“Okay,” I said. “It’s time to kill Hamlet.”
A classroom full of AP English students stared up at me, unsure how to take my somewhat crass proclamation. We were about to finish Shakespeare’s masterful tragedy on a bright spring day in late April — truly the cruelest month, at least for Danish princes and slightly bored American teenagers. And, I was ready to once again lead students through scenes of the Bard’s most poetic renditions of slaughter with vengeance and contrition in the air and bodies strewn across the stage.
But then, one of my politely irreverent students posited an idea. “Or,” he said, “we could not.”
I paused; he grinned.
“We could just not read today,” he continued. “And if we don’t open the book, and we don’t finish the play, then Hamlet doesn’t have to die.”
It was brilliant.
If we didn’t proceed, then, at least in the minds of twenty-seven suburban Colorado teens, Prince Hamlet would live forever. He could remain on the cusp of greatness with all the hope and passion and potential to meet his destiny while avoiding his fate. Hamlet would stand on the edge of eternity, finally ready and forever willing to avenge his father’s death and assume his rightful place on the throne of Denmark.
We pondered these possibilities together in class, digressing into a discussion of the timeless status by which characters “live” in their books. In Acts I–IV, Hamlet is always alive; at the end of Act V, he is always dead. Like Schrödinger’s Cat from the classic meditation on the quirks of quantum mechanics, literary characters can be, and in fact are, both alive and dead at the same time. Readers can experience both states of existence anytime — we can engage any moment of a character’s life with the simple opening of a book. With that, literature has the ability to save lives.
And yet, literature does not prevent death. Saving can also mean simply preserving—an idea Tim O’Brien explored insightfully and poignantly in his post-modern Vietnam novel The Things They Carried, which coincidentally, we had studied the previous month. More students joined the conversation, advocating for the sparing of Hamlet’s life based on the lessons from O’Brien’s novel. In “Lives of the Dead,” the last vignette of O’Brien’s picaresque postmodern war story, his narrator, cleverly and meta-fictionally named Tim O’Brien, shares the story of a classmate named Linda, who passed away in childhood of cancer. The young Timmy, struggling to cope with the senseless death of his friend, “made up elaborate stories to bring Linda alive in [his] sleep.” With all the naive idealism of youth and art, Timmy realized that, through memories, “Once you’re alive … you can’t ever be dead.” So, as he grew and became a storyteller, he continued “dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way.” It’s so simple and pure, the innocent meditations of a young boy who defeats the tragedies of growing up by preserving his friend’s life in a story.
As my students pondered how we might save Hamlet’s life, we recalled how Timmy learns the magic of storytelling’s power of eternity when Linda tells him, “Well, I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like … being inside a book that nobody’s reading.” Thus, the goal of his storytelling became to preserve her life and subsequently save a piece of his childhood forever. The novel ends by revealing the entire point of storytelling and the purpose of the novel: “And so …. It is as Tim saving Timmy’s life with a story.” The brilliance of Tim saving Timmy is the heart of coming-of-age literature — in order to mature and become adults, we must ultimately kill the child, the innocence, in us. We spend the rest of our lives trying to get him back, trying to save our lives.
As class continued, and we coined the phrase “Schrödinger’s Hamlet,” with some input from students who were taking AP Physics, I explained how the idea of literary characters “living” in a novel outside of the specific action of the plot had been explored in other books, notably in the postmodern parody of Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. Fforde’s “prose portal” allows readers to enter the real worlds of literary characters as they go about their daily lives, ready and waiting to come alive whenever the book is opened. We even pondered whether imaginary characters are every bit as alive in our thoughts as “real people” are. To that theory, one clever student declared, “It’s just like the best line from the Harry Potter novels.” Near the end of the seventh and final book The Deathly Hallows, he told us, after Harry’s life has apparently ended at the hands of Voldemort, Dumbledore explains “Of course, it’s happening in your head, Harry. But why on Earth should that mean it’s not real?” At that moment, the boy wizard is also channeling Schrödinger, both alive and dead at the same time.
I had not thought of Shrodinger’s Hamlet in quite a while, but the idea returned this past fall while watching Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The famed director’s ninth film is a perfect example of Schrödinger’s Hamlet in action. In this romance about the end of the 1960s, Tarantino “saves” Sharon Tate’s life. In true fairytale fashion, Sharon Tate remains forever young, beautiful, pregnant and riding on the joy of her big movie role. Tarantino reminds us it’s Sharon Tate’s life that means something, as opposed to her death, and he saves her life because that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The good guys are supposed to win — that is the heart of Romanticism and the classic Hollywood ending. The hero saves the day, and the bad guys get roasted. In Tarantino’s Hollywood, Sharon Tate lives. Just by watching, we can go where she forever lives in beauty and innocence. We can experience her life as Tarantino dreams her back into existence. She becomes Tarantino’s Cat, both alive and dead at the same time.
I don’t know if my AP English class ever continued our lesson, opened our books, and finished Act V of The Tragedy of Hamlet that April day. While I’m fairly certain we did, and Hamlet met his tragic fate, it’s possible those clever teens convinced me to not complete the play. For it was late in the year and probably only a week or two before the AP Language exam, a high stakes test for which we’d been intensely reviewing. There’s a part of me that likes to believe we didn’t unleash the carnage and that young Prince Hamlet lives on in the hearts and minds of my students. And that it was a young teen hero who saved his life.