“We’re All Hamlet Now”: Isabella Hammad’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Enter Ghost

Drawing on Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, and Jacques Derrida, the article argues that Enter Ghost redefines adaptation as decolonial authorship. It examines Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost (2023) as a feminist and decolonial rewriting of Shakespeare's Hamlet, transforming the canonical tragedy into a stage for Palestinian resistance and survival. Through a close reading informed by adaptation theory, postcolonial criticism, and gender performativity, the study explores how Hammad's protagonist, Sonia Nasir, a British-Palestinian actress, reclaims Hamlet as a site of embodied resistance under Israeli occupation. The analysis highlights how performance, bilingualism, and spectral imagery function as tools of political and linguistic reclamation, demonstrating how code-switching and theatrical embodiment translate colonial trauma into collective endurance. By recasting Gertrude as a figure of maternal strength and reframing the ghost as a metaphor for historical persistence, Hammad fuses feminist ethics with national allegory.