Friday, September 24, 2010

Friday's Favorite OTR

This is a repeat of a post from last November, but with a link to the episode included this time around. I will be doing this on occasion for the older Friday's Favorite OTR posts from before I started including the actual episodes.

Sherlock Holmes: "The Adventure of the Original Hamlet" 11/2/46


Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, but many scholars believe a play using the same story may have been written by a guy named Thomas Kidd a decade or so earlier. If this is so--and no one is at all sure one way or the other--it's possible Shakespeare may have lifted some ideas for his play from Kidd's work. Kidd's theoretical play is often refered to as the Ur-Hamlet.


Well, in this nifty little mystery, Sherlock Holmes comes really close to clearing that whole matter up. It seems that a copy of Kidd's play does indeed exist in an out-of-the-way private library. But there's more going on than a lesson in English Literature--as is graphically demonstrated when the owner of the library is blown to bits by a booby-trapped lunch box.


Holmes puts it all together, of course, and puts the finger on the killer. The fate of the Ur-Hamlet, though, is... well, you'll have to listen to the episode yourself to find out about that.

Click HERE to listen or download.

2 comments:

  1. Tim,
    How do I get "The Adventure of the Original Hamlet"?

    I have't read any Shakespeare plays and haven't heard of Thomas Kidd but I like Sherlock Holmes and have some novels from Conan Doyle.

    Is this a Basil Rathborn (sorry I mispelled his name) cause I have a set of videos of his Sherlock Holmes series and this is not in it.

    Oh, I like NCIS too. It's my favorite TV show.

    Susan

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  2. Susan,

    I bought this episode from Amazon.com as an MP3 file. Yes,it does star Basil Rathbone as Holmes. It was just a radio episode and not movie, so it wouldn't have been included in your videos.

    Thanks for your comment.

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