Skip to content

CrashCourse Literature: Hamlet

Author: William Shakespeare · Episode: CrashCourse Literature playlist YouTube: Watch on YouTube Era: WH Era 2 — Early Modern Europe ELA Standard: R.8 — Analyze how an author uses literary elements and devices to develop theme SS Connection: WH.6_12.3 — Political authority, legitimacy, and succession in early modern European states

What This Episode Is About

John Green approaches Hamlet as a play about the failure of action — specifically, why a person who knows what they should do still cannot bring themselves to do it. The episode explores Hamlet's famous delay not as a character flaw but as Shakespeare's deliberate design to force the audience to sit inside radical uncertainty. Green traces the play's core themes of appearance vs. reality, corruption, and mortality (the "To be or not to be" soliloquy as a meditation on consciousness, not just suicide), and connects the political plot — a usurped throne, a poisoned king — to early modern anxieties about legitimate authority.

Key Concepts Covered

  • The soliloquy as the play's primary literary device: Hamlet's internal debates as the drama
  • "To be or not to be" as a philosophical argument about consciousness, suffering, and inaction — not simply a suicide speech
  • Appearance vs. reality as the play's structural theme: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"
  • Hamlet's delay: multiple critical interpretations (Romantic, Freudian, existentialist) and Green's own take
  • Ophelia as a character whose madness is structurally meaningful — not decorative
  • The play-within-a-play as a device for testing reality and exposing Claudius
  • Corrupt political succession: what happens to a state when its ruler is a murderer and usurper
  • The revenge tragedy genre and how Hamlet subverts it by making the hero unable to be a conventional avenger

Watch Prompt

As you watch, track this question in your notes: Green argues that Hamlet's delay is the point — that Shakespeare wants us to live in the uncertainty with Hamlet rather than solve it. What literary devices does Green say Shakespeare uses to create and sustain that uncertainty? Why might that be more interesting than a play where Hamlet just acts?

Device or technique How it creates uncertainty What it forces the audience to think about

This connects to R.8: analyzing how a playwright's structural and language choices shape the audience's experience and develop theme, and to WH.6_12.3: understanding early modern European ideas about political legitimacy, succession, and what corruption in leadership does to a state.

Full Transcript

Transcript pending. This entry is a stub.

Skinny Connection

Studio Ideas

  1. "To Be or Not to Be" Annotation: Students close-read Hamlet's most famous soliloquy using Green's analysis as a starting framework. They annotate for literary devices (R.8) and then write a short W.3 paragraph: what philosophical question is Hamlet actually asking, and how does Shakespeare use language to make sure there's no easy answer? Students connect the political context (usurped throne, corrupt court) to WH.6_12.3.

  2. Delay and Decision: Students identify a moment in history (from WH Era 2 or elsewhere in the curriculum) when a leader or group faced a "Hamlet problem" — knowing what was right but hesitating. They write a W.4 argument comparing that historical case to Hamlet's situation, using R.8 vocabulary for character and theme.

  3. Corruption and the State: The play argues that a corrupted ruler poisons the entire kingdom. Students write a W.3 explanatory piece connecting this idea to WH.6_12.3's framework for political legitimacy: what does Hamlet suggest about the relationship between a leader's moral character and the health of the society they govern? They draw on both the play's text and their world history knowledge.

Reading Library: Full entry

Why This Is Relevant Today?

Hamlet is 400 years old and the questions it raises about action, conscience, and moral certainty have not been answered. Every generation of students reading Hamlet is also a generation living through situations where the right course of action is genuinely uncertain — where institutions are corrupt, information is unreliable, and acting decisively might make things worse. The play is regularly read as a meditation on political paralysis, and that reading is currently very available: what does a person with values do when the system they're part of is corrupt but dismantling it might cause more harm? The question of political succession and legitimacy — the state of Denmark resting on who can legitimately hold power — is a question contemporary democracies are actively re-litigating. See WH-03: Writing Against Empire for how people challenge powerful systems — the contrast with Hamlet's paralysis is instructive.

Entry created: 2026-06-16 · Status: stub · Transcript: pending