#ur-hamlet

I dealt with this very briefly once upon a time here, when I discussed a couple of sources of the play. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk a little more about this topic. As you’ve been reading a bunch it’s likely you know that there’s no evidence Shakespeare read either Saxo Grammaticus’ tale or Belleforest’s French translation of the Amleth story, so it’s hard to speculate what the exposure might have been. Both versions were available in England when Shakespeare wrote the play, and with his level of compulsory education he would have been able to read in Latin or French. 

If Shakespeare did read either of these texts, it probably would have been Belleforest’s, as elements such as the prince’s melancholy in Hamlet are closer to that version. But, of course, that could have come from the so-called ur-Hamlet. Everything’s made difficult by the fact that we have no surviving copy of ur-Hamlet,a play that would have given some indication of what Shakespeare took from where. If ur-Hamlet was by Kyd there’s even more reason to think that a lot of the melancholy and troubled nature of Hamlet might come from there. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (the quintessential Elizabethan revenge tragedy), features quite a lot of moral conundrums and a thoughtful revenger who’s troubled by the necessity for vigilante justice in the corrupt society he lives in

So I can’t offer any very useful ideas about what the influence of any Amleth would have been on Shakespeare’s play. It’s unsolvable, and some scholars would even say there’s no point in considering it. But this doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile making a comparison between the Amleth character and Shakespeare’s Hamlet to see what Shakespeare’s focus was. 

Generally speaking, Amleth’s character is a lot simpler. He’s all about cunning and action. He’s a hero who has a noble goal and shows many of the qualities of a king (decisiveness, intelligence, outsmarting his enemies, even seducing his honeytrap to work for him). It’s also a success story. This doesn’t make the Amleth story less worthwhile. in fact, it’s hugely entertaining, and it gives the kind of satisfaction and closure that one might expect in a mythical tale about a hero. Amleth is an action hero of the Hollywood variety.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not at all an action hero. Shakespeare retains Hamlet’s capacity to do all the things Amleth does – Ophelia describes him as ‘a noble mind’ with 'the courtier’s, soldiers’, scholars’s eye tongue, sword…’ (3.1.149-0) – but makes the story about very different kind of hero in very different times. 

One of the major differences is the fact that Shakespeare's Hamlet is set in a Christian country, not the Nordic warrior society of the Historiae Danicae. Shakespeare was capable of writing largely secular works, as you can see from plays like King Lear, which is generally lacking in Christian references, and poems like 'Lucrece’ or 'Venus and Adonis’ which are written in the ancient Greek world of his characters. So the fact that he adds (or keeps ur-Hamlet’s addition of) the Christian dimension of the ghost returning from purgatory, and the reference to Wittenburg (suggestive of the reformation) suggests that he’s interested in depicting or exploring something different to the Amleth story.

To put it very simply, by making the murder secret and Denmark Christian, the focus shifts from action to contemplation, from public activity to individual consciousness. Shakespeare's Hamlet is more about what the hero thinks: his guilt, his doubt, and the troubled nature of revenge in a society that is Christian but also retains a lot of the ideas of a more heroic past (Hamlet’s father is always described as a heroic warrior, the kind who 'smote the sledded Polacks on the ice’ 1.1.62). It would seem that the tensions between different ideologies allowed Shakespeare to explore refracted identities, generation gaps, the ethics of revenge, and what counts as intelligence. 

He actually did. 

We know for a fact that there are missing plays because there are records of the plays having been published or performed. A guy called Francis Meres published a book called Palladis Tamia in 1598 which includes a list of the plays Shakespeare had written up to that point, the list contains a reference to a certain Love’s Labours Won, which is mentioned again in a book register belonging to the stationer Christopher Hunt in 1603. Some scholars suggest this is a sequel to Love’s Labours Lost, others think it might be the alternative title of an existing play. The RSC went with this second suggestion and performed Much Ado About Nothing under the title of Love’s Labours Won in 2014 as a companion play to Love’s Labour’s Lost.

The other lost play called Cardenio, performed by the King’s Men in 1613 (from surviving performance records). A record that claims its authors were Shakespeare and Fletcher survives in a Stationer’s Register from 1653. Of course, this can’t necessarily be trusted because of Shakespeare’s name-value and the lateness of the entry, but the idea that it was written by Fletcher and Shakespeare coheres with the other known performance date and details we have of the play. It’s been speculated that this play would have been about the lover Cardenio from Cervante’s Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in translation in England in 1612. There’s a play by Lewis Theobald called Double Falsehood that claims to be a version of Cardenio, supposedly based on manuscripts of the play. It’s completely possible that this is indeed true, and that Theobald re-wrote the play just like other Shakespeare plays were re-written in the restoration, but if it is true, then the manuscripts he based his version off has been lost. Many scholars recognise the claim behind Theobald’s work, and the Arden Shakespeare published Double Falsehood as part of their collection of Shakespeare’s works. More recently, Gary Taylor has written a version od Cardenio which attempts to imaginatively reconstruct what Shakespeare’s Cardenio would have been like. It’s being premiered in the UK right now.

In other lost plays, there’s also some speculation about the earlier Hamlet, generally referred to as Ur-Hamlet, which almost certainly existed and which some scholars attribute to Shakespeare. The more popular theory is that it was written by Thomas Kyd.