Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited27 Sep 2022

What Shakespeare Thought About the Mind, with Helen Hackett

If you’ve ever been watching Hamlet and asked yourself, “What on earth is Hamlet thinking?!” you’re not alone. But to figure that out, you might have to figure out what Hamlet—and Shakespeare—think about what it means to think. That’s the argument University College London professor Helen Hackett makes in her new book, The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty, a wide-ranging study of the many conflicting ideas that Elizabethans had about their own minds. She concludes that the period marked an unusually rich moment for theories of consciousness and for the representation of thought in literature. Host Barbara Bogaev talks with Hackett about the four humors, anxiety about imagination, demonic possession, and more. Helen Hackett is a professor of English at University College London. Her book The Elizabethan Mind was published by Yale University Press earlier this year. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 27, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leanor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California and Gareth Wood at The Sound Company in London. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(309)

The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, with Paul Menzer

How do you write a “complete” life of Shakespeare when very little complete information about his life exists? Four centuries after Shakespeare’s death, the legends that have grown up around him have ...

22 Sep 35min

The Bard in the Borderlands

In 1597, the first published edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet rolled off the printing press. Only a year later, the Spanish colony of Santa Fe was established. While you might not immediately...

8 Sep 33min

Shakespeare and the Law, with Len Niehoff

If you were Hamlet’s lawyer, would you advise he plead not guilty by reason of insanity? Would you consider his accidental slaying of Polonius to be murder or manslaughter? These are the kinds of ques...

25 Aug 36min

Stratford Festival's Antoni Cimolino

Near the end of The Tempest, Prospero vows to retire from practicing the “rough magic” he has mastered, to break his magical staff and drown his spellbooks. After 14 seasons as Artistic Director of Ca...

11 Aug 33min

Shakespeare and Stephen King, with Caroline Bicks

Imagine being able to dig through Shakespeare’s manuscripts and ask him about his writing process. Did King Lear survive in the first draft? What if Hamlet originally said, “To live or not to live?” ...

28 Jul 37min

Shakespeare's Margaret, with Charles O'Malley and Scott W. Stern

It’s been more than 400 years since she first appeared on stage, and she’s still controversial. Margaret of Anjou appears in not one, not two, but four of Shakespeare’s plays—Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and ...

14 Jul 35min

Scholars in Shakespeare, with Sean Keilen

Shakespeare famously never attended university. But not only has his work inspired generations of scholarship, his plays, too, are filled with scholarly characters. Shakespeare, it seems, took an inte...

30 Jun 35min

The Six Loves of James I, with Gareth Russell

“Elizabeth was king, now James is queen.” So went the joke circulating around London in the 17th century. While Elizabeth I became an icon for transgressing traditional gender roles, her successor is ...

16 Jun 40min