What do these four movies have in common: a) The Lion King (1994), b) The Shining (1980), c) Johnny Hamlet (1968), d) Scarlet (2025)? There’s a hefty clue in the title of the spaghetti western (c), and of course it’s widely known that the cartoon musical (a) is an animal Hamlet. Last year’s animation from Japan (d), in which a daughter avenges her father’s death, also shows its allegiances. But are they shared with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation (b) of Stephen King’s 1977 novel, in which a struggling writer unwisely becomes the janitor of a Colorado hotel closed for the winter? 

Yes, convincingly argues Caroline Bicks, who holds the Stephen E King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine, a role that allowed her access to the manuscript store in an annexe of the novelist’s mansion nearby. As a Shakespearean, she was intrigued by King’s revelation (made in an article from Whispers magazine in 1982) that he had modelled the novel on one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and that its sections were originally called ‘acts’. At first she tried to guess the play from the drafts and seized on a line eventually cut from a scene in which Dick Hallorann, the cook with the power to read minds (‘shining’), meets two other characters with similar powers. ‘When shall we three meet again heh-heh-heh,’ Dick thinks in the first draft, but not later ones.

Despite almost persuading herself that a mallet wielded by the protagonist Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson in the film) is a stand-in for the dagger that Macbeth sees before him, Bicks was not convinced that the Scottish play provided the template and eventually emailed King. ‘It was Hamlet,’ he