Abstract
For celebrated director Daniel Mesguich, »Hamlet is the play of all plays. It is the core, dense, inalterable, eternal, from which the whole of Shakespeare’s work derives« (Mesguich 1986, 42). Hamlet today is the most often performed of Shakespeare’s plays in France and owes much of its popularity to the symbolic value it has acquired since its introduction in the eighteenth century. The French enthusiasm for the play seems paradoxical, as »Hamlet is quite alien to the classical idea of tragedy« (Benchettrit 1956, 59). It may be argued that, rather than Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the French admire a myth they created themselves to generate the play’s shifting Gallic identities.
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Fayard, N. (2014). France. In: Marx, P.W. (eds) Hamlet-Handbuch. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-00516-8_50
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-00516-8_50
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