Hamlet: Rites of Memory

Whether a “spirit of health or goblin damned” – or indeed the ghost of his father on parole from a very Catholic Purgatory – the apparition that Hamlet and his friends encounter on the battlements comes in such a “questionable shape” that Prince Hamlet vows to remember it. Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt will examine how Hamlet enacts his vow of memory, while at the same time investigating the honesty of the supernatural message and attempting to answer the profoundly humanist question of how to act rightly – with “perfect conscience” – within a Danish state that is rotten at its core.