Hamlet: Shakespeare's Globe, London, Summer 2000

In the final term of my freshman year of college, I took an honors seminar in Existentialism and Literature.  The professor, one of the stricter graders in the English department, cast a bit of an intimidating shadow over those of us in the major who were serious about our studies and about possibly going on to graduate school.  Of course, being the type-A scholarship kid I was, I felt from the first day of class that I had something to prove.

A few weeks in, we were getting set to read Hamlet.  Our professor looked around the table and asked, "Has everyone read Hamlet before?"  Now, I was no Shakespeare neophyte: my high school preparation included in-depth study of Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, The Scottish Play (I don't even type its name), and several of the sonnets.  We'd read Henry IV Part I and all of the sonnets in the British Literature survey I took earlier that same academic year.  But no Hamlet for me.      

I am generally too honest for my own good, and in any case my undergraduate campus ran on a strong honor code, so I wasn't about to lie to a professor in the middle of class.  Along with a few other students, I had to offer a sheepish "No."  I was prepared for that special species of public professorial derision that we all receive at some point or another.

No shame was forthcoming.  Our professor's face lit up, and he said, "Oh, you are in for such a treat.  I wish I could go back and encounter Hamlet again for the first time."  I let out a sigh of relief.  That moment was also a life and professional lesson for me--directly because of it, I am careful never to shame students for not knowing something.  Not reading or not paying attention earn my disapproval, but simply not knowing earns my support and encouragement.

What's relevant here is that he was oh so right.  Just as it's a bit dangerous to hand high school freshmen Romeo and Juliet (Here, kids!  Here's a story about teens your age who know each other for a week, run off together, and commit suicide for each other!), it's probably a bit dangerous to hand smart, idealistic 19-year-olds who are just learning that, yes, most of the time here in the real world, the underhanded scheming monstrous person does indeed win--and there is very little decent people can do about it--Hamlet.

Whatever the dangers, however strongly Hamlet resonated with my emerging sense of everything that was "out of joint" in the world, I also fell in love.  I read Hamlet during Spring Break, enjoying a leisurely, contemplative read that was Everything College Is Supposed To Be for me.  From the soaring verbal poetry, to the romantic, family, and political drama, to reading the famous "To be or not to be" speech in context, to the doomed, glorious, confident self-declaration "It is I, Hamlet the Dane," I found a mental and emotional home in the text and all its pain rendered into beauty.

I went on to take three more courses from this same professor, and it seems that Hamlet was a mental and emotional home for him as well.  Even in an American Literature survey or a Bible as English Literature course, he somehow worked a Hamlet reference in at least every fourth class meeting or so.  I can't blame him.  Hardly a day goes by in my own life that I don't quote Hamlet, either mentally or aloud.

Thus I was a receptive audience member indeed in that summer of 2000.  I had the great good fortune to see Hamlet at the reconstructed Globe in London as part of the Virginia Program at Oxford, a summer study program whose existence had been one of my major reasons for attending my college.  We sat on hard wood benches.  We were far away from the stage.  A light rain fell.  A crying infant and a plane passing overhead were both so disruptive at various points that the actors incorporated references to them into the dialogue.

And I didn't lean back once from the edge of my hard wooden seat.  And I mouthed the words right along with the actors (I did the same thing 11 years later in Staunton, Virginia, but that's another post).  And I caught my breath when Old King Hamlet's ghost did not look at or touch his son until the very last word of his first speech.  And I could barely make myself rise and rejoin the world when the post-play formal, slow jig concluded.

I can't give you anything more in the way of a critical reading of that performance.  Such things came later in my life, education, and career.  But I can tell you, as I tell my students every semester, that that experience was one of the top ten days of my life, and it remains with me as a person and a scholar.