Hamlet, The

Hamlet, The, novel by Faulkner, published in 1931, the first of a trilogy including The Town and The Mansion.

In the 1890s, Will Varner, the mild‐mannered economic power of Frenchman's Bend, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, rents some land to Ab Snopes, whose grotesque, ruthlessly greedy son Flem is installed by the 30‐year‐old Varner heir Jody as a clerk in the Varner store to dissuade Ab from burning the barn, his usual way with landlords. Instead, Flem takes over Varner positions, property, and power as his relatives, including the shrewd, weasly I.O., the idiot Ike, and the primitive Mink, begin to dominate or demoralize the town, to the horror of the compassionate and rational V. K. Ratcliff, a back‐country trader. When Varner's daughter Eula, a mindless, sensual female, becomes pregnant, she is married off to Flem in return for cash and the deed to the crumbling pre‐Civil War mansion, Frenchman's Place. A different passion overwhelms Ike, who falls in love with a cow belonging to the morose farmer Jack Houston, and their daily relationship is made another subject of profit as Lump Snopes sells secret viewing places of the encounters. Another heifer causes different troubles between Houston and a Snopes when Mink's rudimentary sense of justice is outraged because he is charged for letting his stock graze on the farmer's land, and in retaliation he kills Houston and hides his body. Lump's demands for the $50 carried by Houston almost lead to another murder, but Mink is imprisoned for life and comes to realize that Flem, absent in Texas, will not aid him. Flem returns from his trip with a herd of savagely wild horses, which he auctions to the townspeople. He then mulcts them of even more money by inducing them to buy Frenchman's Place as a site of hidden treasure, but it is actually only the place where Flem has buried, and publicly dug up, a little bit of gold. Henry Armstid not only breaks a leg capturing a wild pony, but is maddened by fruitless digging for riches, thus representing the whole community as it is bilked and corrupted by the Snopeses.