SOURCE: “Hamlet and Gender,” in William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Northcote House, 1996, pp. 42-50.

In the following essay, Thompson and Taylor review the shifting critical attitudes to the female characters in Hamlet.

‘A female Hamlet is one thing but a pregnant prince is quite another’ says Dora Chance in Angela Carter's novel Wise Children (1991). Dora and her identical twin sister Nora are stars of vaudeville and illegitimate daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the great Shakespearean actor. The novel contains many references to Hamlet, including the moment when the hero's most celebrated soliloquy becomes the inspiration for a song and dance routine with the two sisters dressed as bellhops in a hotel corridor, debating whether a package should be delivered to ‘2b or not 2b’ (p. 90). The pregnant prince (in this case Dora's and Nora's grandmother Estella Hazard, pregnant with their natural father Melchior and his twin brother Peregrine, who passes...