Naoya Shiga Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Shigekazu Ando

Critical Essay by Shigekazu Ando

SOURCE: "The Destiny of Hamlet in Modern Japan: Concerning The Diary of Claudius by Shiga Naoya," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1993, pp. 351-60.

In the essay below, Shigekazu suggests that Shiga's revision of Shakespeare's Hamlet in "The Diary of Claudius" illustrates significant differences between Japanese and Western literary modernism.

D. H. Lawrence writes on Hamlet in his brilliant essay Twilight in Italy (1916):

I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anyone else. His nasty porking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a spirit of disintegration.

Lawrence sees in Hamlet a thesis about corruption in the flesh and the individual's conscious revolt from it. It...
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