Shakespeare: Hamlet
"To be, or not to be, that is the question." Find out the answer to that question and many more with our Hamlet playlist. Featuring forty-two lectures across four courses, this playlist explores the play act-by-act and scene-by-scene, as well as exploring key contexts, character analysis, theme and critical reception.
What this playlist includes:
34 lectures across 4 courses.
All resources designed and delivered by university academics and researchers.
What you will be learning about:
Shakespeare's Hamlet
Courses and Lectures
1. Shakespeare: Hamlet
Prof. John McRae
Nottingham University
Nottingham University
1.1. Introduction – 10:31
1.2. Soliloquies and Meditations – 06:01
1.3. Hamlet the “Most Royal” King (Part I) – 04:57
1.4. The Book, the Sword, and the Flower – 04:40
1.5. From Zero to (Avenging) Hero – 08:51
1.6. Memory, Proof, and Mirror-Images – 07:07
1.7. The Players, Representation and Truth – 04:59
1.8. To Be or Not to Be – 06:09
1.9. Ophelia’s Soliloquy – 10:22
1.10. Hamlet the ‘Actor’ – 11:06
1.11. Revenge – 10:42
1.12. Two Soliloquies: Claudius and Hamlet – 10:16
1.13. The Pirates and Hamlet’s ‘Sea-Change’ – 06:59
1.14. Accepting Death: Head, Heart and Hand – 05:33
1.15. Hamlet as “Most Royal” King (Part II) – 06:56
2. Shakespeare: Hamlet
Prof. John Lennard
Independent Scholar
Independent Scholar
2.1. Hamlet as Revenge Tragedy – 10:43
2.2. The Ghost – 10:02
2.3. Comparisons – 10:46
2.4. The Role of Hamlet – 10:25
2.5. Metatheatre – 11:34
3. Shakespeare on Stage
Prof. Tiffany Stern
Royal Holloway, London
Royal Holloway, London
3.1. Parts and Rehearsals – 11:24
3.2. Parts of the Theatre – 05:33
3.3. Props – 07:15
3.4. Shakespeare's Theatres – 10:28
3.5. Shakespeare's Actors – 06:21
3.6. Time in Shakespeare – 11:18
4. Seneca and Early Modern Drama
Dr Helen Slaney
University of Oxford
University of Oxford
4.1. Shakespeare's Sources – 08:17
4.2. Seneca – 14:36
4.3. Elizabethan Seneca – 12:50
4.4. Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy – 14:12
4.5. Revenge Tragedy – 11:57
4.6. Seneca in University Theatre – 13:09
4.7. The Roman History Play – 12:36
4.8. Restoration Seneca – 14:16
What Next?
Read around the topic
A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (first published 1904; Penguin, 1991)Anthony B. Dawson, Hamlet: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester University Press, 1995)
John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (first published 1935; Cambridge University Press, 1951)
R. A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet (first published 1946; Nick Hern Books, 2004)
Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius (Penguin, 2000)
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton University Press, 2001)
Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Lisa Klein, Ophelia (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006)
Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (first published 1964; W. W. Norton, 1974)
Zackary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
Maynard Mack, Everybody’s Shakespeare (Bison, 1994)
Fintan O’Toole, Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearean Tragedy (Granta Books, 2002)
Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the body: Women and representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (Routledge, 2001)
William Shakespeare (eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor), Hamlet (The Arden Shakespeare, 2005)
William Shakespeare (eds. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen), Hamlet (The RSC Shakespeare: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Bruce Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 2000)
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