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The aim of this article is to analyse Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, published in September 2016, as a modern rewriting of Hamlet in relation to the usual issues and themes previously tackled by the author throughout his narrative. The novel focuses on the love triangle involving Claude [Claudius], Trudy [Gertrude] and John Cairncross [King Hamlet] and narrates how the lovers plot the murder of the husband from the unusual perspective of a proto-Hamlet in the womb. Despite the fact that he is rewriting a Shakespearean work, the author remains faithful to his style and favourite topics, displaying the function of the family as destructive rather than constructive, conditioning the later development of the children and rendering them devoid of the affection needed. Similarly, Nutshell also depicts his recurrent configuration of mothers as authoritative and destructive, especially for the natural growth of their offspring.

Abstract:In the three versions of Hamlet translated during the Franco regime in Spain, metaphors related to the censored themes of sex and religion were altered or removed. In this study, we employ the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group 2007) to identify all metaphors involving sex and religion in Shakespeare's Hamlet and its three Franco-era Spanish translations. We find that under the influence of censorship, authors employ many of the strategies for metaphor translation also used for uncensored texts, such as those identified by Newmark (1981), van den Broeck (1981), andToury (1995). However, we argue that censorship encourages strategies judged as less preferable, more extreme, or which are not usually discussed in translation studies. These strategies appear to be selected specifically to remove the material subject to censorship, whether this is found in the source domain (vehicle) or the target domain (tenor) of a metaphor.

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