Fortinbras

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Fortinbras has just two brief appearances and fewer than thirty lines to speak. But notwithstanding his physical absence during most of the play, he exerts considerable sway, representing the political world beyond Elsinore and the antithesis to Hamlet. As such he plays a major role in the political afterlife of the play. The article traces the metamorphoses Fortinbras undergoes in his afterlife in Germany from the mid-nineteenth century through the First and Second World Wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.