«Eu era Hamlet»: o desejo de substituição em Hamletmaschine, de Heiner Müller

Abstract

«I was Hamlet»: desire for substitution in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine In this essay I propose a reading of Heiner Müller’s play Hamletmaschine (1977) as a radical exercise in rewriting William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. As a follow-up to his translation of Hamlet into German, Müller writes this nine-page play as a comment to the political situation in Eastern Europe in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Because of its size, the play strikes us as a dense form, close to the fragment form, foreshadowing Müller’s growing immersion in post-modernism, which will characterize his writing during the following decades. I will then stress Hamletmaschine’s fragmentation and substitution of Shakespeare’s play, focusing above all on the importance of the concept of substitution for our comprehension of Müller’s play.