Ur-Hamlet

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Ur-Hamlet was the name given by nineteenth century German scholars to a pre-Shakespearean Hamlet written before 1589. There is no copy of this play now extant.

In 1589 Thomas Nashe implies the existence of such a play in his introduction to Robert Greene's Menaphon:

English Seneca read by Candle-light yeelds many good sentences, as Blood is a begger, and so forth; and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, hee will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragicall speeches.

There is a record of a performance of Hamlet in 1594 in Philip Henslowe's diary and in 1596 Thomas Lodge wrote of "the ghost which cried so miserably at the theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!".

Nashe makes allusions to Thomas Kyd in the same passage and because of this and disputed similarities between the Shakespearean Hamlet and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, it is often posited that Kyd was the author of the Ur-Hamlet. However, with the absence of a copy of the play making stylistic and linguistic comparison impossible, there is no direct evidence of this. (Indeed 'The Spainish Tragedy' is the only one of Kyd's plays to survive in any form.)

More controversial is the question of how much of the Ur-Hamlet, regardless of who its author was, survives or is utilised in William Shakespeare's play. At the one extreme Hamlet was an historical figure and they may be simply two plays on the same topic produced within a few years of one another. At the other Shakespeare's play may be a deliberate expansion and re-writing of a dead colleague's work.

A few orthodox Shakespeareans, including Harold Bloom, have accepted Peter Alexander's case that Shakespeare himself was the author of the Ur-Hamlet and the better known, later play is an expansion by the author of one of his own earliest works.

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