The modernisation of william shakespeare’s hamlet: Identity and gender in iris murdoch’s the black prince

Abstract

This article reads Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (1973) as a retelling of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603), paying special attention to the changes that the original play has gone through in order to render it more apt for a contemporary audience. Even if Murdoch also adapts the male hero, the most interesting changes she introduces are related to gender, since the female figures resembling Ophelia and Gertrude bear little resemblance to their Shakespearean counterparts. Gender is also linked to how the novel is written, especially regarding the narrator and his unreliability. Murdoch’s views on women will thus be juxtaposed to those of her (male) narrator. The rest of Murdoch’s characters are also crafted in Shakespearean fashion, given that almost all of them have a counterpart in the original play.