In the following excerpt, Traub asserts that "Spunk" offers a new perspective on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Traub argues that, similar to Lena, Gertrude exercises personal prerogative when finding herself defined as "an object of property."
. . . African-American women writers' return to Shakespearian drama is hardly surprising, for what more obviously status-studded example of Anglo- European patriarchal culture exists to "signify" or "trope" upon? I will first briefly discuss the way in which Hurston's short story "Spunk" rewrites, by means of a few words, Gertrude's marriage to Hamlet's uncle, transforming an action that in Hamlet's mind is equated with adultery and incest into the personal prerogative of any woman who finds herself defined as an object of property. I will then turn in considerably more detail to Gloria Naylor's complex, ambivalent relationship to Shakespeare, and her.....
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