Ó Hamlet: To be or not to be?

IT’S just not cricket, is it? Not content with beating the auld enemy at their own game, it now appears we Irish may be denting English pride elsewhere — in equally dramatic fashion.

It turns out that Hamlet (or should that be Ó Hamlet?), the pride of English literature for centuries, was Irish, both in name and in legend.

Literature scholars have long understood that Shakespeare’s inspiration for his famous tragedy came from the ancient Danish tale of ‘Amleth’, which, in turn, was based on Scandinavian sagas from the 10th and 11th centuries, recorded by an Icelandic author known as Snow Bear.