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ILBERT MURRAY's essay, and was first G delivered as a lecture in 1914 and later included in his well-known The Classical Tradition in Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. 1927). The essay, which attempted to account for the many striking similarities between the two traditional heroes, Hamlet and Orestes, was a product of the so-called Cambridge School of anthropological criticism.1 Murray traced the similarities in the traditional myths2 of Hamlet and Orestes to a common origin in the ancient ritual of periodically slaying a sacred king. The discovery of the meaning of ritual regicide was, of course, Frazer's primary goal in The Golden Bough, and the conclusions he reached were that the slaying of a king was an attempt to regenerate society by renewing its principal source of mana, or sacred power, and that analogous folk customs and myths involving dying and reviving gods or heroes are also concerned with sources of fertility and the life rhythms they embody or symbolize. Frazer's thesis was highly provocative when critics such as Murray applied it to myths in which heroes killed kings and succeeded them; but, as a theory for the origins of these myths, it was narrow and monistic, and its defects are nowhere better demonstrated than in Murray's essay.
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