“Good night: but go not to mine uncle’s bed — / Assume a virtue, if you have it not,” Hamlet warns the queen (3.4.159-60). More than the tragic effort of an emotionally waylaid son to break apart his mother’s incestuous relationship, this plea for sexual restraint, for the restoration of the queen’s honorable union with her late husband points to the complex oedipal conflict between Hamlet and his two “fathers.” Indeed, in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character’s unconscious desire for…
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