The nature of plays means that they are fluid, being different every time someone engages a written script. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Twelfth Night are generally regarded to have been first performed in 1601. Both plays—one a tragedy, one a comedy—exhibit cultural encounters surrounding death. They prompt their audiences, and later their readers, to consider mortality as an objective truth to which the living react in divergent ways. In this conversation Michael Scott and Michael Collins explored how these two plays confront others in their otherness as they search for reconciliation and peace within the transience of life.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University with Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the year-long series, Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user David Stanley
