Hamlet is the organizing intertext, present from conception
confirmed on the record as both camps proposed (B's concession was "strategic honesty," and the skeptic's independent re-verification of every exhibit makes this no shared error). A novel that keys itself to V.i in its third scene, names its production company after the skull, states the Claudius-succession as family fact, and stages its protagonist reading his own condition through the play is Hamlet-framed at narration grade.
Where readers stand
consensus
consensus as frame (name-checked constantly), live-split on depth (organizing key vs. surface scaffold); quantitative amateur/professional split now on record (Finn 2011); the frame-consensus attested across six non-English languages — where the title's Hamlet source is common ground and NO non-English carrier argues the organizing-intertext claim, one translator explicitly declining it.
In plain terms: Hamlet is the novel's organizing intertext, present from its conception.
Where the text lands: Hamlet as a frame is strongly supported; how deep it runs as an organizing key is unresolved; whether it was there "from conception" is a question about the book's making rather than its text. Among readers: near-universal as a frame, split on depth.
Three distinct in-text mechanisms carry the frame: the graveyard keying at p. 17, the "Poor Yorick" apparatus naming, and the seeded levirate plot. The deeper "organizing key" claim leans on the feigning-feigning reading, whose force is partly reader-supplied, while the author's own structural rationales never mention the play. See Structure and Hamlet.
The question
This reading answers the crux Hamlet as organizing intertext.
The ruling
Weighed in the adversarial ledger The Novel's Structure.