The Texts of Hamlet

This panel discussion will be held in conjunction with Special Collections’ exhibition, "Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Elizabethan Culture." It runs from February 8, 2016 through April 30, 2016.

What is the second half of that famous quote “To be or not to be…”? That would depend on which publication of Hamlet you’re reading.  University of Arizona and Arizona State University professors explore the respective contributions of the First Quarto, the Second Quarto and the First Folio publications of Hamlet.

• Bradley Ryner, "What's Good about the First Quarto?"
• Frederick Kiefer, "What's Wrong with the First Folio?"
• Ian Moulton, "A Fair Copy of Foul Papers"

Bradley D. Ryner is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University, and the author of Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600-1642 (University of Edinburgh Press, 2014).

Frederick Kiefer is University Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona, where he teaches Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the Department of English. His publications include English Drama from “Everyman” to 1660: Performance and Print (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015) and Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Ian Moulton, Faculty Head of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication in the College of Letters and Sciences at Arizona State University, is a cultural historian and literary scholar whose research focuses on the representation of gender and sexuality in early modern literature. He has also published on Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists.

This lecture is offered as part of the programming in support of the installation of First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare exhibit at the Arizona State Museum.

For more information, please visit http://firstfolio.arizona.edu/