“To be, or not to be. …Not to be.” Cue explosions.

Oh yes! At this point, Hamlet isn’t ready to find out “what dreams may come” or to, ahem, put Claudius to sleep either. As you suggested to our class, this clip from The Last Action Hero is the perfect parody. I really do love the line you quoted, too. It ties the parody and the text together, and it’s just plain funny.

I just wanted to add that in part this stems from a certain impulse in me actually to oppose “bardolatry.” For that reason, I was a little bit in conflict with myself when I wrote “a part of Shakespeare’s brilliance” in my proposal of the second interpretive idea. I do think that if we really want to get to the heart of these texts, then at a certain point we’ve got to kind of drop the idea of Shakespeare’s brilliance as something that renders his consciousness distant from ours not only in time and space but also in its nature (i.e. the idea that his thought is simply “beyond” ours because of his talent). At a certain point we should want not primarily to celebrate Shakespeare’s genius and instead to recall Shakespeare’s humanity. It’s sometimes said that a goal in science is to make the familiar unfamiliar, to see an object in a way that is new and facilitates deeper thought about that object. I think maybe we should do the opposite here: we should make what we’ve made unfamiliar familiar again in order to make deeper thought possible. If we assume that Shakespeare’s fallible, and that he’s pretty much like ourselves except in that he happens to be very talented and practiced at poetry, then we can get better in touch with Shakespeare as a-human-being-who-has-communicated-with-us-in-writing.

That’s why I like the question of whether it’s to be said that Shakespeare’s made a whole elephant for directors to touch different—but all practically preformed—parts of, as if the text were so broad just ontologically, or that, I dunno, Shakespeare’s conscious of and working with the intrinsic vagueness of his medium, in this case according to the particular demands of theatrical writing. How do we want to understand the manner in which a text seems to invite not slavish interpretation but creative reconstruction (i.e. the apparent truth that every reader of Hamlet has his or her own fundamentally unique Hamlet)? It gets us thinking about Shakespeare’s writing process, about his text as a way of entrance into his experience as one of us, and in that way lets us start to think of engaging Hamlet as in principle not terribly unlike just sitting down and having a beer with the ol’ bard.