Sunday, November 22, 2026 at 2:00 PM
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Co-presented with the UCLA Department of English Shakespeare’s most famous play might also be his most misunderstood. *Hamlet *opens at midnight with a terrified sentry calling out into the dark: “Who’s there?” UCLA English Professor **Robert N. Watson** uses that exact question to pull us inside the characters' heads. Hamlet famously tells a troupe of actors to “hold the mirror up to nature.” For four centuries, audiences have looked into that mirror and seen themselves, and Watson draws on his new book, *Shakespeare’s Tragedies: What Makes Them Great*, to explain why the play still haunts us. Along the way, he dismantles the most famous line in the English language. “To be or not to be” doesn’t mean what you think it does. **Robert N. Watson** is Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA, where he received the university’s top teaching prize. Hundreds of students filled Harvard’s largest classrooms for each of his Shakespeare lectures. He has held fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge, served as Head Scholar for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Teaching Shakespeare Institutes, and comments on Shakespeare for NPR and the BBC. He is the author of prize-winning books on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, most recently *Shakespeare’s Tragedies: What Makes Them Great* (2026).