Oldřich Daněk: The Memory of Hamlet

Twelve years after the famous events at Elsinore, the plot of Oldřich Daňek's play The Memory of Hamlet begins. Claudius did not die by Hamlet's sword, he survived a severe wound and is now Fortinbras' prisoner. The author plays with classical material, exploiting the "weak" points of Shakespeare's Hamlet and presenting a somewhat more "sober" version. The playwright Oldřich Daněk reworked the story of Prince Hamlet, which was originally an ancient myth and later became W. Shakespeare, in the Apocrypha on the other: the murderer and bloody king Claudius was innocent, and he is not even dead. He is imprisoned in a Norwegian castle where Horatio, twelve years after Hamlet's death, brings the young queen, the wife of the Norwegian monarch Fortinbras. From the dialogue between the Queen and the prisoner Claudius, a new, unexpected image of Danish tragedy emerges as a brilliant metaphor about love and power, control and rule. We apologize for the minor technical shortcomings of the archival record.