ABSTRACT
At the graveyard, Hamlet returns to the issues of death and afterlife, which he has been obsessively examining from the beginning of the tragedy. The prince imagines how the corpse of Alexander the Great, decayed and dissolved into earth, might be used for stopping a hole in a beer barrel. It may be surprising that, while the influence of deconstruction on our understanding of Hamlet finds its reflection in several studies of the tragedy, its impact on the play's adaptations remains open to investigation. Critics practicing deconstruction have challenged the notion of textual wholeness, "arguing that texts are always riddled by abysses, closed only by repression." Similarly to critics applying deconstructive theories to the study of Hamlet, playwrights dewriting this tragedy perceive it as an inherently paradoxical and contradictory construction. Finally, dewriting constitutes a type of adaptation that is distinctive from other postmodern forms of writing.
