Spanish Literature Commons^™

Shakespeare And Cervantes Are Dead: The Construction Of Fiction And Reality In Hamlet And Don Quixote, Joanna Parypinski

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The reason that Hamlet and Don Quixote can be studied so thoroughly on the poststructuralist notion of a false or constructed reality is because they were both works far ahead of their time, often reflecting extremely postmodernist ideas. Don Quixote is generally considered the first modern novel, and Hamlet is also identified with the beginning of the modern age (Oort 319). Yet beyond this, these authors play games with the reader and with the structure of the fiction itself, which would fit sensibly in a 20th or 21st century novel rather than an early 17th century work. These new methods …