Sources of Hamlet

Did You Know?

• The two most popular candidates for written works that may have influenced Saxo are the anonymous Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki and the Roman legend of Brutus.
• Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the coincidence of the names Hamlet and Hamnet (Shakespeare's son) and Shakespeare's grief for the loss of his son may lie at the heart of the tragedy.

Scandinavian legend

The basic plot of a prince avenging his father's murder by his uncle, who has become king, is ancient. Key elements like pretending to be mad, being tested by a young woman, confronting his mother about her quick remarriage, stabbing a hidden spy in her room, and swapping the names on an execution order to save himself are all present in a medieval story by Saxo Grammaticus. He wrote the Vita Amlethi around 1200 as part of his larger Latin work, Gesta Danorum. Saxo likely drew on older written and oral traditions from different cultures. His character Amleth probably came from a widespread Scandinavian oral tale. Similarities exist with Icelandic legends, though no written version of that Icelandic story exists from before the 1500s. In the 1600s, the Icelandic scholar Torfaeus linked Saxo's Amleth to a local oral tradition about a Prince Ambales, also called Amlóði. Torfaeus called this local tradition an "old wive's tale" because it mixed in fairy-tale elements and quasi-historical legend, and because he did not realize Cimbria was another name for Denmark. The shared details include the prince's fake madness, the accidental killing of the king's advisor in the mother's bedroom, and the final murder of the uncle. Some have guessed the original Amlóði story came from a 10th-century Old Icelandic poem, but no such poem has ever been found. The "hero as fool" motif appears in Roman, Spanish, Scandinavian, and Arabic stories, making it a widespread, likely Indo-European, narrative pattern.

The Ur-Hamlet

Scholars generally agree that Shakespeare’s primary source for Hamlet was an earlier play, now lost, often called the Ur-Hamlet. This lost work was likely performed by 1589 and is thought to have been the first version of the story to include a ghost. It may have been written by Thomas Kyd, or possibly by a 25-year-old Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, might have acquired this play and performed a version of it, which Shakespeare later revised. Because no copy of the Ur-Hamlet survives, it is impossible to compare its language and style to the known works of any proposed author. As a result, there is no direct proof that Kyd wrote it, nor any evidence that it was not an early draft by Shakespeare. The idea that Shakespeare wrote his own early version of Hamlet, placing its composition much earlier than the usual date and implying a longer creative process, has some supporters, though others consider it mere speculation. In 1598, Francis Meres published Palladis Tamia, which lists twelve of Shakespeare’s plays by name, but Hamlet is not among them. This omission is not definitive, however, since other Shakespeare plays that existed at the time were also left off the list. Ultimately, scholars cannot say with certainty how much material Shakespeare borrowed from the Ur-Hamlet (if it existed at all), how much came from Belleforest or Saxo, or how much came from other contemporary works like Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. There is no clear evidence that Shakespeare directly referenced Saxo’s version, even though the Latin text was widely available. However, elements from Belleforest’s version appear in Shakespeare’s play that are absent from Saxo’s story, leaving it unclear whether Shakespeare took those details from Belleforest directly or through the Ur-Hamlet.

Elizabethan court

For over a hundred years, scholars have linked several characters in Hamlet to real figures from Queen Elizabeth I’s court. In 1869, George Russell French proposed that Polonius was based on William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who served as Lord High Treasurer and the queen’s chief advisor. French also thought Polonius’s children, Ophelia and Laertes, mirrored Burghley’s own children, Anne and Robert Cecil. Later, in 1930, E. K. Chambers noted that the advice Polonius gives Laertes resembles advice Burghley wrote for his son Robert. Two years after that, John Dover Wilson stated flatly that Polonius was almost certainly a caricature of Burghley, who died in August 1598. In 1963, A. L. Rowse suggested that Polonius’s long-windedness matched Burghley’s speaking style, and the following year Joel Hurstfield described Burghley as the archetypal elder statesman whose paternalistic and patronizing attitude toward his son is perfectly captured in Polonius’s famous speech. Lilian Winstanley argued that the name Corambis, used for Polonius in the first quarto, pointed to Burghley. However, Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney later observed that Corambis means “reheated cabbage” in Latin—essentially a label for a tedious old man. In 1921, Winstanley declared herself “absolutely” certain that Hamlet contains numerous, detailed, and undeniable historical parallels, and that Shakespeare wove contemporary history into the play. She compared Hamlet to both the Earl of Essex and King James I. She also saw a “curious parallel” between the relationship of Hamlet and Ophelia and that of Burghley’s daughter Anne Cecil and her husband, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Additionally, she noted similarities with the relationship between Elizabeth Vernon and Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. Not everyone agreed with these theories. Harold Jenkins dismissed the idea of direct personal satire as unlikely and out of character for Shakespeare. G. R. Hibbard offered a different explanation for the name changes between the first quarto and later editions: Polonius sounds close to the Latin name for Robert Pullen, the founder of Oxford University, and Reynaldo (called Montano in the first quarto) comes too close to John Rainolds, the President of Corpus Christi College. Hibbard suggested these alterations were made to avoid offending Oxford scholars.

Giordano Bruno

The idea that Shakespeare’s Hamlet might owe something to the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno first surfaced in 1846. That year, French biographer Christian Bartholomess, while writing about Bruno, casually noted similarities between Hamlet’s soliloquies on death and Bruno’s dialogue De La Causa, composed during a stay in London in 1584. Ferdinand Falkson’s biography from the same year echoed this observation. Later, in 1868, German Shakespeare translator Benno Tschischwitz published a study comparing specific phrases and philosophical ideas from Bruno’s works with passages in Hamlet. Modern scholar Hilary Gatti, who specializes in Bruno, suggests that any parallels between Hamlet and Bruno’s Lo Spaccia della Bestia Trionfonte or his comedy Il Candelajo actually came through John Florio, an Italian translator living in London. Shakespeare knew Florio and borrowed heavily from his translations; Bruno himself lodged with Florio while in London. However, Danish critic Georg Brandes looked at the timeline—Bruno was in London from 1583 to 1585, while Shakespeare only began to appear in the city later—and concluded the two men barely had a chance to meet. H. H. Furness, editor of the New Variorum edition of Hamlet, dismissed the supposed connections as slight and insignificant, arguing that Shakespeare’s mind was too eclectic for such direct borrowing. In 1897, John Mackinnon Robertson went further, proposing that any trivial verbal echoes between Il Candelajo and Hamlet actually belonged to the lost Ur-Hamlet, not Shakespeare’s version, and that the earlier play was “drafted by a much lesser man than Shakespere.”