Agnes Callard: belief

Transcript context

…Why did Shakespeare tell the story about a royal family that doesn’t matter historically because they all killed each other? Why not tell the story of Fortinbras? I think one of the things that makes Hamlet so powerful is that it’s about how the inside of an experience — or the first-personal point of view on it — is significant. People are significant not only for what they do but for how they live inside of their skin or something like that. In Hamlet’s first speech . . . Sorry, it’s not first. I think it’s the beginning of Act II. He says something like — he’s being criticized for mourning his father too much — “Those are but the trappings and the suits of woe, and I have that within which passes show.” So Hamlet is, from the very beginning, pointing to his inner life. The play points us to that, to the reality of the inner life of people, where their royal status and their large actions and their fighting in wars and all that becomes irrelevant, becomes the background. Why, as a philosopher and also a classicist, are you more interested in reading works of fiction now in some ways? That’s what I take away from what I know about what you’re doing.…

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