Hamlet

The first clear reference to what we know as Shakespeare's Hamlet appears in the Stationers' Register, 26 July 1602, as a play called The Revenge of Hamlet Prince [of] Denmark. In that article, the author says the play was "lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servants" . In his list of London plays published in 1598, Francis Meres makes no mention of any play called Hamlet, but a note in Gabriel Harvey's edition of Speght's Chaucer (published in 1598) does mention the play Hamlet. Since scholars question the date of the actual writing of that note, most of them agree that Shakespeare published Hamlet after 1601 and before 1603. The First Folio, in 1623, categorized Shakespeare's plays as Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Shakespeare wrote the great tragedies--excluding Romeo and Juliet, which is not, strictly speaking, a true tragedy--between 1601 and 1606, and apparently Hamlet was written first. Shakespeare closely followed Hamlet with Othello (1604), King Lear (1605/6), and Macbeth (1606), but a number of experts in Bardology (the study of Shakespeare, who is known as The Bard of Avon) believe that Hamlet represents the best of Shakespeare's work. It is the perfect play.

The Texts

Scholars base modern editions of Hamlet on the three versions of the play published by 1623. Two of the versions appeared while the author was alive; the third surfaced seven years after his death.

The First Quarto (so named because the play was printed on paper that was folded in four parts) is difficult to read. It contains 240 more lines than in the next version (the First Folio), but it has merit because it represents the first publication of the actual stage version of the play.

In some cases, the writing in the First Quarto is so amateurishly unpolished as to make the experts believe that the First Quarto edition is poorly done and fraught with mistakes, designed essentially as an acting script marked over and edited by an actor.

The Second Quarto edition of Hamlet, published in 1604, used a more finely tuned edition as its basis. John Heminge and Henry Condell, members of Shakespeare's company, compiled the First Folio by combining the Second Quarto text with updated stage manager's notes. Thus, scholars base modern texts largely--if indirectly--on the text of the Second Quarto.

The Source

Theater has always been a collaborative art. In Shakespeare's time, a repertory company could not expect a playwright to write in a vacuum. The nature of the schedule, in which a new play could be commissioned weekly, required playwrights to collaborate. English playwrights in the late 16th and early 17th centuries freely borrowed material from one another and shared criticisms and edits. Hamlet, like the other great works attributed to Shakespeare, definitely presents Shakespeare's work, but also showcases many contributions by actors, managers, prompters, and so forth, who all knew what parts of a play to leave in or take out.

Like the Greeks, Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences attended the theater to watch plays they had seen often or which were based on stories as familiar to them as their own family histories. Accordingly, Shakespeare based his Hamlet on a popular Scandivian saga that had existed for at least a hundred years in one form or another, and which actors all over Europe had performed in earlier manifestations as early as the 1550's.

Newington Butts featured the Lord Chamberlain's Men in Hamlet, an earlier revenge play, directed by Henslowe, on June 9, 1594. Scholars commonly call this Hamlet the Ur-Hamlet and believe the author to be Shakespeare's brilliant contemporary Thomas Kyd. Neither a copy of the Ur-Hamlet nor concrete evidence that Kyd actually wrote the play exist, but the story of Hamlet does bear a strong resemblance to Kyd's masterpiece The Spanish Tragedy, which many scholars believe to be a perfected version of the Ur-Hamlet.

Both Kyd and Shakespeare would have read Saxo Grammaticus' Historia Danica, an anthology of legends and myths from the Norselands, translated and popularized in French by Belleforest in 1570. Thomas Pavier issued an English translation of Belleforest's version of the story of Hamlet in 1608 under the title The Hystorie of Hamblet.

In Belleforest's retelling of the old story, which takes place in the days before Christianity found its way to either Denmark or England, the public knows of King Hamlet's murder, and the new king claims he killed King Hamlet while acting in defense of the queen. Hamlet is a youngster who can only pretend to take care of himself. Although he admires truth, he cannot see beyond his vindictive spirit and exhibits exceeding cruelty. In this version, Hamlet goes to Britain where he marries and stays with his wife, the daughter of the English king, for a full year. News of Hamlet's death reaches the King of Denmark, and he throws a party to celebrate, but Hamlet appears as the party gets under way. This early Hamlet takes immediate action: he gets the court drunk and sets fire to the palace, immediately killing the King.

The play on which Shakespeare based Hamlet was a bloody tale full of sound and fury with crude and savage overtones. Though the bloodshed remains in Shakespeare's version, he refined the play, making it poetic and full of thought-provoking ruminations on the meaning of life, death, eternity, relationships, hypocrisy, truth, the existence of God and almost anything else that concerns mankind. However, the fact that the Shakespearean character of Hamlet is more refined creates a problem for those who would interpret the play.

Shakespeare wrote the standard revenge play, but in an entirely new form. Revenge tragedy was hugely popular in Shakespeare's day. The revenge play revolved around a hero who was bound to avenge a wrong. Like their models in the Roman tragedy of Seneca, the heroes and villains were dramatically mad, melancholy, violent. The plays were graphic, bloody. Shakespeare, being an original thinker, placed refinements in his work, creating new tensions and increasing some of the old questions.

Were the play a true revenge play, Hamlet would act sooner. He would dispatch the King at the start, with the rest of the play elaborating upon what transpires after Claudius' death. By not acting more promptly, Hamlet leaves us pondering his true motivation. Hamlet has every opportunity to kill the unguarded king, yet Claudius lives. Shakespeare's Hamlet's obstacles are not physical, and within this fact lies the first rub for critics and interpreters. Hamlet's actual