Stage and History in O incerto señor don Hamlet

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to situate Álvaro Cunqueiro’s play O incerto señor don Hamlet (1958) within the modes of signification of the modern stage. As a corollary, the study also situates Cunqueiro’s work in a specific ideological unconscious—a romantic and petty-bourgeois substratum from which stem Cunqueiro’s aesthetic, anthropological, and historical views. This work of contextualization should not be confused with the empiricist or positivist tendency to create a context—whether historical, cultural, biographical or otherwise—as an explanatory supplement to the text. Contextualization is carried out here, instead, through a symptomatic analysis of Don Hamlet that suggests the capillary functioning of an unconscious that is present, as it were, in every word.