Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare whose year of publication is around 1603, since the exact date is not known.

The plot of this play revolves around the revenge carried out by Prince Hamlet to vindicate the death of his father, King Hamlet, who has been murdered by his brother Claudius.

As in other tragedies of the author, the protagonist cannot avoid a catastrophic fate despite all his efforts to avoid it. Likewise, this play explores such universal themes as life and death, reason and its weakness, and madness.

The story of Hamlet was narrated by Saxo Grammaticus in the Gesta of the Danes (books III and IV, chapters 86-106), of the early 13th century. It came to Shakespeare through François de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques and a lost drama (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), which was probably performed in 1587 or 1589. There are some important divergences between Belleforest's narrative and the Shakespearean drama: in the Frenchman's account, Hamlet knows from the beginning how his father died, so his feigned madness has a magnificent justification; on the other hand, he does not die in the fulfillment of his revenge and is able to act energetically at the right moment.

One can imagine that some of the new elements were introduced by that drama designated by the critics, with a German prefix, Ur-Hamlet, that is, "primitive Hamlet": thus the death of the protagonist, the specter of the father, the scene of the drama within the drama and the final duel with Laertes, elements that make us think of Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) as the author of this now lost work. In the Ur-Hamlet, Hamlet was probably an aggressive avenger; in readapting the play, Shakespeare gave the protagonist a melancholy character, which became fashionable in the early 17th century, to justify the delay of revenge; the focus of the drama was thus shifted from the intrigues of King Claudius to the reactions in the mood of the hesitant and pessimistic Hamlet.