Short comparative review of Ian McEwan's Nutshell and Hamlet

Revenge is a prison cobbled from the detritus of deceit. Hamlet, the tragic tale of lives demolished by greed and lust, provides the intertextual backbone of Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (2016). In Shakespeare’s (Bloom and Burton, 2006) tale, prince Hamlet is horrified at his mother Gertrude’s marriage to his uncle Claudius, following the suspicious death of his father, the gentle King Hamlet. For Nutshell, McEwan’s as a foetus hearing the savage plot by his mother, the lust-addled and aptly named Trudy and his sly uncle Claude to poison his father, to secure his crumbling mansion.. This review delves into the tangled web of both texts to reveal gems of intertextuality.

 The ties that bind these two doomed children, centuries apart do not define Nutshell, rather they enhance the experience.. Hamlet is dismayed over his mother’s swift marriage in Act 1 Scene “:; not two months dead’ (Bloom and Burton, 2006). However, it is worth noting that Ian McEwan wrote without the explicit intention of rewriting Hamlet and value should be placed on the unique narration style, rather than focussing on its base similarities to Hamlet (Muller, 2018).

In Nutshell, in his private Alcatraz, the womb, the foetus hears the dastardly plot to poison his father.  Alluding to Hamlet in Act 2 Scene 2, where he laments: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, if not for I have bad dreams ‘{Bloom and Burton, 2003). Referring to the captivity of the characters, McEwan evokes Hamlet’s speech to Rosencrantz in Act 2, Scene 2: ‘Denmark is a prison.,’ alluding to his growing unease and the suffocation of the foetus (Cordurelli, 2020).

According to Shang (2017), Trudy is enslaved in Nutshell, by misplaced desire, Claude a prisoner of his desire for Trudy and disdain for his romantic brother, while the innocent foetus is bound within his ‘nutshell’ prison.  A pervading sense of psychic doom invades Hamlet and Nutshell.

Foreshadowing the treachery to come, the foetus describes his situation on page one: ‘my ear…is pressed against the bloody walls, I listen…and I am troubled. I’m hearing pillow talk of deadly intent…’ (McEwan, 2016). This deft wordplay, according to Ksiezopolska (2022), highlights the absurdity of the narration inviting readers to dismiss existing conventions. Furthermore, conferring upon a foetus a state of consciousness, allows McEwan to evoke empathy, with the narrative’s Barthesian methods weaving in the exterior world, creating suspension of disbelief (Colombino, 2020).

Nutshell refers to the prize for the poisoning, a mansion, on page 58: ‘only cliches serve it well: peeling, crumbling, dilapidated…’ (McEwan, 2016), echoing Marcellus’ warning to Hamlet in Act one Scene one: ‘there is something rotten in the house of Denmark,’ and Hamlet’s musings on the treachery of his mother and uncle in Act one Scene two: ‘’tis an unweeded garden. That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature.’ (Bloom and Burton, 2003).

‘First sorrow, then justice, then meaning, the rest is chaos’ (McEwan, p.579), the infant hero, free of his nutshell, makes one final evocation to Hamlet’s exit from the mortal coil in Act 5 Scene 2: ’the rest is silence.’ For Trudy and Claude, future silence eludes them as the haunted poems of John Cairncross linger on the lips of his all-knowing son.

References

Bloom, H., Burton, R., & Shakespeare, W. (2003). Hamlet. Yale University Press.

Colombino, L. (2022). Consciousness and the nonhuman: The imaginary of the new brain sciences in Ian McEwan’s Nutshell and Machines like Me. Textual Practice, 36(3), 382-403. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2022.2030116

Cordurelli, M. (2020). Chaos and Dissimilation in Ian McEwan's Modern Retelling of Hamlet. Inquiries, 12(9). http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1795/chaos-and-dissimulation-in-ian-mcewans-modern-retelling

Księżopolska, I. (2022). Shakespeare and other suspects: The concealed narrator in Ian McEwan’s Nutshell. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 64(3), 365-378. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2021.2025030

McEwan, I. (2016), Nutshell, Vintage

Muller, W. G. (2018). Frontiers of Literary Studies. The body within the body: Ian McEwan’s creation of a new world in Nutshell, 4(2), 374-392. https://doi.org/10.1515/fns-2018-0029

Shang, B. (2017). Ethical literary criticism and Ian McEwan’s Nutshell. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59(2), 142-153. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00111619.2017.1378612?src=recsys