Richard Sacks -- Fall 2024
University College Enrichment Program
Fall 2024 Enrichment Program Catalog (available in summer 2024)
Five sessions overall (including performance of Hamlet at DCPA)
Four Wednesday evenings from 6:30-8:30pm MT in-person at DU
September 4, 11, 18, 25, 2024
Hamlet at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts
Saturday September 21, 2024 at 7:00pm MT
performance ticket included in course tuition
Course Materials and Information page
Course Overview:
For over 400 years, Shakespeare's Hamlet has captivated and confounded actors and directors, scholars and critics, and of course audiences around the globe, confronting them all – and confronting us still today – with agonizing questions about what it means to be – or not to be – human. Are we “noble in reason [and] infinite in faculties,” as Hamlet muses aloud in his oft-quoted “what a piece of work is a man” speech, or (as he continues) are we “this quintessence of dust?” And how can we coexist with the excruciating contradictions of the world around us? Or with the suffering of those who love us for better or for worse? Or with the ghosts that insistently inhabit our minds and spirits? Or ultimately, as he wonders in the play’s most famous soliloquy, how can we live with our very selves – “to be or not to be?” Join Dr. Richard Sacks, who spent four decades at Columbia University teaching its core great books course, in a deep dive into these and other difficult questions through a four-session close reading of the unimaginably dazzling language and unbearably tragic visions of this astonishing text.
Scheduling note:
On Saturday evening September 21, 2024 at 7:00pm – between the third and final Wednesday evening sessions – we will attend the fall 2024 production of Hamlet at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
Note on editions:
We will be using the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet (3rd edition, 2019, Heather Hirschfeld and Philip Edwards, eds., Cambridge University Press, paperback edition, ISBN-13: 978-1316606735, currently $11.95 from Amazon or Tattered Cover). Here’s some context on why you should be prepared for variations in the text and its line numbers if you use a different edition (which you are of course welcome to do):
There is no authoritative text of Hamlet, and as a result each edition differs from others in ways small and sometimes large, including in the line numbering. The reason for this glorious mess is that three different early printed texts of Hamlet exist – the so-called First “bad” Quarto of 1603, the Second “good” Quarto of 1604/5, and the First Folio collection of 1623. But no manuscript of the play survives. These three versions vary enormously from each other in ways ranging from their readings of individual words to their inclusion/omission of lengthy passages and in one notable case almost an entire scene. In terms of choosing which edition to use for this course, I’ve tried to strike a balance among many factors, but three in particular: 1) I wanted a text presented without lots of intrusive editorial markings and thus allowing a “smoother” read (to the extent that there’s ever anything “smooth” when it comes to reading Shakespeare); 2) I wanted an apparatus format on each page of the text that allows transparent access to textual variations and editorial choices, especially since at times such variations and choices can influence our interpretation of this notoriously complex and ambiguous play; and 3) I wanted an edition based on an editorial process that has the humility to admit that “In searching for a solution to the play’s textual problems, we should not imagine that we are likely ever to find ourselves with a single definitive text” of Hamlet (appendix one of our edition, p. 253).