The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays

Kenneth Muir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317833413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1977. This book ascertains what sources Shakespeare used for the plots of his plays and discusses the use he made of them; and secondly illustrates how his general reading is woven into the texture of his work. Few Elizabethan dramatists took such pains as Shakespeare in the collection of source-material. Frequently the sources were apparently incompatible, but Shakespeare's ability to combine a chronicle play, one or two prose chronicles, two poems and a pastoral romance without any sense of incongruity, was masterly. The plays are examined in approximately chronological order and Shakespeare's developing skill becomes evident.

IV

TRAGIC PERIOD

24

HAMLET

SHAKESPEARE’S Hamlet was based on a lost play of the same title, perhaps by Shakespeare himself, perhaps by an unknown dramatist, but since The Spanish Tragedy, one of the most popular plays of the age, which kept its place on the stage in spite of ridicule and parody, resembles Hamlet closely, it would appear that the source-play – the Ur-Hamlet as it has been called – was written by Kyd, or by a close imitator of his.¹ Both plays begin with a ghost demanding vengeance; both are concerned with the madness, real or assumed, of the avenger; both contain the death of an innocent woman; both heroes blame themselves for their procrastination; both contain a play within the play.² We know very little about the Ur-Hamlet: the Ghost is said to have cried like an oyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge!’ and Hamlet is alleged to have said, ‘There are things called whips in store’. This, however, looks suspiciously like a misquotation of a passage from one of the late additions to The Spanish Tragedy:

And there is Nemesis and Furies,

And things called whippes,

And they sometimes do meete with murderers.

Perhaps, Armin, who quotes the phrase, may have confused the two plays.³

Although, therefore, we have no certain knowledge of the Ur-Hamlet, we can deduce a good deal about its contents from a study of other versions of the Hamlet story. Its author was doubtless attracted to the plot because it enabled him to use some of the popular ingredients of The Spanish Tragedy. Instead of a father seeking to avenge his murdered son, he was provided with a son seeking to avenge his murdered father. The story as given by Saxo Grammaticus and in Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques is substantially the same. In the former the father of Amleth, a governor of Jutland, had married Gerutha, the daughter of the King of Denmark, and had won fame by slaying the King of Norway in single combat. His brother, Feng, murders him, seizes his office, and marries his widow, thus ‘adding incest to unnatural murder’. Young Amleth determines to avenge his father, but to allay his uncle’s suspicions he puts on an antic disposition, so that he seems completely lethargic. In his feigned madness he ‘mingled craft and candour in such a way that, though his words did not lack truth’, there was nothing to reveal ‘how far his keenness went’. Two attempts are made to pierce his disguise. A beautiful woman, a childhood friend of his, is instructed to seduce him; but he is warned of the plot both by his foster-brother and by the woman herself. Then one of Feng’s friends undertakes to spy on him, while he is talking with his mother in her chamber. From this trap Amleth is saved by pretending to be a cock, crowing and flapping his arms, till he finds the spy hidden under the straw mattress. He pierces him with his sword, cuts up the body into little pieces, cooks them, and flings them to the pigs. He upbraids his mother for her lascivious conduct, urging her to lament her own guilt rather than his madness. The mother repents and is won over to Amleth’s side. Feng next despatches Amleth to Britain with two retainers, bearing a letter with a demand that the King should put Amleth to death. While the retainers are asleep, Amleth searches their belongings, finds the letters, and substitutes fresh instructions, as in Shakespeare’s play. Amleth’s companions are duly hanged and he marries the British princess. A year later he returns to Jutland and, having made Feng and his followers drunk, he sets fire to the palace. He changes swords with Feng, his own having been tampered with, and slays him. Feng’s followers are burnt alive. The version of the story given by Belleforest is much the same, except that Gertrude and Feng had committed adultery before the murder of her husband and that Amleth’s excessive melancholy is mentioned.

Whichever source the author of the Ur-Hamlet used, he would have found the germ of all the main characters, except Laertes – Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern – as well as the basis for the feigned madness, the interview with Ophelia, the closet-scene, the voyage to England, and the changing of weapons in the final duel. If he used Belleforest, he would have found too Amleth’s melancholy and Gertrude’s adultery. But in neither of these sources was there a ghost, a Mousetrap, a Laertes, or a Fortinbras; there were no drowning of Ophelia, no pirates, no grave-digger scene, and no Osric. We may be reasonably sure that the author of the Ur-Hamlet, imitating The Spanish Tragedy, invented the Mousetrap, the Ghost, and the madness and death of Ophelia. The introduction of Fortinbras, Laertes, and Pyrrhus provided Shakespeare with a trio of avengers of fathers to contrast with his hero.

Some other characteristics of the source-play may be deduced from a study of the piratical First Quarto of Shakespeare’s play, which is apparently contaminated by memories of an earlier version. It is also probable that Der Bestrafte Brudermord, performed in Germany, was derived confusedly from the pre-Shakespearian play.

From the bad quarto, it would seem that the character of the Queen was modified by Shakespeare. After the death of Corambis (i.e. Polonius) she blames herself for Hamlet’s madness and believes either that she is thereby punished for her incestuous remarriage, or else that her marriage, by depriving Hamlet of the crown, has driven him mad from thwarted ambition. Hamlet urges her to assist him in his revenge, in order to purge her soul of guilt. She replies:

Hamlet, I vow by that maiesty

That knowes our thoughts, and lookes into our hearts,

I will conceale, consent, and doe my best,

What stratagem soe’re thou shalt deuise.

(III. iv) (Sh. Q. Facsimiles scene-division)

Later on, when Hamlet returns from England, she sends him a warning message by Horatio:

Bid him a while

Be wary of his presence, lest that he

Faile in that he goes about.

(IV. vi)

Thus in the Ur-Hamlet the Queen apparently took positive steps to aid the Prince in his revenge, whereas in Shakespeare’s play she conceals her son’s secret and probably keeps herself from her husband’s bed, without doing anything more positive to assist her son.

The version of the voyage to England given in Fratricide Punished (as the German play is usually called) differs from Belleforest’s and also from Shakespeare’s. Hamlet embarks for England with his escort and they are forced by contrary winds to anchor by an island, not far from Dover. They land to take air and exercise and the two ruffians inform Hamlet that they have orders to kill him. He pleads with them in vain; he attempts, without success, to seize a sword; and he finally escapes by a trick. The men plan to shoot him, one from each side; Hamlet obtains permission to say a last prayer and proposes to raise his hands when he is ready to die; but, on raising his hands, he throws himself forward so that his executioners shoot each other. Hamlet finishes them off with their own swords. He then searches them and finds a letter from the King, commanding that, should the first attempt on his life miscarry, he should be put to death by the King of England. There is nothing about the forged commission, and nothing about the pirates. Hamlet makes his own way back to Denmark. It has been argued⁴ that some such scene must have been in the Ur-Hamlet because of the lines in the bad quarto:

Being crossed by the contention of the windes,

He found the Packet sent to the king of England…

He being set ashore, they [the others] went for England,

And in the Packet there writ down that doome

To be perform’d on them poynted for him.

(IV. vi)

There is nothing here to suggest the shooting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the island; but, on the other hand, Hamlet being set ashore conflicts with the account of the voyage given by Shakespeare. If there were, indeed, a scene on the island in the Ur-Hamlet, such as in Fratricide Punished, Shakespeare must have realized its absurdity and he may have been worried by the fact that the play was already too long. Here, then, he may have gone to Belleforest for the business of the forged commission and the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the encounter with the pirate ship being his own invention, though possibly suggested by an incident in Arcadia.⁵

The Ur-Hamlet, then, so far as it can be reconstructed, seems to have been fairly close to Shakespeare’s play in its main outlines. The revelation of the Ghost, the feigned madness, the play-scene, the closet-scene, the killing of Polonius, the voyage to England, the madness and suicide of Ophelia,⁶ and the duel with Laertes were probably all to be found in the old play, and Shakespeare’s additions (the pirates, Fortinbras, and the gravediggers), important as they are, are less significant than his intensification and subtilization of themes and motives present in his source – the effect of a mother’s guilt on a son, the malcontent’s satire under the guise of madness, the self-laceration caused by enforced delay, the contrast between the avengers, and the friendship between Hamlet and Horatio.

It used to be thought that the real problem of Hamlet is not due to the complex character of the hero, but to the confusions caused by Shakespeare’s inability to transform the intractable material of the old play, so that we have motives and incidents from the Ur-Hamlet (such as the murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Hamlet’s callous attitude to it) side by side with the feelings and experience of the civilized poet. There are, too, certain discrepancies, such as Hamlet’s age – eighteen or thirty – and the varying knowledge displayed by Horatio, which have been thought to indicate revision. It has been argued that in an earlier version of the play ‘To be or not to be’ belonged to Act I (before Hamlet’s meeting with the Ghost) and that the graveyard-scene was an afterthought.⁷ Santayana, for example, declared⁸ that ‘some of Hamlet’s actions and speeches’ are apparently survivals from the original play and that these ‘give a touch of positive incoherence to Hamlet’s character’. The ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• I Introduction
• II Early Plays
• III Comedies and Histories
• IV Tragic Period
• V Last Plays
• Notes
• Index