Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness

Rhodri Lewis (English) and Leonard Barkan (Comparative Literature) will discuss Lewis’s radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare’s engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Lewis reveals a Hamlet unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare’s age are scrupulously upended.