Ágnes Harasztos: The Liminality of an East-Central European Hamlet – Rose Tremain’s The Road Home as an Adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Article

DOI 10.51313/Freeside-2022-03

Rose Tremain’s The Road Home explores the experiences of an Eastern European immigrant. The English literary discourse on this experience takes the form of a pastiche which reinterprets Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Hamlet’s liminality, experienced as a young and lonely rebel, and Lev’s hybridity, which he experiences in a cross-cultural position, is manifested in the same patterns. Tremain’s book follows Hamlet in showing liminality through madness, scenes of a theatre, and death as memory. These common features also share the important aspect of seeming instead of knowing which is a Kierkegaardian idea of non-existence. Following Edward S. Casey’s argumentation that Kierkegaard’s ideas are in accordance with Hamlet’s dilemma of whether to hesitate and think or to act and decide, this study investigates the scope of liminality in the character of Lev as an East-Central European Hamlet.