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Hamlet is arguably Shakespeare’s best known play and his greatest tragedy. As a tragedy, it explores our bottomless capacity to mislead ourselves into wrong actions by thinking too much about the right way to act in a world teeming with injustices. Consequently, Hamlet is also a play about reading and misreading other people, our own motives, and the wisdom of the past which comes down to us in classic texts. This talk will consider a few pivotal moments in Hamlet where Shakespeare invites us to reflect on the nature and purposes of reading — including the “reading” we are doing as an audience of the play. What does Hamlet offer to teach us about interpreting works of art, and why would such a lesson be important for us now, more than four centuries after Shakespeare wrote it?
PRESENTER:
Sean Keilen is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he directs Shakespeare Workshop, a research center that promotes scholarship, community engagement, and theatrical performance. He is the author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (Yale University Press, 2006) and the coeditor of Shakespeare: The Critical Complex (Garland, 1999) and The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (Routledge, 2017). Princeton University Press published his new book, Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts, in 2026. Sean Keilen works as the head of dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a longstanding professional theater company.
