would describe Blake as mad, and perhaps the entire 19th century could be considered “mad” as well with its break from rationalism and embrace of subjective reality, the Gothic and the spirit of the imagination.

The Age of Enlightenment rose up from the roots of the Renaissance: Isaac Newton is knighted and Rene Descartes declares, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Baruch Spinoza declares, “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.” Politically, Enlightenment ideology is firmly established after the Glorious Revolution in England, which gave Parliament authority over the sovereignty of monarchs. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke expound on human equality, on governments that serve the people, and declare that all people should have the agency of self-determination and freedoms of religion, speech and thought – the very ideals Jefferson declares so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence. But while the American Revolution and the establishment of a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" was perhaps the pinnacle of Enlightenment spirit, the bloodbath caused by the uprising of the peasantry in the French Revolution would mark an end to an idealization of human nature as something moved solely by intellect and order.  
  

And in fact, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is a plea that the very democracy “of the people,” created in the optimism of Enlightenment ideology, should not “perish from this earth” as the horror and hypocrisy of slavery seriously challenges the righteous ideals of equality during the Civil War.

Many historians point to July 14, 1789 as the beginning of the Romantic era – of course it is fairly silly to pin an entire transformation of Western ideology on the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris, as the French Revolution begins. Many factors are at play: The Industrial Revolution, which replaces feudal manors with factories; the spreading British Empire, which brings new ideas – and opium – from the Far East; the continued prosperity and rise of the middle class with an increasingly global mercantile exchange; the global displacement of people whose roots once went back centuries in the same land; the questioning of objective reality. The philosopher Immanuel Kant proposes that our own perceptions shape our reality; the famous German writer, poet and philosopher Goethe re-examines the story of Faust, questioning if human passions should be tamed by rationalism. Later in the 19th century, the philosopher Nietzsche will ask the same questions. Indeed, the qualities of human greed and lust, the corruption of power, and the ultimate failure of philosophy and rationalism are predicted in Voltaire’s famous Enlightenment satire, Candide, which is wryly subtitled Optimism.

In America, socials movements that include free love societies, the Transcendentalists, religious revivals, the abolition movement, the brutal institution of slavery – and a brutally bloody Civil War to end it – shape the passion of Romanticism. The expansive and often brutal wilderness of the West is conquered through further bloodshed in the Indian Wars. God is equated with nature, and the powerful, indifferent and unpredictable forces of nature mirror our own.

The elements that define all historical movements can be seen everywhere. They infuse the arts of the era as well. In class, we compared neoclassical music and paintings to those of the Romantic era, and examined the differences between odes: Thomas Gray’s Ode to the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes and John Keats’ To Autumn. We will be reading Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which incorporates both Enlightenment and Romantic ideology, and Mary Shelley’s astounding masterpiece, Frankenstein. It should be noted that Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an Enlightenment feminist, whose work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, launched the women's movement. Enlightenment thinking of human equality paved the way for many women authors of the 19th century to publish under their own names -- something Jane Austen doesn't do at first -- and have a wide audience.

From the perspective of the Romantic era, personal experience and subjective reality eclipse a notion of objective truth. There is an idealization of peasants and common people, and a hearkening back to the mysticism present in medieval times. Indeed the name “Romantic” is a derivation of medieval romances, the stories of knights on quests to discover spiritual truths. Movements against social injustices caused by slavery, colonialism and industrialization gain traction, and moral relativism takes a stand in works such as Huckleberry Finn, as Huck questions and opposes a law that declares that a black man is property. The nature of evil is questioned as Gothic works such as Frankenstein, Dracula, Wuthering Heights and the works of Edgar Allen Poe create monsters and ghosts that reveal dark psychological desires within. Passion trumps rationalism, people seek to extend their reality through impassioned religious practices, now including Hindu and Buddhism, or through use of opium. And all this during a time also known as the Victorian Era, which often has a veneer of being prim and stuffy. But appearances are often deceptive.