Hamlet Act III Scene 1

About this Course:

In 2020, when something seemed “rotten in the state,” the faculty of Gregory the Great Academy took up the principle that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” and had the pleasure of providing their students with a temporary distance-learning program. One aspect of these courses was a series of recordings in which Luke Culley, Sean Fitzpatrick, John Burger, and a few other faculty members, recorded a series of conversations about Shakespeare’s tragic and triumphant masterpiece, Hamlet. These conversations were held without rehearsal or pre-arranged topics in imitation of the famous conversations held by John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick at the University of Kansas’s Integrated Humanities Program, where the Academy claims its origins.

Among all the things it is about, Hamlet is a quintessential study in adolescence and has been a cherished member of our curriculum for years, presenting the torturous delights of looking into the mystery of the characters’ incentives and impulses. Frank Nelick used to bark, “Stop trying to figure everything out,” at his students when he judged they were straying too far from wonder into the analytical weeds, and Hamlet presents a perfect occasion to behold the inscrutable motives of every man and woman, and the Inscrutable Divinity that shapes our ends. “There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy…”

As a mind-twisting murder mystery, Hamlet is a marvelous and maddening meditation on the human condition with poetry that dances like a man on a wire over a precipice of “to be, or not to be,” and we hope you might approach and share the enjoyment we had in talking with each other at length over this pinnacle of plays. We pray you find some method in our madness and achieve a glimpse and receive a taste of what makes literature alive and lovely at Gregory the Great Academy.