Dramatic And Literary Links

Alaksandrus of Troy reminds Ian Arnstein of Max von Sydow (see image), just as William Walker looks like Robert Redford.

I have found another roundabout set of literary links:

reading SM Stirling's replay of the Trojan War made me look at our paperback copy of Chapman's Homer;

the General Introduction informs us that Chapman translated Homer while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet;

Chapman's was the first English translation of the Iliad and almost certainly influenced Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida;

Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, a sequel to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, refers to Hamlet as a real person;

Anderson's The Road Of The Sea Horse refers to the historical Macbeth.

We accept the supernatural in (some) literature even if not in our own beliefs. Thus:

Homer - gods;
Hamlet - a ghost;
A Midsummer Night's Dream - fairies;
The Tempest - a magician and his spirits.

However, Stirling's Nantucket Trilogy is alternative history fiction without any Olympians intervening in the Trojan War and Anderson's Harald Hardrada Trilogy is historical fiction with whales and icebergs instead of Jotunheim in the far North.