ABSTRACT
In his third soliloquy, provoked by the First Player’s successful mimicry of the visible markers of emotional distress, Hamlet castigates himself, over the course of thirty-five or so lines, for his failure to act on the ghost’s instruction to avenge his father’s death. By characterizing Hamlet as bishonen and by insistently returning to images of homoeroticism in moments of crisis, Richard Appignanesi and Emma Vieceli’s insertions, reorderings, and visual interpretations remake William Shakespeare’s play into manga, not just in aesthetic terms, but in terms of the narrative as well. Shakespeare’s play presents Hamlet’s vengeance as an attempt to recapture an impossible, nostalgically pure past. If Vieceli’s art reshapes her Shakespearean hypotext according to the shojo manga architext, it is in Hamlet himself that the mangaka’s commitment to the text’s status as manga, over and above its status as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, is most clearly demonstrated.
