Mallarmé, Stéphane

Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842–98),
French poet. An unhappy English teacher but a highly praised Symbolist poet, he discussed Shakespeare in an influential article (La Revue indépendante, 1 November 1886) focusing on Mounet-Sully's performance of Hamlet in the five-act verse drama by Dumas and Meurice, Comédie-Française, 1886. He described the inner dilemma of the melancholy prince as a lonely shadow of himself playing a solitary tragedy, thus defining ‘Hamletism’, the late 19th-century trend, characterized by the metaphysical uneasiness of a dual personality.

Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine