Which would be planted newly with the time, Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen, [Flourish. 96 100 104 Exeunt. HAMLET PRINCE OF DENMARK INTRODUCTION IN his Hamlet in Iceland (1898) Professor Gollancz comes to the conclusion that the tale of Hamlet in its earlier form grew up during the course of the eleventh century in the Scandinavian kingdom of Ireland. However this may have been, we find it related in the Latin Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish writer of the second half of the twelfth, and the opening years of the thirteenth, century. In the fifth volume of Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques (1570) it is once again told under the title Avec quelle ruse Amleth, qui depuis fut Roy de Daunemarch, vengea la mort de son pere Horvvendille, occis par Fengon son frere, & autre occurrence de son histoire'. The tale was translated into English from Belleforest by an unknown hand at an unknown date. The earliest edition of this Hystorie of Hamblet that has come down to us is of the year 1608, and it may be that the popularity of Shakespeare's play suggested his work to the translator. In many respects the story differs from that familiar to us. two chapters, for example, narrate how Hamlet, after his coronation, went into England; how the King of England secretly would have put him to death; how he slew the King of England, and returned again into Denmark with two wives; how he was there assailed by Wiglerus his uncle, and after betrayed by his last wife, called Hermetrude, and was slain; after whose death she married his enemy, Wiglerus. The last That an English play on the subject of Hamlet existed as early as 1589-if not as early as 1587is certain. Together with the earliest extant edition (1589) of Greene's Menaphon appeared a letter by Nashe, in which the play and its author are referred to in a manner which is the reverse of complimentary. The passage is too long to quote, but, in my opinion, it refers almost unmistakably to Kyd as author of the play, and it seems probable that the passage contains a jest upon his surname. We learn that this original Hamlet was a Senecan tragedy of vengeance, and it appears from an allusion by Lodge in his Wits Miserie, 1596, that a ghost crying Hamlet, revenge' appeared in it. We cannot doubt that this was the Hamlet which, as we learn from Henslowe's Diary, was performed at Newington Butts in June 1594. In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy a distracted father seeks vengeance for the murder of his son; there is a play within the play, and there is a ghost. Kyd, in what German critics style the 'Ur-Hamlet', may at once have repeated and varied his effects. His materials would probably have been found in Belleforest. Mr. F. S. Boas suggests that the dramatization of the story was 'prompted by the visit of English actors to the Court of Helsingör (Elsinore) in 1586. The troupe returned in the autumn of 1587'. We may suppose that the Hamlet of this lost tragedy was a man of action; that he adopted, as in Saxo Grammaticus, a somewhat gross pretence of insanity, which may, as in other Elizabethan plays that deal with madness, have been the occasion for comic incidents; that, as in Saxo, he stabbed an eavesdropper; that a kind of prototype of Ophelia appeared; that Hamlet's mother, as again in Saxo, took sides secretly with her son; that Hamlet was dispatched to Britain, altered a letter and sent his companions to their death, and that, still following Saxo, the dramatist crowned him King of Denmark at the close. We are here in the region of conjecture, but it seems to be conjecture rising from a basis of reality.1 1 The German play Der Bestrafte Brudermord, discovered in MS. in 1710, and of much earlier date, is supposed by some to be founded on Kyd's tragedy; it is more probably a degraded adaptation from Shakespeare's play in its earliest form. |