The American dramatist Lorraine Hansberry used Shakespeare's Hamlet as a source for her tragedy about an African colony rebelling against British rule. Hamlet is a Danish prince whose dead father appears to him to declare that he was mudered by his brother, Hamlet's uncle Claudius, now the king. Hamlet swea11111rs vengeance but delays, unsure what to do, until he takes catastrophic action in the play's final scene. The author draws out the significance of Shakespeare's story to Les Blancs in the context of the radical ideas of the 1960s.