Shakespeare’s “Lost Play” Lecture at Rutgers

Shakespeare’s “Lost Play”: After the Arden Edition
April 12, 2012
4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Murray Hall, Plangere Annex 302
510 George Street
New Brunswick, NJ


Reception to follow


The Rutgers British Studies Center is pleased to announce a visit by Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham, on Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 4:30pm in the Plangere Annex, Murray Hall (302).  Dr. Hammond will speak about “Shakespeare’s ‘Lost Play'”.  Please join us for what promises to be a fascinating lecture!


When it appeared in the celebrated “Arden Shakespeare” series in 2010, Double Falsehood unsurprisingly had a global impact as that rarest of publications, a newly-discovered play by William Shakespeare. Performed during the 1612-13 season and attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher, the play surfaced over a century later in a version revised by Shakespeare scholar Lewis Theobald. In the Arden edition, Professor Hammond recounts the scholarly sleuthing by which he discovered the relationship between the lost play–a dramatic adaptation of Cervantes’ nearly contemporary masterpiece Don Quixote (1605, 1615)–and the play that was staged in 1727. In his lecture Hammond will describe this historical trajectory, the critical responses his edition of Double Falsehood has received in the two years since its printing, and directions for further research suggested by this singular publishing event.

co-sponsored by the Department of English Graduate Long Eighteenth-Century Studies Group