This research provides a comparison and contrast of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The research will identify ways in which Hamlet resonates in James's story, with a view toward evaluating the extent to which elements of the latter text can be said to replicate those of the former.
There is no shortage of critical commentary on certain analogues between Hamlet and The Turn of the Screw. One of the most striking of analogues is that critical opinion of each of these texts is sharply divided. Just as Hamlet critics seem divided on how to explain why Hamlet delays so long in killing Claudius, Turn of the Screw critics seem divided on the question of whether the ghosts the governess sees at Bly are "real" or only a product of the governess's insane mind, though the effects of her ideas--notably Miles's death--are real enough, whether she is mad or the ghosts are really present. Whether the ghosts are evil because they are palpably (so to speak) present or because preoccupation with them causes the governess to beleaguer the children to distraction, the impact of the encounter with the presumed ghosts so intimidates little Miles that it "dispossesses" his "little heart" and makes it stop forever (James 403).
One does not have to be armed with the panoply of critical theory that accompanies Shakespearian and Jamesean criticism to see affinities between narrative design and technique between Hamlet and Screw. Ghosts, especially the reaction of the central characters to them, drive the action of each story. The sanity of the central characters of each narrative is also at issue. Hamlet reveals that he is mad but "north-north-west" (II.ii.96), and Abel cites Hamlet's tendency to rationalize and indeed to find "refuge in philosophy, just as he has already taken refuge in pretended madness" (Abel 55). But at III.i Ophelia laments the deterioration of very Renaissance man: courtier, soldier, scholar, etc. In Sc...