Lecture available via iTunesU or at the Oxford podcast site.

Reading List

•On sources, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare volume 7

•On modernity see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (2007) and Linda Charnes, Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a new Millennium (2006)

•On Catholicism, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (2010)

•On ghosts see Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (1987)

•On reading Hamlet backwards see Terence Hawkes, ‘Telmah’, in That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (1986)

•On Hamnet, see Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (2005) or the extract in the NY Review of Books and Richard Wheeler, ‘Death in the Family: the Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000)

‘it can of course only be the poet’s own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe […] that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare’s own son who died at an early age bore the name of “Hamnet”, which is identical with “Hamlet” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams)