Hamlet

Giovanni Papini, journalist, essayist, novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and philosopher, was a controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism.

Due to his ideological choices, Papini’s work was almost forgotten after his death, although it was later re-evaluated and appreciated again: in 1975, Jorge Luis Borges called him an “undeservedly forgotten” author.

In 1913 he published his essay Ventiquattro cervelli (“Four and Twenty Minds”), in which he reviewed, with a critical slant and with great philosophical scrutiny, the life and works of great personalities of history and literature such as Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, finally, himself!

From Four and Twenty Minds, translated into English by Ernest Hatch Wilkins and published in the United States in 1922, we have drawn the study Hamlet, which today we propose to modern readers. It’s a short essay dedicated to the controversial Prince Hamlet of Denmark, protagonist of one of the most famous William Shakespeare's tragedy, written in 1916, for the third centenary of Shakespeare’s death.