Shakespeare's Sherlock

To be or not to be—that is the question in more ways than one. As it happens, "Hamlet" exists in multiple versions, and ever since the 1823 discovery of a seemingly earlier variant in the closet of a manor house, generations of scholars have puzzled over which is the definitive text. The latest to join the literary sleuthing is University of Pennsylvania professor Zachary Lesser. In this lecture, he untangles the textual clues in these multiple versions to give us a new sense of Hamlet.

This program presented in partnership with the Penn Humanities Forum.