Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to The History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU and Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode, a face without a heart, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Individualism.

Some years ago, a new film version of Hamlet was released and my mother asked my father whether he'd like to go see it.

Don't think so, he replied, I've already seen Hamlet. She found this attitude preposterous, but I sort of know what he means.

I've seen the play performed live and it does suffer from an excess of familiarity.

Even if the actors are wonderful, it's a real challenge to hear its many famous lines as anything but well-known quotations, less like a drama than a compilation of Shakespeare's greatest hits.

And if you're philosophically minded, you may have a further problem, which is that you'll keep getting distracted by thoughts about metaphysics, effects, and epistemology.

It's striking how many of the famous passages invoke philosophical ideas.

Even once you get past the ten-word distillation of existentialism to be or not to be, that is the question,

there are such recognizable philosophical one-liners as, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

What a piece of work is a man, be cruel only to be kind, and there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

I think there's a good reason for this, which is that Hamlet himself is philosophically minded.

He is, after all, a university student, and I have a pretty good idea what his major might be.

His irony, detachment, and reflectivity make him one of the great characters of literature, and so it's often said, a distinctively modern character.

But these same features make him pretty useless when it comes to the task he's meant to be performing, namely seeking revenge by killing his uncle, the new king Claudius.

This is a play that is mostly about failure to act, which might seem like a dramatic flaw, but since this is Shakespeare, of course, it isn't.

He was recycling an existing story about a prince who feigns madness as part of a plan to seek revenge against his uncle.

Face with the narrative problem of how to keep the audience interested, even though they know that the climactic revenge will be exacted only at the end,

Shakespeare decided to make his hero's procrastination a theme in its own right.

Rather than simply putting practical obstacles in his way, he would explore the psychology of a young man who cannot bring himself to act.

Hence, the self-conscious nature of the play, its habit of drawing attention to its own theatricality.

Hamlet is a man who has been miscast in his own story.

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