SOURCE: Snyder, Susan. “‘The Norwegians Are Coming!’: Shakespearean Misleadings.” In Elizabethan Theater, edited by R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner, pp. 200-13. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.
In the following essay, Snyder remarks on a similar absence of a crucial battle scene in both Othello and Hamlet, noting that Shakespeare did not dramatize the Turkish attack against Cyprus in Othello and represented Fortinbras's invasion of Denmark in Hamlet as a relatively bloodless one. Both tragedies, the critic suggests, depict the enemy within as a greater threat than the foreign antagonist.
