«Hic sunt leones»: L'Amleto di Riccardo Bacchelli

In 1919, Riccardo Bacchelli published an unconventional rewriting of Hamlet, whose extreme originality and lack of any direct reference to the Shakespearean hypotext disconcerted both common readers and critics, in the Italian literary magazine “La Ronda”. As a matter of fact, Bacchelli seemed to reject the widely accepted psychologistic interpretation of the play and refused to consider Hamlet as a much-abused “myth” of romantic literature. In his parody, devoid of any trace of humour, he thus proposed a “new” Italian Hamlet, a modern antihero that inaugurated the long series of serious and comic remakes of Shakespeare’s play that appeared in Italy throughout the twentieth century (Carlo Emilio Gad- da, Ennio Flaiano, Giorgio Manganelli, Carmelo Bene among others, reworked the tragedy) and celebrated Hamlet as a renewed emblem of art and of human condition.