Introduction to Hamlet
Hamlet
was written at the turn of the seventeenth century and is the first of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. It
has become the most frequently produced and arguably the best known of all Shakespeare’s plays
despite being over four hours long in performance. Hamlet marks a turning point in drama, giving a new
intensity to the traditions of melodrama and satire but creating an ironic background for tragedy.
Tradition has it that Shakespeare himself played the Ghost at the first performance in the Globe theatre.
The play has been praised for weaving together a human consciousness strained to shattering point,
whilst retaining a sense of normality in life and continuity. Our deepest nature recognises Hamlet’s
response to his predicament; character and plot are co-ordinated to reach a universal consciousness.
The play shapes and orders that which, close up, appears chaotic and arbitrary.
Hamlet
is grouped among Shakespeare’s tragedies and is linked to the others by common factors. Following
ancient Greek tragedy (see Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex etc.) they all concern people of high birth, the fate
of whom has historical implications. Further, the setting for the action is remote in time and place, often
evoking the supernatural; high language is used by the main protagonist and his circle, and the plot
works towards the death of several of the central characters. Ending with a sense of loss and catharsis
(the purging of the soul by art), the plays all portray characters in the grip of emotions that transcend
social conventions and setting.
The play was written during the last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Life at this
time was precarious: murder, arrest and disease were a reality of everyday life so the violent deaths in
Hamlet were not out of the ordinary (though by its bloody finale are a little more frequent). The royal
family in England, as in Hamlet, was the nucleus of society and indeed Elizabeth believed the fate of the
country rested on her shoulders. Threats against authority and political power increased in frequency
throughout her life, but she was protected by the sense of duty and honour of an impervious national
solidarity. Hamlet was born of the refocusing on the individual within this society. It flags the transition
between the political climate of the early part of Elizabeth’s reign and that of its closing years, the union
of the medieval world and the modern world.
Sources
There is some limited evidence that the play is based on historical fact, but the main thrust of the play
appears to be of Shakespeare’s own devising. However, the basic story of Hamlet is found in the folk
literature of Iceland, Ireland and Denmark hundreds of years before Shakespeare’s time, the earliest
reference being an 11th century Icelandic poem. 600 years before Shakespeare’s version, tales of
‘Amlodi’ the clever son whose name means ‘stupid’, were being told in Scandinavia, to be followed by
the legend of ‘Amleth’ as recorded in the twelfth century in the Danish history book, Historia Daica. In
this, the prince emerges triumphant as the new king. Hamlet is often associated with Francis de
Belleforest who published the story in French in his volume Histories Tragiques in 1570. Shakespeare’s
play had already been written by the time that Belleforest’s appeared in English so it is more likely that
inspiration was derived from a now lost play, which scholars refer to as Ur-Hamlet and which was
circulating on the London stage around 1589. There are also strong associations with a revenge play
written in the 1580s, thought to be influenced by Belleforest and attributed to Thomas Kyd (author of The
Spanish Tragedy). Shakespeare veers from his source more in Hamlet than in any other play.