Hamlet

Hamlet is ultimately based on the story of Amleth, which is found in a medieval Danish history by Saxo Grammaticus. Although called a history, the Amleth story, as recorded by Saxo, certainly contains more myth and legend than fact.

Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Saxo's Amleth, are quite different in important respects, but the story lines are roughly similar, and Hamlet has a number of incidental details that appeared earlier in 'Amleth.'

A French writer, Francois de Belleforest, translated Saxo's story of Amleth into French in 1570, and it probably entered English cultural consciousness via that French translation.

There is a reference from 1589 to an English stage version of Hamlet, although it's very doubtful that play was the same one we have now. The earlier 'Hamlet' (called ur-Hamlet) is traditionally ascribed to Thomas Kyd, although some scholars have opined it might have been by Shakespeare.

The best guess seems to be that Shakespeare's company obtained the earlier English 'Hamlet', in the mid-1590's, and Shakespeare then reworked it, to make it into the play we have now, as published in the Second Quarto of 1604-1605, and later in the First Folio of 1623.

So, according to current thinking, Hamlet probably developed by way of the following path:

Saxo's Amleth - >

Belleforest's translation ->

An English play by Kyd - >

Shakespeare's Hamlet.

1. Act I sc2. "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt...But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue."

This soliloquy is spoken by Hamlet after he sees his mother whom Claudius has married, completely reconciled to her new state. She does not mourn the death of her husband (Hamlet's father) and seems happily married to Claudius. Hamlet is shocked at the change in his mother's attitude and this soliloquy expresses his disgust towards all women in the now famous line: "fraility thy name is woman!" In fact, he is so disgusted that he wishes that he could die and that he is even prepared to commit suicide. It is this soliloquy which has led many psychoanalytical critics to conclude that Hamlet suffers from an 'Oedipus Complex.'

2. Act I Sc5. "O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?....I have sworn 't."

This soliloquy is spoken by Hamlet after the Ghost reveals to him how Claudius had murdered him. Hamlet is completely overwhelmed by hatred towards his uncle Claudius and vows to kill him in obedience to his father's wishes. Hamlet's father's ghost reminds him to never give up his idea of revenging his murder. So Hamlet practises what psychologists would today term as 'selective amnesia.' That is, deliberately forget everything that has been stored in his memory but always to remember only one thing - to kill his uncle Claudius and fulfill his father's ghost's wishes.

Excerpted from Ophelia's lines in Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5:

"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray,

love, remember: and there is pansies. that's for thoughts.

...

There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue

for you; and here's some for me: we may call it

herb-grace o' Sundays: O you must wear your rue with

a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you

some violets, but they withered all when my father

died: they say he made a good end,--"

Hamlet is understood by most performers, audiences and critics to be musing about suicide here. 'To be' equals 'to exist', ie 'to live', or 'to carry on living'. 'not to be' is then 'to die', or 'to end life'.

Initially in the soliloquy, Hamlet's considerations favour death. He presents death as an end to 'The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to', and the same as sleep.

However, he then (famously) introduces the idea of dreams to this metaphor. Following his religious concerns throughout the play, he contemplates the possibility of some unknown experience after death, a concern that makes perfect sense given that he has already been visited by the ghost of his father. He reaches the explanation that it is this 'dread of something after death' that makes people carry on living, putting up with all of the pain of life rather than deliberately risk whatever might happen after they die. (Or, at least, after they die by suicide. Hamlet has already noted in his first soliloquy that 'the Everlasting' has 'fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter - ie God has forbidden suicide. Suicide is regarded as sinful, as the rough burial given to Ophelia in Act V again stresses.)

Finally, Hamlet moves from reflecting that it is fear of hell that makes people put up with life to musing that it is this sort of thinking too deeply about things that stops people doing anything significant - that deep thought gets in the way of resolution. Consequently, the soliloquy becomes another opportunity for Hamlet to berate himself for having not yet avenged his father by killing Claudius.

Whilst this speech, like many in the play, addresses the issue of Hamlet's delay in taking revenge, it's not quite the case that Hamlet can't make decisions about anything. This conception of Hamlet is quite common (possibly following Olivier's influential film version in which Hamlet is described as 'a man who could not make up his mind'), but it is not an accurate description of Shakespeare's character. He decides immediately to go to see his father's ghost, for instance, and to speak to it, and even threatens to kill his friends when they try to prevent him from following it. He swiftly decides on the strategy of pretending to be mad whilst he considers his revenge, and later produces the idea of using the players to entrap Claudius within minutes of their arrival. There are plenty of examples of swift, intelligent - sometimes rash - decisive action from Hamlet.

As for the delay to his revenge, this is interpreted differently by various performers and critics. It has been argued that he cannot pursue his revenge because he is already in the grip of melancholy following his father's death and mother's remarriage; because of the depth of his religious concerns and/or a clash between Protestant and Catholic faiths; because the role of revenger is not in his nature; because he has a sort of metatheatrical sense of the path of revenge tragedy and does not want to end up in the classic 'everybody's dead' conclusion. It can also be argued that he actually delays much less than his self-criticism suggests, when the sequence of events in the play is considered carefully. For example, its worth noting that a huge section of the play (from the start of Act II to halfway through Act IV) appears to take place during a single day, during which Hamlet sets up the play within the play, uses it to gain proof of Clauidus' guilt, refrains from killing Claudius whilst hie's praying, confronts his mother and is exiled to England. The length of the section, and of Hamlet's remonstrations with himself, can sometimes give the impression that more time is passing.