SOURCE: Scolnicov, Hanna. “Chekhov's Reading of Hamlet.” In Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception, edited by Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland, pp. 192-205. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Scolnicov delineates the influences that Hamlet had on Chekhov and the relationship between Hamlet and The Seagull.

That The Seagull is indebted to Hamlet in many ways has long been recognized and partially demonstrated.¹ Yet the Shakespearean play cannot be seen as a ‘source’ play in the ordinary sense, since it presents other characters involved in another action set within a different society. Chekhov also borrowed widely from Maupassant, Turgenev, Maeterlinck and others.² Stretching from verbatim citation through structural and thematic analogues all the way to parody, Chekhov's debt covers the whole gamut of possible literary links, the whole range of intertextual relations. The question of the degree of borrowing, its function and meaning, is thus raised...