Shakespeare's Hamlet

Shakespeare's hamlet has its roots in the same soil as oedipus rex. The changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization. In the edipus, the child's wishful fantasy that underlines it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In hamlet, it remains repressed. And just as in the case of a neurosis, we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences.