Shakespeare's Hamlet versus Sumarokov's Gamlet

This book is about the possible distinctions between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sumarokov’s Gamlet, with the higher focus on the formal aspects of the texts that could be easily located, extracted, quantified, computerized, and, at the same time, could contribute towards identifying the authors’ intentions, especially relating to the structural and lexical organisation of both plays. The research reported here adopts an original multi-pronged approach including quantitative, qualitative and comparative analyses. Key findings shed light on substantial divergences between Shakespeare and Sumarokov’s perceptions of the main and secondary characters, of the complexity of their relationships as well as provide evidence to striking diversions between the playwrights’ religious, socio-political, family, moral, philosophical and artistic conceptual frameworks. This work should not only benefit research on corpus linguistics with respect to literary texts but also be of interest more generally to scholars of translation and comparative literature, deepening our understanding of translation and literary processes.