Hamlet

• The Aeneid by Virgil. Hamlet built on it. - *Hamlet*'s Player's Speech is Virgil, explicitly: 'Aeneas' tale to Dido,' the fall of Troy from *Aeneid* Book 2 - Shakespeare has the actor recite Priam's slaughter and Hecuba's grief as a play-within-the-play — and it's that Virgilian image that goads Hamlet into shame at his own delay - Knowing the source episode sharpens the scene: this is the most famous tragedy borrowing its emotional pivot from the Roman epic
• Metamorphoses by Ovid. Hamlet built on it. - *Hamlet* reaches for Ovid again and again — Niobe, Hecuba, Hyperion, the forgetful waters of Lethe all surface from the *Metamorphoses* - The Player's Speech is built on Golding's Ovid, the ~200 lines on Hecuba's fall (*Met.* 13) - Shakespeare had read lots of Ovid in Golding's translation; the *Metamorphoses* is the single classical text standing behind *Hamlet* more than any other
• Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. Hamlet shaped it. - Turgenev turned Hamlet into a type — the skeptic of negation, paralyzed by his own self-awareness — in his 1860 essay 'Hamlet and Don Quixote' - Two years later he poured that type into Bazarov, the brilliant nihilist whose egoism leaves him unable to love - *Fathers and Sons* is Hamlet transplanted to provincial Russia: read the play and you've already met Bazarov's ancestor
• Faust, First Part by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Hamlet shaped it. - Goethe named Shakespeare one of the three formative influences of his life, and *Faust* wears the debt openly - Gretchen is Goethe's Ophelia — the woman the hero takes up and ruins, undone into madness, her brother killed avenging her - The borrowing is direct down to the staging: Mephistopheles sings one of Ophelia's mad songs, and Faust's churchyard scene plays as a dark echo of Hamlet's graveyard
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Hamlet shaped it. - Dostoevsky read *Hamlet* in Russian and French and wrestled with it in his notebooks — *How terrible! How petty is man! Hamlet! Hamlet!* - Raskolnikov is his Russian Hamlet: the brooding intellectual paralyzed by a deed, conscience turned against itself - Where Shakespeare's prince agonizes over a murder he must commit, Dostoevsky recasts the type as the modern murderer agonizing over one he has
• Dracula by Bram Stoker. Hamlet shaped it. - Stoker knew this play in his bones — he managed Henry Irving's Lyceum, where *Hamlet* was a fixture, and reviewed Irving's *Hamlet* back in 1876 - He salts *Dracula* with it: Harker's journal invokes *the ghost of Hamlet's father* and confesses he never grasped a line of the play until he lived it at the Count's castle

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Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)