ABSTRACT
In Joyce's Ulysses, the myth of Hamlet is superimposed upon the Odyssean myth. In France, during the second half of the nineteenth century, circa 1886-7, Paul Bourget and Jules Laforgue tried to rewrite Shakespea's tragedy. More recently, Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince, 1973, skilfully presents an inhibited writer who can only love Ophelia when disguised as Hamlet and reminding her of Octavian, the count of the Chevalier a la Rose. From this point on Hamlet's theatrical destiny was in the hands of the producers. Paradoxically it was the great poets who, like the philosophers who reflected on Hamlet, such as a Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, were best able to understand the important lessons of the myth through their own subjective appreciation. He chose Hamlet as the symbolic figure of the poete maudi, threatened by the Ghost of Silence. In people's modern age of transition and change the myth of Hamlet, like all great literary myths, has inevitably become impoverished.
