SOURCE: Hale, David G. “Hurston's ‘Spunk’ and Hamlet.” Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 3 (summer 1993): 397-98.

In the following essay, Hale explores Hurston's allusion to Hamlet in her story “Spunk.”

Zora Neale Hurston's “Spunk” (1925) is a story of lust, killing, and supernatural revenge set in rural Florida. Critics have praised its “mythic quality” achieved by her use of material from folklore and voodoo (Perry 123, Ikonne 184-85). Another aspect of Hurston's artistry appears through recognition of a complex allusion to Shakespeare's Hamlet, a work of high art with its own roots in myth and folklore.

In the story's last paragraph, at Spunk Banks's wake, “The women ate heartily of the funeral baked meats and wondered who would be Lena's next” (Hurston 8). The sentence clearly recalls Hamlet's “Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral bak'd-meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.180-81). The repeated phrase and the mention of a bereaved woman's...