Zachary Lesser

In 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a badly bound volume of twelve Shakespeare plays in a closet of his manor house. Nearly all of the plays were first editions, but one stood out as extraordinary: a previously unknown text of Hamlet that predated all other versions. Suddenly, the world had to grapple with a radically new—or rather, old— Hamlet in which the characters, plot, and poetry of Shakespeare's most famous play were profoundly and strangely transformed. Q1,...