Lit In-Person: Hamlet

Dusting off the Classics: Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Five In-Person Sessions
Wed., Sept. 4, 11, 18, 25, 2024, 6:30-8:30 pm MT
DCPA Performance, Sat., Sept. 21, 7 pm

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. Please note: Between the third and final sessions, students attend the fall 2024 production of Hamlet at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Richard Sacks taught literature, mythology and linguistics at Columbia University for 40 years. He also regularly participated in Columbia's well-known Core Curriculum, teaching its great books course and giving lectures to faculty on the challenges of teaching texts by authors ranging from Homer to Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf.