The death of Hamnet: an essay on grief and creativity.
The author argues that Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600) was influenced by the death in 1596 of the playwright's 11-year-old twin son, Hamnet. Beyond the similarity between the dead child's name and the play's title, the language of the play, a supreme act of sublimation, does at times seem preoccupied with a kind of linguistic twinning. The play's variations on the theme of doubling-pairs of characters, for example, and the many instances of hendiadys, a figure of speech using two substantives to denote a single complex meaning, as well as Hamlet's play within a play-are indirect references to the dead twin, the author contends.
Mahon
Eugene J
EJ
Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons, USA. Ejmahon@aol.com
D002648:Child; D003405:Creativity; D003643:Death; D004324:Drama; D006117:Grief; D049670:History, 17th Century; D006801:Humans; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D012660:Semantics; D013359:Sublimation, Psychological; D014427:Twins; D014956:Writing