Hamlet and Method

On April 25, I gave a plenary lecture entitled "Hamlet and Method: Knowledge Before Critical Thinking" at the annual meeting of Deutsch Shakespeare Gesellschaft in Bochum, Germany. Below is an abstract.

ABSTRACT: From the sixteenth century onwards, the notion of “truth” developed hand in hand with the notion of “method.” Indeed, we could think of the latter as comprising teachable procedures for establishing and purveying the former. One of the less commonly noted links between our world and Shakespeare’s is that both have witnessed something of a crisis of method. This talk explores how we might enter these two iterations of the problem of how to know into conversation, taking Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a guide and travel companion. Along the way, we will examine our own work as professional curators of knowledge, the complex set of inheritances that have shaped it, and the futures that may lie beyond it. Ultimately, I will suggest that Shakespeare’s theatrical use of questions (from “Who’s there?” to “To be or not to be?”) helps us recover something we might call the physics of knowledge-making. These material, transactional, and collaborative aspects of epistemogenesis are as central to early modern conceptions of judgment, prudence, and logic as they are marginal to the contemporary notion of “critical thinking,” that cornerstone of our profession’s most vexed genre of professional writing: the English Department Mission Statement. I will conclude the talk by offering some observations on why this difference matters.