The Absence of Allusion to Warfare in Álvaro Cunqueiro’s "Don Hamlet": A Galician Text of the Shakespearian Play

Abstract

The historical evolution of Galicia, a nation in the north-west of Spain, has been determined by the negation of its own tradition and language within the Spanish state, which only accepted the existence of one of the many languages that existed within the territory. Whereas Castilian literature benefited from the protection of the state, Galician, Basque and Catalonian literatures were prosecuted, banned and even subject to a degree of state repression. Galician-Portuguese literature, which developed in the Middle Ages with literary works of enormous importance, was not to be re-discovered until well into the nineteenth century. From this date on, the Galician Literary Revival, or Rexurclimento and later movements began a process of cultural normalisation - similar, in many aspects, to the language planning established in countries which felt the influence of Romanticism culminating in the early twentieth century with the work of a number of influential intellectuals, Galicia sought to place herself at the same level of other European nations. Unfortunately, this process was to be dramatically frustrated by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.Some members of these minorities opted, as an alternative route to the so-called Mediterranean Classicism, for their integration into the world of Atlantism (McKevitt, 2006). The result of this trend was the introduction of the literature of English-speaking countries to the field of Galician culture. We should not be surprised by the fact that Anglophone literature has thus played a major influence on Galician culture. Alvaro Cunqueiro is probably considered the writer who most contributed in offering an original Galician vision of English, French and oriental myths (Ricci, 1971). Elis major achievements, with novels such as Merlin and Company (1955) or plays like The uncertain Lord Don Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1958), are not the only prominent case studies so far. In fact, his dispersed international journalistic career in newspapers and magazines over three decades should also be afforded a degree of prominence (Jarazo and Dominguez, 2010). Nevertheless, one of the most well-known achievements of the Galician writer is the publication and performance of his Hamletian adaptation in during the post-civil war period. A Galician adaptation which is somehow accurate to the Shakespearian version, but devoid of certain symbols, characters and plots in order to conform to the required norms of Franco's repression and censorship. This is especially significant we take into account the conservative background of the author, whose play was written in the Galician language and published by a liberal Press, Editorial Galaxia. Encoding and decoding messages in literary manifestations was, in the end, the only possibility to convey the unofficial Galician culture at the time. Cunqueiro's Don Hamlet constitutes an excellent example of codifying messages during Franquism, especially as far as the absence of allusions to warfare is concerned.Shakespeare's Hamlet has been considered to be in many cases the anamorphosis of the revenge of the other prince, Fortinbras, rather than the drama of Flamlet's revenge.2 Authors such as Flaverkamp explain that the appearance of Fortinbras' army in the middle of the play -unexpected, poorly motivated, cut in many productions- allows an external political threat to come suddenly into view: a threat from beyond the stage, from an elusive offstage whose dislocation makes it comparable to the threatening spirit at the beginning, similar in a way to the ghost's injection of history and intrusion on the present state of affairs (Flaverkamp 178). The author points out that if all these indications at the margins of the drama are taken and added together, the story of Flamlet appears instantly transformed and displaced into a quite different story: that of the Norwegian conquest of Denmark made possible under the pretext of an invasion of Poland (178). …