[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN GREENBLATT: Hello, I'm Stephen Greenblatt.

I'm a student of Shakespeare, a lifelong student of Shakespeare,
and I'm speaking to you on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.
Shakespeare died on April 23rd, 1616, and was buried two days later
in the church in Stratford-upon-Avon.
His death was very little noticed in his own time.
It was not a major event.
But now, 400 years later, all over the world people
are remembering Shakespeare in libraries and theaters,
in universities and schools, acknowledging what he left to us,
loving and caring for it.
We're here today at Harvard University in Memorial Hall, built after the Civil
War to record the names of the 136 Harvard men who died on the Union side
in the Civil War.
Their names stand for the whole question of the memory of the dead, the work
that the dead do, the obligations that they place upon us,
the ways in which we remember them.
And those questions are very much in Shakespeare's mind
in Hamlet.
The focus in this module for Shakespeare's thinking
about the work of the dead will be his tremendous play Hamlet,
and particularly the ghost in Hamlet, one of the most remarkable creations
in his entire work.
That ghost comes back and brings an obligation, a message,
to his son that changes his son's life and changes everything.
In this module, we'll be taking two approaches
to the question of how Shakespeare thinks about the dead.
In the first approach, we'll consider the ghost in the theater, the ghost
as he's meant to surge up on the stage.
In the second, we'll think about the ghost and about ghosts
as they function in the world of Shakespeare,
in the social and religious world of his time.
We live in a very different world.
We have very different ideas about our relationship to the dead.
But the fact is that ghosts still haunt us.