this winter i’ve audited a course at U of A on hamlet. 3 solid months of hamlet, hamlet, hamlet–re-reading the original text + academic articles + assorted theories + assorted films of hamlet and hamlet-adjacent storylines. it’s been a great experience–i’m thankful the prof accepted me as an auditing student.
the pleasure of auditing is not having to write the final paper, and i’m grateful for that, but i’ve done the assignments in-between. what have i learned? that i love learning, that hamlet is a complicated character, that ophelia gets a bad rap, that there were many political forces at play in elizabethan society during the time that hamlet was written, that shakespeare was under pressure from censors.
but mostly what i’ve learned is that students are smart, and they’re the future, and we’re in good hands.