Why did Shakespeare make Hamlet in Denmark?

Answer 1

Shakespeare set Hamlet in Denmark because that is where the story was set in his sources. He took the story possibly directly from the source story by Belleforest who had taken it from Saxo Grammaticus. In both those sources Hamlet is prince of Denmark. Even more importantly, scholars believe that there was a previous play drawn from Belleforest and possibly by Thomas Kyd also called Hamlet the Prince of Denmark, which was very well-known and thought to have been considered to have been a bit corny. To have written Hamlet Prince of Bavaria would have looked as ridiculous to his audience as Holmes and Watson being based in Las Vegas instead of London.

Answer 2

After a fashion. The story on which Hamlet is based is part of the legendary history of Denmark in the same way that King Lear and Cymbeline are based on the legendary history of Britain. Whether there was a real historical Hamlet (or Amleth as he is called in the source work) is debatable.

Hamlet's position is therefore different from those characters (Richard III, Cleopatra, Macbeth) who unquestionably did exist in history.

It is also quite possible that Shakespeare's real inspiration for the play was an earlier play. A play by this name was played on June 9, 1594 and it seems unlikely that this is the play that we know. There is also a German play called The Fratricide which might be a translation of that earlier play.

Answer 3

Ultimately the story of Hamlet comes from the history of Saxo Grammaticus, written in Latin in about 1185. A French retelling by Belleforest was much more accessible to people in Shakespeare's day. However it is possible that Shakespeare was not even familiar with that; he may have based his play entirely on an earlier Hamlet play which scholars call the Ur-Hamlet. No copy of this survives and, unless it was the basis for the German play Der Brudermord, we don't know much about it apart from the fact that it was around about ten years before Shakespeare wrote his play.

Answer 4

Not as far as we know.