The Literary Tradition of the Hamlet Story
English Lit: OCR A Level - Hamlet, topic 1.1.2
The History of the Hamlet Story
Shakespeare did not invent or create his plots and characters. Instead, he used existing stories from other texts to create his dramas. Hamlet is no exception.
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Grammaticus' version of Hamlet
- The story of Hamlet (or Amleth) was first written in the 12th Century by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus.
- Saxo Grammaticus came up with key plot features in Shakespeare’s play (the murder of the King by Hamlet’s uncle; the marriage of Hamlet’s mother and uncle; Hamlet’s madness) over 400 years before Shakespeare began to write his version.
Thomas Kyd's version of Hamlet
- The Hamlet story was then adapted into a play for the English stage in the 1580s or 1590s, probably by the playwright Thomas Kyd.
- However, this version of the story has not survived. As a result, we cannot know if any elements of the old Hamlet story were used or not.
- Some Shakespeare scholars believe that this ‘lost’ play version introduced other key aspects of the Hamlet story, such as the Ghost and the play-within-a-play.
Immediate success of Hamlet
- Because of this ‘lost’ Hamlet, it is impossible to know which features of Shakespeare’s play were ‘created’ by him.
- But Shakespeare’s version of the Hamlet story, first performed in either 1600 or 1601, appears to have been an immediate success with audiences at the newly built Globe Theatre. The power and poetry of Shakespeare’s language (especially in Hamlet’s soliloquies) helped to breathe new life into an old story.
- The play continues to move and fascinate audiences today.
Test yourself on The Literary Tradition of the Hamlet Story
Which key Hamlet plot feature did Grammaticus NOT come up with?