“I do not know / Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do,' / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do't.” (Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 4). Shakespeare’s Hamlet is famous for his intense introspection, and for his continued uncertainty, despite this introspection, as to why he delays in taking revenge against his father’s murderer. But Hamlet is by no means the only character whom Shakespeare memorably depicts as fallibly in search of self-knowledge, at the very moment when self-possession is most needed in order to undertake a momentous deed. We will look closely at three Shakespearean heroes – Brutus, Hamlet, and Macbeth – whose faltering attempts to know themselves and to understand their own motives for action are fundamental to their tragedies.
We will also consider the problem of self-knowledge as a wider theme in these three plays, asking to what extent the central characters’ struggles for self-understanding set them apart from those around them, or conversely, to what extent the same issues are echoed in secondary characters, or even feature as something like a general condition of life in the worlds they inhabit.
As we explore these issues, we will be led to reflect on the venerable but problematic critical idea that Shakespeare’s greatest characters can be described as having something like an interior self which runs deeper than their words or actions. To what extent has criticism imposed this idea on the plays, and to what extent is it genuinely rooted in Shakespeare’s texts?
The course will involve extensive close reading of the set plays, so students must bring a copy of the relevant play to each lecture, and should become as familiar as possible with all three of them in advance.