Hamlet

28 Dec, 2017 820 English and Old English literatures

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Shakespeare’s best known, most quoted and longest play, written c1599 - 1602 and rewritten throughout his lifetime. It is the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, encouraged by his father’s ghost to take revenge on his uncle who murdered him, and is set at the court of Elsinore. In soliloquies, the Prince reveals his inner self to the audience while concealing his thoughts from all at the Danish court, who presume him insane. Shakespeare gives him lines such as ‘to be or not to be,’ ‘alas, poor Yorick,’ and ‘frailty thy name is woman’, which are known even to those who have never seen or read the play. And Hamlet has become the defining role for actors, men and women, who want to show their mastery of Shakespeare’s work.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Sir Jonathan Bate 16 episodes
    Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford
  • Carol Rutter No other episodes
    Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick
  • Sonia Massai No other episodes
    Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London

Reading list

  • Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
    A. C. Bradley (Penguin, 1991) Google Books →
  • Hamlet: Shakespeare in Performance
    Anthony B. Dawson (Manchester University Press, 1995) Google Books →
  • What Happens in Hamlet
    John Dover Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 1951) Google Books →
  • Hamlet versus Lear
    R. A. Foakes (Cambridge University Press, 1993) Google Books →
  • Shakespeare and Violence
    R. A. Foakes (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Google Books →
  • Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet
    Harley Granville-Barker (Nick Hern Books, 2004) Google Books →
  • Hamlet without Hamlet
    Margreta de Grazia (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →
  • Gertrude and Claudius
    John Updike (Penguin, 2000) Google Books →
  • Hamlet in Purgatory
    Stephen Greenblatt (Princeton University Press, 2001) Google Books →
  • Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction
    Tony Howard (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →
  • Ophelia
    Lisa Klein (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006) Google Books →
  • Shakespeare our Contemporary
    Jan Kott (W. W. Norton, 1974) Google Books →
  • Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text
    Zackary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) Google Books →
  • Everybody's Shakespeare
    Maynard Mack (Bison, 1994) Google Books →
  • Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearean Tragedy
    Fintan O'Toole (Granta Books, 2002) Google Books →
  • Enter the body: Women and representation on Shakespeare's Stage
    Carol Chillington Rutter (Routledge, 2001) Google Books →
  • Hamlet
    William Shakespeare (eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor) (The Arden Shakespeare, 2005) Google Books →
  • Hamlet
    William Shakespeare (eds. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen) (The RSC Shakespeare: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) Google Books →
  • Shakespeare and Masculinity
    Bruce Smith (Oxford University Press, 2000) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b09jqtfs

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jqtfs

Auto-category: 822.33 (English drama—William Shakespeare)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, his longest play, around 1599.