thursday, 30 May h. 16,30, Aula F, Via dei Volsci 122
30/03/2023 ore 16,30
«The play’s the thing», Hamlet says, «wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king». In the second act of the play Shakespeare weaves a spider’s web to “catch the conscience” of a king and of his corrupt court, accomplice in his intrigues and his atrocities. Primarily Hamlet is a student of Wittenberg, in whom Shakespeare individualizes the tragic temper of a hero. But for Hamlet to be ready to avenge his father's death, his conscience must be awakened. Shakespeare entrusts to drama the young prince’s moral education. It is the art of a company of strolling players that makes Hamlet shake from the sleep of his conscience. It is then that Hamlet makes his decision, and plans on Claudius' confession. And it is now that in Shakespeare theatre assumes not only the function of representing the consciousness of thought that generates social and political tensions but above all it manifests the other side of the medal: when men can only denounce social abuses from a stage, it means that the ferocity of a hegemonic power, which spreads terror, has annihilated minds; no way out, unless someone, more than others, feels the inescapable moral need to risk his/her life to awaken some who “sleep”, because sometimes death is even preferable to life.
The reception of Hamlet in European culture has shaped an Hamletism that emerges from different forms and dramaturgical contexts, that evoke convergences with the more introspective and sentimental scenes, or with those more pregnant with political and historical tensions of the Shakespearean text.
One of the twentieth century’s plays that particularly proposes the emblematic role of the Hamletism is Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. The theme of the utopia of a world that will be regenerated by the decision of those whose “conscience” does not make “cowards" reappears in the character of the student Trofimov, and it becomes the motif of the whole pièce.
link: meet.google.com/ujp-oerc-iyt