Hamlet: A Staged Reading

In 1823, more than two hundred years after the death of William Shakespeare, Sir Henry Bunbury made an intriguing discovery in his manor in Suffolk, England. Lying on a musty bookshelf, he reported finding “a small quarto, barbarously cropped, and very ill-bound,” that happened to contain a copy of Hamlet published in 1603, one year prior to the then earliest-known published version of the play. The First Quarto of Hamlet (or Q1) was full of mysteries – characters names were changed, new scenes were included, and hundreds of other details made this text a radically different version of the Hamlet we thought we knew. This will be a staged reading in which the focus will be primarily on the text of the play. If you would like to be involved in this production, please email alyssa.miller@yale.edu. In conjunction with a Senior Thesis in English for Alyssa Miller.