In honor of her recently published book, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss, Professor Emily Anderson will be holding a talk entitled "Shakespearean Adaptation: Hamlet without Yorick." She will examine the question: How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? In her lecture, Professor Anderson will address this question through an overview of Shakespearean adaptations: a King Lear that features a happy ending, a production of Macbeth that excises Banquo’s ghost, a Winter’s Tale that cuts two acts off of Shakespeare’s play, and, in her culminating example, a production of Hamlet that omits the graveyard scene, and Hamlet’s iconic confrontation with Yorick’s skull, altogether. As she will show, all of these examples, and most especially the last, illustrate that adaptation is often paradoxically motivated by the desire to preserve the very sources it overwrites.

Light refreshments will complement the presentation.

Emily Hodgson Anderson is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where she teaches classes on a range of topics related to eighteenth-century literature and culture. Her most recent book, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss, was published July 2018 with the University of Michigan Press.