Prince Hamlet (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781838127886)

Hamlet is a twelve year-old boy who hangs out in cemeteries and has a black horse called Nightmare. Yorick is alive and well and teaching the gloomy little prince how to play with words. Young Hamlet worries that he will never be a good king because he thinks too much and doesn't like killing things or grabbing more land. Hamlet debates theology with Horatio and goes swimming with Ophelia but spends most of his time learning how to be a wise fool before Yorick mysteriously dies. Prince Hamlet is at once a stand-alone set of stories about a boy whose magical skills are intellectual and verbal and it is a canny foreshadowing of the major events and ideas in Shakespeare's most famous play. It turns out that Yorick is-as Harold Bloom observed-both Hamlet's true mother and his father.