Event Concluded
Dr. Gideon Rappaport will be discussing and signing copies of Hamlet: Edited and Annotated by Gideon Rappaport at La Jolla, California’s literary institution D.G. Wills Books.
When: Thursday, February 15, 7PM
Where: D.G. Wills Books, 7461 Girard Ave, La Jolla, CA
Though it is one of Shakespeare’s greatest and most beloved plays, Hamlet has been repeatedly misunderstood. This is partly because audience assumptions about the nature of reality have undergone huge changes between Shakespeare’s time and ours. In the name of those different assumptions, modern scholars, play directors, and film producers have often wrenched Shakespeare’s play out of its intended meaning. The result is that for most people what this great play is really about has been almost entirely obscured. Founded on the best scholarship of the past, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet not only provides precise glosses on the meanings of particular words and phrases as they would have been understood by Shakespeare’s audience and specific suggestions for actors and directors. More importantly, it clarifies the profound dramatic through-line of the play. The commentary in the annotation demonstrates that the story of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not of a man “who could not make up his mind,” or who thinks too much to act, or who exhibits the relativity of all values, or who is Oedipally in love with his mother, or who melancholically wishes he were dead. These and other non-Shakespearean interpretations superimposed on the play in the last hundred years vanish into insignificance in the face of the actual story of Hamlet as revealed in the original meanings of its speeches and their interrelation. That story is of a man who, in a dangerous and paradoxical moral situation—which stands for the situation of every one of us—becomes guilty of a tragic moral fall and then undergoes a spiritual turning leading to redemption.
Gideon Rappaport has an honors B.A. in Literature and History from Cowell College, University of California at Santa Cruz, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in British and American Literature from Brandeis University. He has taught Shakespeare, British Literature, and Humanities at Hamilton College, SUNY Cortland, Concordia University, and the University of New Hampshire, and at The Bishop’s School and La Jolla Country Day School in La Jolla, California. His many articles, reviews and books include Appreciating Shakespeare, which can also be heard as a podcast on Buzzsprout at “Appreciating Shakespeare with Doctor Rap.” Rappaport has also served as theatrical dramaturge for professional theaters including the Old Globe Theatre, the California Shakespeare Festival, the British-American Youth Festival Theatre, the San Diego Repertory Theatre, the North Coast Repertory Theatre, the Intrepid Theatre, the Moonlight, the Poor Players, the New Fortune Theatre Company, and the Coronado Community Theatre, and the San Diego Shakespeare Society, as well as school productions at The Bishop’s School and La Jolla Country Day School. He has lectured on Shakespeare for continued learning programs at University of California at San Diego and University of San Diego, for the Honors Seminars of the San Diego City Schools, Friends of the Library in several cities, the San Diego Shakespeare Society, and conventions of the National Association of Independent Schools and the California Association of Independent Schools.