 It is now my pleasure to introduce a man who needs no introduction, Professor of Philosophy and Published Playwright Douglas Huff. Doug is truly the founding father of this curriculum, having conceptualized its framework and written the grant for our funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Doug himself is also a figurehead within the program and has taught virtually every section of individual and morality over the last 29 years. As a former student of Doug's who wrote my letter of recommendation for my graduate study at Columbia, I can say he is without a doubt the favorite professor here at Gustavus. He is loved for his vast knowledge, his boundless charm, and his wonderful sense of humor. He has received both the Edgar M. Carlson Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Swenson Bun Award for Teaching Excellence at Gustavus. Over his long and successful career, Doug has three times been a visiting professor at Oxford University and has received many grants and awards, including a Fulbright grant, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and a Hidden Rivers Arts Playwriting Award. He has published a book, has written numerous academic articles, and has had ten of his plays produced in the United States, England, and India. It is now my privilege to welcome Professor Douglas Hough, the man, the myth, and the legend, to the stage to deliver his lecture entitled The Art of Living. Well, I'm so happy to see you here because I thought after Will's lecture everyone would just go home. I know I felt like going home, but be there as it may, here we are. I know it was a mistake. It's always been a mistake to speak after Will because he did a beautiful job, and even though he's not here now, oh, he is too. I congratulate him. Now, and it's wonderful. Of course, it's always good to see my colleagues. I believe, and I haven't seen them for a while, but seeing these former students now, that's extraordinary. Everybody, everybody looks better than you did when they were 18. And I think that's just how it works. Okay, it is indeed an honor to speak to you on the 30th anniversary of Curriculum 2, now called the Three Crowns Curriculum. 30 years is a long run for any program, and as Renee Peterson told me earlier, I didn't think it would last this long. I doubt any of us did, but what lasted did, and now it's time for us to celebrate 30 years. I'm going to do two things today, only two, God willing. Firstly, I want to make some brief comments about the history of the program. Really just add a few things to what Richard Fuller was kind enough to do for us. I want to mention, talk a bit about how it started, who started it, and why. And secondly, I will give a short lecture, and it will be fairly short. You can put your clock on it, I think. A short lecture in the spirit of the Three Crowns course, and tell you what you have to do to give your life meaning. Finally, someone's going to tell you what to do. And perhaps, after doing that, and perhaps what is even more important, tell you what you must not do, what you must avoid doing at all costs, if your life is to be meaningful, significant, and rewarding. First, Curriculum II officially started on the fall of 1985, as you've heard. We called it Curriculum II because we couldn't think of anything else. The search, I think Dick Fuller was sort of alluded to the fact that Ma Young, Evelyn Young, who ran the cafeteria here for 150 years, published the books about, I don't know, recipes, and all that, and rye bread, too. And that somehow stuck in our minds, and so was all this in Curriculum II. The search for a more substantial name became our holy grail, until Laurie Carson Kelly, and I'm sure to thank Laurie for that wonderful introduction. I'm going to put you in my will for that. Anyway, Laurie forced us to find a name with more publicity value. If you don't like the name, I encourage you to send all criticism, rage, and hate mail to Laurie. C2 Three Crowns was born in 1981, thanks to a task group set up by our dean, Robert Karsten, to develop an alternative program fulfilling General Ed. Why did we do it? There were many reasons, of course, but one was the perceived weakness in tertiary education. The knock on American higher education has always been that our students graduate knowing very little about a great deal, but nothing in any depth resulting in intellectual immaturity. In short, integration was the key of the three crowns. Integration between courses provided harder, integration between courses proved to be harder to achieve than we thought, but we were fully committed to its value, which we believe made the content of General Ed broader and deeper at the same time. But today it is the committee that created three crowns that I want to acknowledge before they are lost from memory. My memory and everyone else's. There is, for example, no record of them at the moment in the college archives. The committee was made up of six people. Renee Peterson was our office manager. The faculty were Richard Fuller from Physics, as you've seen, Thomas Emmert from History, David Fienen from Music, Anne Walcott from Political Science, and last and surely least was Associate Academic Dean Douglas Huff. Now, what I'd like to do here before I forget is if any of those people are still living and happen to be here, I'd like to have them stand and be acknowledged. When I look at that list, I see that, well, Renee went off to a well-deserved retirement, Anne Walcott left Gustavus for Greeter Pastures, and the rest of the people became deans at the college. Really not a very encouraging sign there at all. The program we developed was adopted by the faculty in 1982 and implemented in 1985. The program was funded by a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Robert Peterson, legendary development officer and Renee's husband, it really was a family in those days, raised the matching funds, which gave us a million-dollar endowment. With regard to the NEH grant, Renee told me to be sure to tell you the smoking story, and Renee, that's what I'm going to do. On my first trip to Washington, I met with a very sober and rather cold bureaucrat at NEH. She made it quite clear that she didn't think our proposal had much chance of success. In her opinion, we would expect to apply two or three times to even be considered seriously. I was getting nowhere quickly talking to her, and she was looking at the clock. While casting around for something to say, I noticed a very large ashtray on her desk filled with cigarette butts. I asked her if I could smoke. She said, oh, thank God, and pulled out her own cigarettes. Suddenly she had all the time in the world and became very helpful, explaining in detail how I should go about writing the grant. God works in mysterious ways. That is an unexaggerated story, by the way. Before I leave off rummaging through history, let me recognize all the directors of Three Crowns. These are the exceptional people who made the program work year in and year out. We are deeply indebted to them for all their devotion and hard work. We wouldn't be here without them. They are. Our first director, Richard Fuller, really the father of curriculum two. And then our second director, Florence Amamoto, from the English department, who served longer than anyone else, and we were deeply indebted to her. And then we had a rather colorful director, Dennis Cirkovich from the Russian department, who served. And then we had the dynamic boys from classics Matthew Penciera, who was our director, and Eric Dugdale, his colleague, filled in his first semester for him, and they both did a wonderful job. And last but not least, Laurie Carson Kelly, our president director from political science. And Laurie is loved by everyone and has done a beautiful, beautiful job, without question. And she's also been assisted by a very dynamic young graduate of curriculum to Mandy McCourt. Would they both stand, please? Now I want to go back into ancient history just for a moment, because I should also mention one more person. Professor Thomas Gover, emeritus from chemistry. While he was in the dean's office and a leader on the campus, he oversaw both curriculum one and curriculum two, and we owe him a great deal of credit. Oh, there he is. He didn't go home. Now, just one more recognition if I could. We have a lot of faculty here, the people that actually made curriculum two were the classroom instructors. Would all of those who have taught in curriculum two are now teaching in three crowns? Would you please stand and be recognized? Well, that ends the prepared part of the talk. Now for the unprepared part. I got that joke from Chester Johnson. I might have to mess up. A former professor here. Now I'd like to take a few minutes and do what we often do in the three crowns curriculum and tell you how to live. Socrates put some urgency to this endeavor. When he suggested that some lives are not worth living, he, in the apology as Will Poire pointed out this morning, he stated, the unexamined life is not worth living. For Socrates, some lives are clearly meaningless and count for nothing. The temptation here is to quickly identify what makes a life worthless and do whatever we can to avoid doing that. Now in Socrates' case, what makes a life meaningless is relatively straightforward. If, as he argues repeatedly, your actions and ideas do not accord with reality. If your ideas are based on falsehoods, then your life is obviously meaningless, worthless, and doesn't count for anything in any context or any environment where truth remains of value. Although Socrates' way of approaching the problem is extremely valuable, I mean if we realize we don't know what we thought we knew, we at least can begin to search for the truth. We can begin to purify our souls of falsehoods. Still there is another way. The search for meaning may real also require us to change our attitude toward life itself. Excuse me for a moment. This is water, by the way. Rather than thinking that life is something to be used up and grabbed with gusto is when they say, he lived his life to the fullest. Or she got the most out of life. Or when failure and disappointment strikes, I have nothing to expect from life anymore. Or as one of my colleagues who's retired recently, Rob Gardner, always likes to say, there's nothing out there for me. Rather than do that, we should instead think of existence as expecting something from us. Perhaps we should think we owe life, owe something to life. As Victor Frankl stresses, it does not matter what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us. In short, if we as human beings have obligations to the gift of life, there are some things we must do if our life is to have meaning. Well, whatever they are, they surely come after personal and familial obligations of survival and will-being are met. Yes, the harvest is the end, the barns are full, there's money in the bank, everything is covered by insurance, family trips are taken, gifts are given, the children are educated and married and to top it off, you've stopped drinking and smoking and run three times a day. Now, is there something else you're supposed to do to make your life meaningful? Well, yes there is. If you owe something to the miracle of existence, then you'd better be prepared to respond. Or you're just another person who managed to grab as much pleasure, power and fame as he or she could every time the brass spring came around. And God knows there are enough of those. No, you need to do something else. There are three things you must do to make your life meaningful. One, you must help the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised and the marginalized. Two, you must help build a great civilization which necessitates the two bedrocks of every civilized society, universal health care and education. And three, you must search for God. Number two is the one that preoccupies many of us here today as we celebrate our curriculum. Built as it is on the soldiers' shoulders of intellectual giants, emphasizing again and again that a great civilization requires a high culture, great art, great science and great philosophy. The deterioration of the American culture can frighten us. There are moments when it doesn't seem possible to escape all the vulgarity and greed hammering at our doors, corroding our institutions and undermining our noblest aspirations. I'm starting to sound like Cicero. But this is the main tragedy of current American life. A colossal disrespect for truth and utter contempt for facts and finally a cavalier contempt for each other. We are surrounded by barbarians and like the medieval monks before us, sometimes it seems our job is simply to huddle together in cloisters keeping the remnants of civilization alive for a better day. But that is not the case. Our job is in the here and now. Our job is to celebrate genius compared to which, as Proust would say, all social position and official rank are as nothing. And thereby, we are here to help raise the spiritual and intellectual aspirations of our students. Of course, encouraging genius is a tricky business. To echo Gertrude Stein, it is difficult to be a genius. You must sit alone for long periods of time and do nothing. Do absolutely nothing. Try selling that to contemporary students glued to their cell phones, iPads, and laptops and you know what we are currently up against in curriculum too. Of course, we don't expect all of our students to become geniuses, but the emulation of genius will always make them more than they are, which, of course, is the final goal of education. Still, this business of helping others, building civilizations, searching for God and all that is all for naught if we don't manage to avoid doing one other thing. And this other thing is the one thing that most of us cannot resist doing. There is a sense of urgency here. Since performing this action will always harm us and perhaps even destroy us, we must in short avoid making a certain kind of mistake. We must avoid making a tragic mistake. Now, I'm going to read for another 20 minutes so you can schedule your energy level for that period of time. I want to talk about a tragic mistake. The question now, what is a tragic mistake? There are many places we can go for an answer and it is always the same answer, but one of the best is surely found in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Now, since this play is often considered the play of the Western Canon and after eons of adoration and praise, it must now be approached with a certain amount of humility if not downright trepidation. This is especially true if one were foolish enough to aspire to say something new or even relevant to what has already been said. The words of Wittgenstein can make us pause if nothing else will. He says, I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare's admirers and to make matters worse, he goes on to say, an enormous amount of praise has been and is still to be lavished on Shakespeare without understanding for the wrong reasons by a thousand professors of literature to say nothing I might add of philosophers and playwrights. A tragic mistake is a moral mistake. Tragedy is in essence a moral concept. Thus we might think it shares something with philosophy, but caution is required here as well. Tragedy plows a different part of the ethical field than does moral philosophy. There are limits to what moral philosophy can tell us about right and wrong, and tragedy easily demonstrates why. In conventional moral thought and it makes little difference what moral theory we prefer, when I do something wrong, make the wrong moral decision, I cease to be looked upon by others or even by myself with the same admiration and respect as I once enjoyed. They may feel sorry for me, they may feel bad for me, but let's face it, when I make a wrong decision that I did not have to make but insist upon making, contrary to all advice, then it's my own damn fault and the consequences are just even if sometimes harsh. Excuse me. This is the exact opposite of what we experience in tragedy. When the tragic hero makes a moral mistake, which leads to his or her destruction, we do more than feel sorry for the person. We say in effect two seemingly contradictory things. One, we say that the tragic hero is completely responsible for his or her action, and two, the tragic hero does not deserve his or her fate. The exact opposite in other words of what conventional morality would conclude. Justice plays no role here. This seemingly contradictory notion of moral decision making where you are responsible for the decisions you make but do not deserve the consequences is the very heart of tragedy. How are we to understand this? What is it that makes such a notion coherent? The answer lies in the concept of tragedy itself. I'll try not to dump that water on your computer. The answer lies in the concept of tragedy itself. Tragedy, of course, is here a technical term of dramatic literature which often, if not always, involves suffering of some sort but must not be confused with the common use of the term for any unfortunate happenstance, accident, or crime. If, for example, when walking home today, Professor Dennis Cirkovich is run over by a garbage truck, that is not a tragedy. Sorry, Dennis. So what is a dramatic tragedy? We can quickly summarize a tragedy following Aristotle into four essential elements. Tragic hero, tragic situation, tragic mistake, and a tragic flaw. The key here is the relationship between the tragic hero and the tragic situation, or between plot and character, as Aristotle would say. The tragic hero is at the very least morally above average and quite often, as in the case of Hamlet, morally and intellectually exceptional and well beyond us, like Prufrock, we may be lesser lords, perhaps, fit to start a scene or two, perhaps no Prince Hamlet. Virtuousness, that is, a degree of wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice is always required for the tragic hero, and it may even be necessary for his happiness, as Aristotle insists. But in the end, virtue cannot protect him. It cannot save him. It cannot prevent Hamlet from making a tragic mistake. His virtuous character has no doubt served him well in the past, has saved him from much misfortune before, but not here and not now. As great as he is, he will insist on making the wrong decision, and he will make it contrary to all advice and all opportunity to do otherwise. It is, however, the situation in which Hamlet finds himself that makes it possible for us to say he did not deserve his destruction. He did nothing to create or deserve the problems he faces. Nevertheless, the world he now faces demands action from him. He will fail to deal successfully with the situation because he is not perfect. He is a human being with strengths and great virtues, but they cannot save him, and because no one is prepared to deal and is equipped to deal with every problem, the world, the contingent dreadfulness of the world will have its way with Hamlet. As it will have its way with all of us sooner or later. The tragic hero and the tragic situation are, in other words, tailor-made for each other. Some situations just bring out the worst in us, and this is no less true for the tragic hero than it is for anyone else. If Prince Hamlet had been in Macbeth's situation, for example, King Duncan would not have been stabbed in his sleep, there is nothing in Macbeth's world that would have had such an effect on Hamlet's character. Nothing there would have brought out any weakness in him, but in Elsinore, it's entirely different. Once Hamlet has the opportunity to make the wrong decision, nothing in heaven or earth can stop him, and he destroys himself, destroys himself in the sense that he can never, ever be the man he once was. There is no redemption in tragedy. I really don't need the water, I just like drinking it. Still, I actually do need the water. Still, we see Hamlet, we feel Hamlet did not deserve his destruction, because he did not deserve to be put into this situation, which is why we always, we all resonate with tragedy. It is this tragic sense of life that makes tragedy morally profound, and we carry it with us from the cradle to the grave. None of us asked to be here in this world, but here we are. And with a load of duties and obligations to perform as well until we are wracked with disease and die, and no one deserves to die. Death may be the way of nature as science assures us, but it makes no moral sense. There really is no point to it, and we do not, we do not deserve anything of the kind. Like tragedy, there is no justice here. It is, it is as if we have done something terribly wrong. It feels, death feels like punishment, punishment for the crime of existence. Nevertheless, our tragic hero, Hamlet, does make a tragic mistake. Why did he do it? He did it because of a flaw in his character, a tragic flaw which is simply a character fault, a frailty or a weakness that is brought forward by the tragic situation perhaps for the first time in his life, but most definitely for the last time. Again, tragedy is a theoretical notion. Not that there cannot be tragedies outside the theater, but it is the theater that gives the knowledge that tragedy is meant to teach us, although from a slightly different perspective in each case. This is why the tragic flaw always seems to be a case of moral hubris that is the failure to recognize any moral authority greater than our own, human or divine. Each individual tragedy uniquely says that this is what moral hubris looks like here and here and here. The more you see it, the better you understand it, for some things must be seen to be understood at all. Now this may be all well and good, but as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, a tragedy in any of Aristotle's senses, and if not, what is it? If we read the play in terms of classical tragedy, we notice immediately that it falls into two distinct parts. Acts one through three follow the classical form quite closely. Act one introduces a tragic hero in a tragic situation which we know will eventually prove to be beyond his powers. This itself is saying something since Shakespeare has made Hamlet well above the average in terms of moral virtue and intelligence. For instance, his capacity for self-reflection is extraordinary and he is a superb athlete to boot. He is also a young and he's a prince. When we first meet him, he has returned from the university in Germany for his father's funeral only to discover that his mother has been unfaithful to his father with his uncle Claudius. To make matters worse, his rightful crown has been usurped by Claudius. Death, adultery, estrangement from his one true love, political corruption, and finally rumors of murder by a ghostly apparition all provide Hamlet with his tragic situation. Act two begins a month later with Hamlet in a sorry physical and psychological state. He feels the duty to act but has taken no action to avenge his father's murder. This rather sad and frustrating state of affairs has led some to miss the entire import of the play. To this day, Hamlet is sometimes seen as a typically indecisive intellectual who simply cannot make up his mind to the point of hopelessness if not cowardice. Others following Freud have argued that Hamlet waited because he was psychologically incapable of taking action against his uncle because he suffered from an out-of-piss complex. In other words, Hamlet did nothing between acts one and two because he is either an indecisive coward or suffers from a crippling psychopathological state. In either case, we lose the play as a tragedy because we no longer have a tragic hero. He is either without virtue or he is psychologically impaired. There is no justification in either case for seeing the play as anything more than a psychological case study or a warning against indecisiveness. In reality, there is no justification here for bothering to see the play at all, much less seeing it as a masterpiece of Western literature. Now, Hamlet did nothing between acts one and two because he is not insane. He is not going to kill someone because of a ghost story, even if it is a story that seems to confirm what he already believes to be true. Hamlet doesn't believe in ghosts any more than we do and probably less. But on the other hand, Horatio saw it and anything Horatio sees, Hamlet is going to take seriously, especially when even palace guards feel that something is truly rotten in the state of Denmark. Since Hamlet is not crazy, he will only really believe and act on the ghost story if and only if he can corroborate it with additional evidence. If not, killing a man on the basis of what an apparition tells you in private is paramount to madness and no one knows this better or fears it more than Hamlet. How to confirm the ghost story? That's just the question. And his weeks of failure to answer it have brought him to thoughts of suicide. Why can't he get confirmation? What's so difficult about that? Why doesn't he just spy on Claudius? Why doesn't he read Claudius' mail, listen in on his private conversations or send allies, and Hamlet has allies to spy or bribe people to spy? Why doesn't he do what we might do? He doesn't because he is Hamlet. Spying is not a moral option for Hamlet. In Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, if you spy, you die. There are no exceptions in the play to this moral law. Everyone who spies dies. Ophelia, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrant, and Guildenstern. Hamlet, of course, gets his confirmation of the ghost story in Act 3. It is also in Act 3 he makes his tragic mistake and destroys himself. The confirmation he seeks comes through the play within the play, where incidentally Shakespeare also gives Hamlet the talent of a playwright and has Hamlet write and insert a scene in the murder of Gonzago in order to test the king's reaction to seeing his own crime writ large before his eyes. Although hardly evidence, even for evidence enough for a court of law, it will be enough for Hamlet if Horatio sees what he sees. This is part of Hamlet's genius. Like us, he knows that he will see only what he expects to see, since the things we see are the things that are already within us. He rightly doesn't trust himself, especially here, and makes sure Horatio can corroborate his reaction to the king. This power of self-reflection is part and parcel of what makes Hamlet Hamlet, but there are limits even to this power, and it fails him when he needs it most. It is here in Act 3 that Hamlet makes his tragic mistake, does the morally wrong thing, crosses a line that must never be crossed and destroys himself. Like Creon in Antigone, Hamlet, like Creon in Antigone, Hamlet too will eventually realize that in a profound sense, he too no longer exists. But unlike Creon, Hamlet has unfinished business and he will forge ahead, even though it has cost him everything. In the end, Hamlet's chief virtue may be perseverance. Tragedy again involves a peculiar kind of mistake. Ordinarily, when we do the wrong thing, it is always possible to make restitution to some degree. Redemption of some kind always seems possible. There are even cases where we have learned a profound lesson from our wrongdoing and become a better person for it. That is not possible in tragedy. In tragedy, we are always faced with a very specific situation where we are called upon to take action, and if we take the wrong action, nothing, especially ourselves, will ever be the same again. Tragedies, in essence, are meant to tell us something about the boundaries of moral reality that circumscribe our lives. Watching Hamlet or Creon exceed those boundaries tells us a great deal about where they are and what it takes to violate them. It tells us what attitudes, inclinations, and postures must be avoided at all costs. First and foremost, of course, tragedies warn us against any form of moral hubris, which encourages us to elevate our judgments over and above everyone else's, including the judgment of an all-powerful and divine being, as Mrs. Turpin discovered in Flannery O'Connor's story, Revelation. To her utter amazement, Mrs. Turpin found herself at the end of the story, shaking her fist at heaven and yelling, Who do you think you are? For one magnificent moment, she was the sole moral authority in the universe. For one terrifying moment, she came face to face with demonic rebellion. We are all prone to place ourselves at the center of the moral universe. There is nothing mysterious about this. We know that sometimes the lone individual in a group is indeed right and everyone else is wrong. Popular fiction worldwide is filled with such stories, but what is often ignored in these heroic tales is that the criterion for right and wrong is not the lone individual's strong convictions or feelings. A madman could have strong feelings and perhaps even do something positive by accident, but we would not praise him for it. He has no idea what he's doing. He's just doing something he evidently has to do. What makes his action right or wrong has nothing to do with the strength of his feelings. To call an action right has no meaning unless there is a benchmark other than feelings. Feeling good does not make it good, contrary to Nietzsche, Sartre and Hemingway. So where did Hamlet go wrong? Evidently, he must have committed moral hubris, but where? He does it in Act 3. In fact, he does it twice in Act 3. The first, when he takes it upon himself to prevent Claudius from going to heaven, which foreshadows the second, when he takes it upon himself to chastise and punish his mother in spite of God's commandment to honor her and in spite of the ghost's commandment to leave her alone. The ghost said, Heaven will judge her, not you. While she remains a loyal and devoted mother to Hamlet, her failure to his father is none of his business. Hamlet has usurped the moral authority of everyone, including God. It could not be clearer than that. We might pause here for a moment, however. Of course, we all come into existence as into a rather terrifying place, mitigated only by a mother's touch, but is turning on her, scolding her, and humiliating her enough to constitute a tragic mistake. Of course, we know that small actions can have enormous consequences. Pebbles in the road can destroy lives as Ophelia discovered, but is Hamlet's failure with his mother really enough of a mistake for the grand goals of tragedy? To see why it might be, we must return to the first instance of moral hubris. Hamlet, on his way to his mother's chamber, comes across King Claudius praying. Hamlet surmises correctly that Claudius is asking God for forgiveness, or at least attempting to ask. Hamlet, Claudius, and everyone in the audience knows that asking for forgiveness is the theological loophole through which all sinners can be saved, no matter the monstrosity of their crimes. The caveat here is that forgiveness must be requested in complete sincerity. A requirement Claudius cannot meet. Hamlet does not know this, of course, but he is taking no chances, and he refuses to kill Claudius and perhaps send him to heaven. Under the right conditions, God would take Claudius, but Hamlet is not going to let that happen. He will kill him later when Claudius is immersed in sin. Hamlet will decide who goes to heaven or hell and when. Hamlet has replaced God. There is no moral authority higher than Hamlet at this juncture in the play. Hamlet has dramatically exceeded his moral prerogative. A major indicator as to the level of Hamlet's hubris is that he never confers with Horatio, his loyal consiglio re, about the wisdom of his decision to ignore Claudius and rush off and chastise his mother. Hamlet seeks Horatio's advice in everything but this. In Hamlet's mind, there is no need to confer with anyone at this point, for nothing could be more just, more right, more proper than his deciding where Claudius will spend the afterlife or in his punishing his mother for her infidelity. Unfortunately, when Hamlet confirmed the ghost story, he also confirmed the admonition to leave his mother alone. This he ignores, and so he goes to his mother and in his haste and anger accidentally kills Polonius, thus preventing him from taking immediate action against Claudius. To forge ahead at this point and kill Claudius now would be seen by one and all as the action of the homicidally deranged. Hamlet's attempt to rectify all things that Elsinor has collapsed and come to nothing. The tragic consequence is the sacrifice of his virtuous character. Hamlet as we know him is no more. Both of these consequences are presumably realized by Hamlet as he drags Polonius's body around the back hallways and lobbies of the castle with remorse and regret. The tragedy of Hamlet is all but over at this point. It is here that a soliloquy calls out to be inserted into play if there was ever a moment when we needed to know more about Hamlet's inner thoughts. This is it. A speech of recognition filled with pathos is surely what Aristotle would have expected at this point. It may even have been the conclusion Shakespeare was looking for, but he decided not to take. Shakespeare wants to know what happens next. For that to happen, Hamlet needs to carry on. Thus there is no suicide, no mutilation, and no stopping him. It has cost him everything to this point, and it was all completely his fault. So be it. Claudius will still pay. And in Acts 4 and 5, Hamlet will do whatever it takes to make him pay dearly. The Hamlet of Acts 1 through 3 is no more. In part 2 of the play, my part 2 of the play, we are confronted with a different Hamlet. Hamlets of Acts 4 and 5 is a dramatic hero of action. One we are all too familiar with from any number of revenge sagas coming from Hollywood or Bollywood. It makes no difference. From here on in, it is a question of, well, he or won't he overcome all obstacles and pull it off in the end? Hamlet now condones and performs actions he had refused to stoop to performing before Act 4. He lies, he dissembles, spies, bargains, conspires, plots, and kills without hesitation, even old friends. And he nearly succeeds in the end. In fact, he's within minutes of exposing Claudius to the court with hard objective evidence. That is to say, Claudius' letter to the English king asking him to kill Hamlet is there. And we're waiting for the arrival of the English ambassadors asking for their reward. All he had to do was stay alive long enough, which Shakespeare made sure would not happen. If Hamlet had been allowed to live everything, given all the chaos, would have worked out reasonably well. That is, Claudius punished and dead Hamlet king, Hamlet reconciled with his mother, and perhaps even with leirates, Shakespeare, like Aristotle, knew this was not a satisfying or adequate structure for tragedy. I might do a footnote here. Aristotle, at one point in the Poetics, does suggest that it is possible to have a happy ending in a tragedy. And what I just described, this alternative ending to Hamlet where everything sort of comes out all right, that would have been as close to a happy ending as Aristotle had in mind. But Aristotle went out of his way to point out that would be a terrible structure for a tragedy. And Shakespeare obviously agreed, so Hamlet must lose absolutely everything in the end, including his life. In conclusion, in conclusion, we can now see that in writing Hamlet, Shakespeare can join two theatrical forms, classical tragedy and revenge saga. Although it is not an especially happy marriage, it works once we understand the destruction of Hamlet's virtue in act three, and how this changes in character made the action in four and five possible. Thanks to the classical tragedy in act one three, we leave the theater with a profound feeling that Hamlet did not deserve any of it. Even though he was sorely responsible for the worst parts of his own destruction, our knowledge of what cannot ever be done morally, our knowledge of the limits to what is morally possible for us, has increased tenfold after following the decisions of a virtuous young man in a terrible situation that he did nothing to cause, but one that was clearly beyond his powers to deal with successfully. There is a line we cannot cross. We may not always know where it is, but we do now know it is there. And knowing that, of course, is the birthplace of wisdom. Thank you.