Deconstruction is the practice of taking language apart, or taking works of art apart, to discover their unacknowledged inner workings. Whatever value this approach may or may not have as literary criticism, it is one of the main methods of contemporary (and sometimes ancient) fiction. Deconstructive fiction is parallel to revisionist history in that it tells the story from the other side or from some queer angle that casts doubt on the generally accepted values handed down by legend. Whereas metafiction deconstructs by directly calling attention to fiction’s tricks, deconstructive fiction retells the story in such a way that the old version loses credit. Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be seen as a work of this kind. In the revenge tragedies Shakespeare’s audience was familiar with, some ghost or friend or other plot-device lays on the hero the burden of avenging some crime. The genre is by nature righteous and self-confident, authoritarian: There is no doubt that vengeance is the hero’s duty, and our pleasure as we watch is in seeing justice done, however painful the experience. Shakespeare’s Hamlet deconstructs all this. Despite Horatio’s certainty, we become increasingly doubtful of the ghost’s authority as the play progresses, so that we become more and more concerned with Hamlet’s tests of people and of himself; and even if we choose to believe that the ghost’s story was true, we become increasingly unclear about whether Hamlet would be right to kill the king who usurped his father’s throne—at any rate, Claudius becomes less and less the stock villain, and Hamlet, as he proceeds through the play, becomes more and more guilty himself.