Shakespearean Explorations: Hamlet & King Lear with Professor Philip Weinstein (Virtual)

The Vineyard Haven Public Library is pleased to announce a new literary lecture series with Professor Philip Weinstein entitled, Shakespearean Explorations. This initial set of virtual lectures will focus on two of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear. The four-part series on Hamlet and King Lear will be held via Zoom, from 6:00-7:00 pm on alternate Wednesday evenings in May and June: May 6th, May 20th, June 3rd, and June 17th.  Interested patrons may register here.

All of us have come into contact with Shakespeare’s plays at some point in our lives—in high school, in college, on our own, and at theaters all over the world that continue to put on his plays. For none of us is he an unknown quantity. Yet there is no point in denying that his plays make considerable demands: over 400 years old, they are written in an early modern English that differs profoundly from contemporary usage, and they typically proceed by way of the poetic form we call “blank verse”: 10-syllable lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter. These lines can be dense, even tortuous, but they also rise, recurrently, unexpectedly, to levels of sublimity found nowhere else. We do need the footnotes and the glosses. Yet, as one of Shakespeare’s first-rate critics (Stephen Greenblatt) puts it, his blank verse is “like the dream of what ordinary speech would be like were human beings something greater than they are”—that is, how we might speak if we were gods.

We will encounter other challenges as well. How should we accommodate the capital fact that the plays—every one of them—were written to be acted on a stage? And that, following from this fact, their intended form of “fulfillment” is indeed the stage?  In this regard, plays—crucially unlike novels—lead a double life: one on the stage (varying over time and place, and from stage to stage), and the other on the page. No less, the Shakespeare that many scholars seek to access is an Englishman of the late 16th century. One sustained form of scholarly commentary (called “the new historicism”) has labored hard to unpack what his plays—on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage between 1591 and 1611—would have meant then.

For us though—in the four sessions we will devote to our two plays—the Shakespeare that we can all access, together, is the one on the page: the writer, the poet, the one we are reading now.  This is the Shakespeare who, as fellow poet and playwright Ben Jonson put it in the dedication to the First Folio, was “not of an age but for all time.” Coming to grips with two of his masterpieces is going to be quite a journey, a journey that Professor Weinstein invites us all to join him on.

Philip Weinstein earned his PhD in English from Harvard University, staying on to teach at Harvard for the next 3 years. He then accepted a position at Swarthmore, where he remained for over 40 years, becoming the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English. He has written several books of literary criticism, many focused on Faulkner, including “Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner,” which won the Hugh Holman Award for the best book of literary scholarship or literary criticism in the field of southern literature published in 2010. In 2015, Weinstein retired from Swarthmore and moved to Martha’s Vineyard full-time. Since then, he’s gone on to write three more books and to continue teaching adults through the Vineyard Haven Public Library, Swarthmore Lifelong Learning, and the 92nd Street Y in New York.

For more information, please contact the library at vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or (508) 696-4211.