Hamlet in Narnia: The Prince and the Poem in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia

C.S. Lewis is little-known for his Shakespeare scholarship except perhaps for his lecture “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem” for the British Academy (1942). This essay begins by discussing Lewis’s approach to the play and his desire to reenchant his audience with the play he had loved as a child, before character-criticism got in the way. It then explores how Lewis takes the Prince and the aspects he found most affective in Hamlet out of the play and explores them, imaginatively, in another world: recasting them “for children” in Narnia. The essay considers Hamlet in The Silver Chair in which Rilian is literally compared to the Prince, the Hamlet-like trajectory of Prince Caspian, and finally, in The Last Battle, the recreation of another world characterized by its pervasive atmosphere of death in which characters and readers alike are called to consider “being dead”.