Written as a screenplay, Hamlet's Twin chronicles the unusual honeymoon of a contemporary young couple, Nicholas and Sylvie Vanhesse, as they travel to Norway, and, eventually, to a mythical archipelago near the North Pole. Nicholas, while playing Fortinbras in a television production of Hamlet, becomes obsessed with the thought that Fortinbras was Hamlet's estranged twin. His trip to Norway becomes a symbolic journey towards claiming his own rights and achieving his own revenge. Hubert Aquin's Hamlet's Twin is as tragic and as full of self-conscious riddles as its namesake.