The Ur-Hamlet (the German prefix Ur- means "primordial") is the name given to a theoretical play, believed lost, that may have been extant before 1589, a decade before the earliest known version of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In 1589 Thomas Nashe implies the existence of such a play in his introduction to Robert Greene's Menaphon:

English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences, as Blood is a begger, and so forth; and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.^[1]

There is also a record of a performance of Hamlet in 1594 in Philip Henslowe's diary and in 1596 Thomas Lodge wrote of "the ghost which cried so miserably at the theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!"^[2] Nashe makes allusions to Thomas Kyd in the same passage and because of this and claimed similarities between the Shakespearean Hamlet and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, it has sometimes been posited that Kyd could be the author of the Ur-Hamlet.^[3]

However, with the absence of a copy of the play making stylistic and linguistic comparison impossible, there is no direct evidence of Kyd's authorship, nor is there any evidence the play was not an early version by Shakespeare himself. In this regard, a few Shakespeare scholars, including Harold Bloom, have accepted Peter Alexander's case that Shakespeare himself was the author of the Ur-Hamlet and that the later play is a reworking by the author of one of his own earliest works.^[4] This belief was also held by Prof. Andrew Cairncross, who stated that "It may be assumed, until a new case can be shown to the contrary, that Shakespeare's Hamlet and no other is the play mentioned by Nash in 1589 and Henslowe in 1594."^[5] Harold Jenkins, in his 1982 book "Hamlet", dismisses this assertion^[6], but the view is upheld by anti-Stratfordians, who believe that there was no Ur-Hamlet, and that the references are merely signs that the Shakespearean Hamlet was written earlier than the generally accepted date, and revised on numerous occasions.^[7]

How much of the Ur-Hamlet, regardless of who its author was, survives or is utilised in the Shakespeare play — or if it even existed — is impossible to ascertain. Shakespeare may have never heard of it or could have, perhaps, ignored the play, using earlier versions of the "Amleth" (or "Hamblet") legend to put together the story (see Sources for Hamlet), and in the course of it inventing the ghost and much else. But the surviving references to the ur-Hamlet suggest it was well-known, at least to London writers such as Nashe and Lodge — and presumably to their fellow playwright Shakespeare. So it is possible that he used the contemporary play, perhaps in great detail, and took what else he needed from available versions of the old legend. He worked that way in other plays (most notably, Henry IV, Part 1, where he used Holinshed as well as an extant play).

Saxo Grammaticus wrote of Hamlet, Amleth or Amlóði (Norse for "mad", "not sane") in his Gesta Danorum some 400 years prior. It is believed the original tale was contained in the lost Skjöldunga saga and may have been a traditional Scandinavian tale.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Bloom, Harold (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead. ISBN 1573221201. 
• Edwards, Philip, ed (1985). Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The new Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052122151X. 
• Jenkins, Harold, ed (1982). Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The Arden Shakespeare. London, England: Methuen. ISBN 041617910X. 

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