Shakespeare query and replies

What is the Ur-Hamlet

I read somewhere that there was a play written before Shakespeare's Hamlet called the Ur-Hamlet. Do we know who wrote this play and if it resembles Shakespeare's own play?

posted by paulo (Stonewall) on 2004-06-29 07:51:10
last updated 2004-06-29 07:51:10

Very little

We know almost anothing about the "ur-Hamlet." There were a couple of references in the mid-1590s (too early to refer to Shakespeare's Hamlet) to a Hamlet stage play that was notable for its rivers of blood and a ghost "crying like an oysterwife 'Hamlet, revenge!'"

The author wasn't mentioned. I have read two suggestions. One is Kyd, who was known for his bloody tragedies. The other is Harold Bloom's suggestion that the ur-Hamlet was actually Shakespeare's first effort and that the Hamlet we know resulted from a re-write in about 1600.

posted by Harry (Harry Connors) on 2004-06-29 20:57:41
last updated 2004-06-29 20:57:41

The Spook Who Spoke

For a very entertaining, though wildly unlikely, take on a VERY ur-Hamlet you might enjoy Lindey Davis's Last Act In Palmyra. In it she sends her hero, Marcus Didius Falco, to Palmyra on the far eastern edge of Vespasian's Roman Empire. There he joins a traveling troupe of actors, solves a few murders, and writes a play, The Spook Who Spoke. From various descriptions of the plot it is obviously a first draft of Hamlet.

Davis's novels about Falco are hardly great literature. However, they are very entertaining if you can imagine a hard-boiled detective given a real sense of humor and an incredibly tangled personal life in ancient Rome. Maybe life in the Roman Empire was just like that--or maybe not. If that isn't the way it was, that's the way it should have been.

posted by Harry (Harry Connors) on 2004-06-30 18:50:49
last updated 2004-06-30 18:50:49