This year’s Shakespeare lecture in honour of Professor Stanley Wells C.B.E. was given by Professor Ann Thompson of King’s College London. Her talk was called ‘”You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said." : Have we heard it all?’
She begins by fantasizing about what it must be like never to have read Hamlet, and then reading the play for the first time. During the course of it she looks afresh at the placing of the famous ‘To be, or not to be’ speech and raises questions which seek to defamiliarise our knowledge of the play. She considers choices which editors, actors and directors have made before taking questions from the floor.
Thank you to the University of Notre Dame for organising this splendid event, co-hosted by The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham and The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.