Patching Up Hamlet: Der Bestrafte Brudermord as Adaptation and Critique

Abstract

“ o far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is snone of the others.” The polemical verdict comes, of course, from T. S. Eliot in an essay that shifts critical attention away from the character of theDanish prince to the “primary problem” ofHamlet the play. For even apart from its textual dilemmas,Hamlet is a drama marked by gaps and enigmas: the prince’s delays in avenging his father’s murder; his persistent moodiness; the question of royal inheritance; the allusions to Catholic purgatory. In Eliot’s account, the problems of Hamlet are the direct result of its method of composition: Shakespeare has superimposed his play onto “much cruder” material, a set of stubbornly unyielding sources from the tale of François Belleforest to Thomas Kyd’s “UrHamlet” and the anonymous dramaDer bestrafte Brudermord, better known in English as Fratricide Punished. Inverting Eliot’s perspective, the purpose of this essay is to examine the Brudermord as an intervention rather than a source, an attempt at responding to the dramatic problems it was once supposed to have caused. Criticism and commentary are one means of addressing the problems ofHamlet, but a parallel form has always been that of creative response and adaptation. As Stephen Orgel notes in a study of two later continental adaptations, “Hamlet is a play, we might say, that frommoment to moment wants completion, calls out for us to fill in the blanks.”Drawing on an English play that itself was in a state of flux and revision,