In 1881, Edward Payson Vining wrote an innovative book that promised to unravel The Mystery of Hamlet . When Vining had weighed all the evidence, he came to the only reasonable conclusion: Hamlet was a woman.
Not, mind you, that Shakespeare conceived of a female prince: “It is not even claimed that Shakespeare ever fully intended to represent Hamlet as indeed a woman. It is claimed that in the gradual evolution of the feminine element in Hamlet’s character the time arrived when it occurred to the dramatist that so a woman might act and feel, if educated from infancy to play a prince’s part.”
This is taking suspicion of the intentional fallacy a bit far.
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