SOURCE: "The Hamlet of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Laforgue," in Hamlet in France: From Voltaire to Laforgue, Librairie Droz, 1964, pp. 137-52.

The following excerpt from Bailey's book treats the Symbolist fascination with Hamlet; she contends, through an analysis of "Hamlet" and other references to the figure in Laforgue's writings, that Laforgue identified with Hamlet.

With the emergence of Symbolism, Hamlet may be said to have come into his own. Shakespeare's spiritually embattled hero, with his intuition of things undreamed-of in a corrupt and sordid world, found a congenial element in the climate of ideality that nurtured poetry in the last half of the century. The interpretations of Laforgue and Mallarmé, ironic in the one case, exalted in the other, reveal a sensitivity to Hamlet's scope and mystery rarely rivaled in the literature of Hamlet commentary. They took the Prince of Denmark out of the theater, in the strict sense...