- To be or not to be.
Those might be the most recognizable words
in English literature.
But it's certainly not
a quotation we would
have heard from Amleth, the Viking prince
in the History of the
Danes by Saxo Grammaticus.
And yet if you've read Saxo,
you'll see clear parallels
that tell us that Amleth was
the forerunner of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
He's a prince of Denmark.
His father, the king, is
killed by his brother,
the uncle of Amleth.
This uncle-king marries Amleth's mother.
In order to keep from being killed
as a potential avenger,
an enemy of the new king,
Amleth has to pretend to be crazy
in order to hide his revenge plot.
There's a moment when one
of the king's henchman
is spying on Amleth while he speaks
with his mother, Gerutha, and he's hidden
and Amleth hears him and
discovers that he's there
and stabs through the straw and kills him.
After this, the king sends him to England
hoping that his ally, the king
of England, will kill him.
On the way to England,
he discovers a message
that calls for his own death
and he changes that message
to ask for the death of the two men
who were taking him to England.
He eventually kills the
king in a sword fight
in which he starts off
with a sword that's been
rendered useless and he switches
swords with his opponent
before killing him.
The major difference
in the plot, obviously,
is the fact that Amleth goes on to rule
in his father's place, rule over Denmark.
He then has this adventure
in England where he marries
the queen of Scotland and goes to war
with the king of England
before he's eventually killed
in another battle.
But all of these plot similarities tell us
that this is more than coincidence.
The specific scenes like killing the spy
that's spying for the
king while the prince
is talking to his mother
or the king's spies
watching the hero as he
interacts with a young female
with whom he has a past relationship.
The changing of the letter
after being sent to England
to call for his spy's
death rather than his own.
All of these things are
too close, too parallel
to be just coincidence.
But once we've established these parallels
and this lineage of Shakespeare's Hamlet,
then we can start to
look at the differences
and there are quite a few of them.
But in a previous lecture when
we talked about Saxo's Amleth
and the History of the Danes,
we also noted that there
were other offshoots
of this story which probably existed
for a long time in oral
tradition in Scandinavia,
ending up as far away as
Iceland in Ambales Saga
showing up as a kenning
for the sand on the beach
of being the flour of Amlodi's mill.
Amlodi's mill being a poetical reference
that someone named Amlodi
presumably made at some point
for the ocean as a mill
that grinds up islands
into flour, which is the sand.
So there are many other
versions of this story
before Saxo's account and
there are many other versions
after Saxo's account.
And it's probably Saxo's
account that ended
up influencing Shakespeare because his
History of the Danes was written in Latin.
It was something that could
be read all over Europe.
But that's not to say it
directly influenced Shakespeare.
That's not to say that Shakespeare himself
actually read Saxo's account.
There are other intervening
versions of the History
of the Danes, the story of Amleth.
One of those shows up in
a French work called the
History of Tragedy by
Francois de Belleforest.
And that was written in French in 1570,
about 30 years before
Shakespeare's play Hamlet
was first performed.
But we don't know that
Shakespeare could read French
and Belleforest's account of Amleth
wasn't translated into English
until after Shakespeare's
play was performed.
So unless Shakespeare could read French,
then it's unlikely he
got it from this version.
There was a play that seems
to have been a version
of Hamlet that was put on
as early as 1589 in England.
But we don't have any
copies of that play left
and we're not even really
sure who wrote that play.
All we know about the
play is that apparently
there was a ghost in
it, which is significant
because there was no ghost of
the father in Saxo's account
of Amleth, but in this
play that was put on
as early as 1589, there was a ghost.
And apparently the actor
who played the ghost
wasn't very good, he just
screamed, "Hamlet, revenge,"
over and over again.
And another playwright
who had seen the play
complained about it, and
that's how we know about it.
He complained about it
in a piece of writing.
Where he said that the
ghost cried miserably
like an oyster wife, "Hamlet, revenge."
In other words, someone who
sells oysters by calling out,
"Oysters, oysters."
It's that kind of delivery
that this dramatist
Thomas Lodge was complaining about.
And we don't even know
what the title of this is.
Scholars suspect that
this drama was written
by the playwright Thomas Kyd
because it closely resembles
another work that we know
was written by Thomas Kyd
called the Spanish Tragedy.
But we're not sure if Thomas Kyd wrote it.
Some people have suggested that
maybe Shakespeare wrote it.
Maybe this was an early version
that just wasn't very good.
But we also don't even
know what the title was.
So it's frequently called Ur-Hamlet,
and you'll remember the word
Ur means like an early version,
like the primordial version of something,
although we of course know that this
isn't the first version of Hamlet.
But we can at least say
that because this play,
this Ur-Hamlet was performed in Britain
in the 1590s, it's likely that Shakespeare
would have seen it.
Whether or not he was
involved with producing it
we don't know, but he's
likely to have seen it.
So the story of Hamlet was
popular knowledge by 1600
when Shakespeare writes
his play of Hamlet,
the prince of Denmark.
So whatever Shakespeare's
source was, he had a source.
Some people are sometimes
disappointed by this
when they find out that Hamlet,
like almost all of Shakespeare's plays,
is an adaptation of a story
that came from somewhere else.
It's just one iteration of a
story that had past iterations
at the time Shakespeare wrote it.
For instance, Othello was modeled
on the Italian writer Cinthio's
story The Moorish Captain.
Shakespeare's history plays
like Henry V and Richard III,
what happens in them comes
almost point by point
from a book called Chronicles
of England, Scotland,
and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed.
King Lear, the general plot of King Lear,
can be read in Geoffrey of Monmouth's
History of the Kings of Briton,
although it doesn't end quite so badly
in the original version.
But hopefully by now, we're not
so easily disappointed
by this recognition.
Every identifiable author
we've read in this class,
Aeschylus, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer,
they've all adopted not only the stories
from past sources, but
elements of previous narratives
and Shakespeare is no different.
And once we know what his sources are,
then we can see what really is original.
If we compare Saxo's account of Amleth
to Shakespeare's version of Hamlet,
we see the similarities and
we can sort of put them aside
and say yes, he took
this from another source.
But look at what else he adds.
Look at the interpretations he gives it.
Look at the narrative choices that he made
for this particular
iteration of this story.
Shakespeare is very familiar to us,
his name, his face, and we may assume
that we know a lot about him.
But remember the illusion of
knowledge that I discussed
in one of the earlier lectures.
When something is familiar to us,
we tend to overestimate how much
we actually know about that thing.
And because Shakespeare's name and face
and especially his works,
the plays that he wrote,
are very familiar to us, we tend to assume
that there must be a lot more
historical information about him.
We know what he looks like
through images like these,
but the two images on the
right are actually the only two
paintings that could have been made
of him during his lifetime.
All other images, including the engraving
on the first folio which was
produced after his death,
that engraving could not have
been made while he was alive.
It could have been made
by someone who knew him.
It could have been made based
on the Chandos portrait,
the one on the right.
But that image was made in 1623
and Shakespeare died in 1616.
The image on the bottom left
is his funerary monument,
and obviously that would
be made after his death.
The two pictures on the right, however,
seem to be the only ones
that are made of him
during his lifetime, but
we're not actually sure
that they represent him,
especially the Cobbe portrait,
the one in the middle.
That one was actually only
discovered in the year 2006,
so very recently.
And we can see some resemblances
to the more familiar
Chandos portrait on the
right, but we can also see
a little bit of difference.
All other images of
Shakespeare are paintings
and productions that were
made after his death.
So they, again, could
have been made by somebody
who remembered what he looked like,
but we don't know for sure.
We have his signature on legal documents
and that sort of thing from the time,
but his signature kind
of changes over time.
So they don't always look the same.
In fact, the way he spells
his name changes over time.
Now this would have to be William
Shakespeare that was there
and recognizable and
present to sign a document,
otherwise that would be
forgery, that would be illegal.
But these signatures change
and the spellings change.
Sometimes he writes his
name W-I-L-L-M as William
and then Shakespeare is just S-H-A-K-P.
Sometimes it's S-H-A-K-S-P-E-R-E.
Sometimes there's no R-E on the bottom.
The one way he never spells his
name is the way we spell it.
From these same legal documents,
we know that he was born in 1564,
we know that he died in 1616.
He lived the first part of his
life in Stratford-upon-Avon,
a good distance away from London.
But he made his way to London
and joined several
prominent theater troupes.
Quickly became highly respected,
especially for his writing.
The people who write about
him during his lifetime
were very frequently prominent people
like the playwright Ben Jonson,
the playwright Christopher Marlowe,
whose works and lives we
know a lot more about.
But he came from humble beginnings.
His father was a glove-maker
who made a good deal
of money during his life,
but then he also lost
a good deal of money.
His mother came from a prominent family
but her inheritance was lost
by Shakespeare's father.
And this has led a lot of people to say,
well, he's too poor and
too low-class to have been
the person who wrote all
of these wonderful plays,
and that's led to a lot
of conspiracy theories
that insist that somebody
else must have written
the plays that are attributed
to William Shakespeare
for one reason or another.
People like Christopher
Marlowe, Francis Bacon,
who was a very famous early scientist
that was a near
contemporary of Shakespeare,
and also the Earl of
Oxford Edward de Vere.
These are all people that
have been put forward
as possible authors of
the plays attributed
to William Shakespeare.
But the underlying presumption there
is that he had to be from the nobility
in order to be educated and intelligent
and to write these kinds of
examinations of human character
and the sort of
vicissitudes of social life
and life in the world.
And that's just not true.
Now, you know, we saw this
same kind of prejudice
in The Song of the Cid
where people dismissed
the accomplishments on
the battlefield of El Cid
because he came from a lower social class.
But you could counter-argue almost
that Shakespeare would have
had to come from a lower class
and had to be the kind of person
who could work his way up,
who could earn enough to enter
the sort of lower nobility.
He became officially a gentleman.
He got a coat of arms, which is something
that only ranking families
are allowed to have.
But he was able to purchase
this during his lifetime
because of his success
on the stage in London.
But in order to work his way
up in this very difficult,
very rigid social hierarchy,
he would have to be
very good at understanding human nature
in ways that people who
were already at the top
would not have to be.
If you're born wealthy and
you're born with high status,
you don't really have to learn much.
There's always gonna
be people to do for you
what other people would
have to do for themselves.
And Shakespeare's brilliance
at theory of mind,
at understanding the
minds of other people,
is something we see in his plays
and it's something that
he would have had to have
to go from where he began
to where he ended up.
And despite all we don't
know about Shakespeare,
at least we have the texts of his plays.
We know what the original plays were...
Well, no, I'm just kidding.
If you've learned anything in this class,
it's that we never have an Ur-text.
We never have the original
version of something.
And that's true even when it
comes to Shakespeare's Hamlet,
not just the Amleth
story, but Shakespeare's
specific play Hamlet, we don't have
this genuine original against which we can
judge all later versions.
We don't have any versions of his plays
that were written by Shakespeare himself
in his own handwriting
that he may have used
when performing a play.
All of his printed
plays come from editions
that were reconstructed either by actors
familiar with the parts,
or possibly by notes from the producers.
With Hamlet, we have three
early printed editions
and none of them match any others.
And these are referred to
either as quartos or folios
according to how the book
itself was constructed.
The quarto would have been
put together like this.
The pages would be printed
in a printing press
on both sides of a large sheet of paper
like the one you see in the top left.
And that sheet of paper
would be folded four ways,
and then after it was
bound, the parts on the top
that were still connected would be cut.
And this form of
book-printing continued on
into the early-20th century.
And sometimes today if you go check out
a really old book from a library
that hasn't been used much,
you can find the pages are
still sort of folded together.
They haven't been cut.
But these books would have been
much smaller than the folio,
which is the other style of construction.
In a folio, we have a sheet
of paper about the same size,
again printing on both sides of it,
but it's just folded
once before it's nestled
into other folded pages
and then bound together.
Now there are two quartos that were made
during Shakespeare's lifetime.
The play Hamlet was first acted
at the Globe Theatre in
London around the year 1600.
But we don't have anything left over
from those early performances.
The earliest we have is the first quarto,
which was made in 1603.
And we might like to assume
that this earliest version
is the most original,
because it doesn't match
the printed version, the
second quarto that was made
a year later in 1604.
In fact, the second quarto
is almost twice as long
as the first quarto.
And we might like to
assume that the earlier one
is the original one, but
there's a problem with that.
The first quarto bears this
description on the title page.
This is the tragical history
of Hamlet, prince of Denmark,
by William Shakespeare, as
it has been diverse times,
different times, acted
by his highness' servants
in the city of London, in
other words the King's Men,
the theater troupe that
Shakespeare was a part of.
And it has also been acted this
way according to this script
in the universities of Cambridge
and Oxford and elsewhere.
Now this description differs
a lot from the description
of the second quarto, which
again is about twice as long.
And its title page describes
it as newly imprinted
and enlarged to almost
as much again as it was,
according to the true and perfect copy.
And because so much is missing
and so much is different,
people, scholars tend to
assume that the first quarto
wasn't something that Shakespeare oversaw
in the printing process.
It was probably something
that some of the other actors
or people vaguely familiar with the play
took it upon themselves to print
and then distribute or sell.
But something that was probably written
and then put in typeface by memory
that was a little bit imperfect.
They didn't have direct access.
They left a lot of things
out rather than this being
an original version
that was later added to.
And if we look at the first quarto
and compare it to the second quarto,
we see that a lot of things are missing
that make Hamlet Hamlet.
The famous to be or not to be speech.
In the first quarto
goes, to be or not to be,
I, there's the point.
As opposed to, to be or not
to be, that's the question,
the version we're all more familiar with.
It goes on to die, to sleep, is that all?
I, all.
No, to sleep, to dream,
I Mary there it goes.
For in the dream of death when we awake,
and borne before an everlasting judge.
Well, we very quickly have
gone from familiar language
to unfamiliar language.
This description of after we
die being going to judgment,
this is something that's not
directly referenced this way
in the second quarto,
the more famous version.
We do see some of those same elements.
We see that to die, to sleep no more.
To sleep perchance to dream.
But then there's a lot more that happens
in between those things.
And rather than appearing
before God as the judge
after we die, it's a
little more dreamlike.
For in that sleep of
death what dreams may come
when we have shuffled off this mortal coil
must give us pause.
In other words, if
dying is going to sleep,
then the dreams that come after that
is something we have to stop and consider.
This is a little more ambiguous,
a little more artistic,
than just saying, you
know, when I face judgment.
Both version describe death
as that undiscovered country
and get to the point that
when we stop and consider
what's going to be after death,
it makes us reconsider whether
or not we want to remain
in this world.
If maybe we're in too big of
a hurry to leave this world
and go onto the next world
before we make that decision,
we should stop and
consider the consequences.
We don't know what we're
getting into in the next world.
The general point is the
same, but there's a lot more
going on in the second quarto description.
And the second quarto gives
us a lot of what we think
is more of the Shakespearean Hamlet,
the more complete version of Hamlet.
But even in it, some things are missing.
And for that reason, a lot
of lines are incorporated
from the first folio.
Remember, the first folio
was printed in 1623,
but it has a lot of additions
that seem to come from Shakespeare himself
according to scholars.
Now, the folio contains most of the works
that Shakespeare produced.
And when you pick up say
the Arden Shakespeare
that I recommended for this class,
or if you read the Folger
online Shakespeare,
or any other version,
you're almost never reading
either the quarto or the folio.
You're usually reading a combination
of some things from the folio,
some things from the quarto.
And for that reason, a
lot of times line numbers
are gonna differ from
one edition to another.
Sometimes even the act and scene numbers
are going to differ, but usually the acts
and scene numbers usually match up.
Frequently though, it's the line numbers
that are a little bit off.
So when you read a modern edition,
are you reading Shakespeare?
Yes, but you're reading
Shakespeare as it's been edited
by someone between Shakespeare and us.
We're not just reading Shakespeare's
direct thoughts on paper.
But we should also
remember that the reason
it wasn't written down,
it wasn't printed first,
is because it was produced as a play.
And Shakespeare was very
successful as a playwright
and an actor and director.
So successful that he
opened his own theater,
the Globe Theatre in 1599.
And despite burning
and then being rebuilt,
it survived mostly until
1642 when all the theaters
in England were shut down
by religious reformers
who thought it was sinful, it promoted sin
and that sort of thing.
But before that first quarto,
the location of Hamlet,
the place where you would
go to see and receive
the story wouldn't be a text,
it would be the theater.
So every time a play is performed,
it's a different iteration.
And each iteration is going
to make subtle differences,
subtle changes according
to how much time they have,
what the weather's
like, because as you see
with the Globe Theatre,
it's an open-air theater.
Some nights you might
have hostile audiences
that can't keep quiet and
tend to interrupt the play.
So Shakespeare himself
might be making decisions
about what lines to add or
subtract on any given night
during any given performance.
But also each actor is gonna decide
how to deliver those lines.
Where or how those lines
are gonna be staged.
What he's going to be doing at the time.
What he's holding, how he's dressed.
The director will have input into this,
but the actor ultimately
is standing on a stage
and makes a decision about
how to read these lines.
Any individual actor
might emphasize some lines
and de-emphasize other lines.
Might use different intonations.
And so the impression we get,
the story as we receive it,
the narrative, for lack of a better word,
a lot of people want to say if it's acted
it's not narrative, but
even your performance
is a type of narration.
It's taking a story that
exists before that iteration
and it decides what to focus
on and what to leave out.
And so when Sir John Gielgud
does the Yorick scene,
where he holds up the skull and says,
"Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio."
When David Tennant did it in 2008
for the Royal Shakespeare Company he
made different decisions about
how to deliver those lines.
When Benedict Cumberbatch
did the same thing,
he made different decisions
about what to enunciate,
what to pass over, how theatrical to be.
How to act out those lines
as he was saying those lines.
In other words, just like
every other text we've read,
the story is multi-form.
Each iteration makes decisions
about how to narrate,
how to present that story.
And the same holds true
for movie versions.
There are a ton of movie
versions of Hamlet.
Some are just filmed on the stage.
Some are acted out in costume and setting
that would be the original Amleth's sort
of medieval Denmark.
Some are acted out in the setting
and the costumes of Shakespeare's time
like Laurence Olivier's
1948 performance of Hamlet.
Many versions of Hamlet
are set in modern times
like the Ethan Hawke version
and Kenneth Branagh's 1996
version of Hamlet is
set in the 19th century,
which is neither Shakespeare's
time nor our time.
It's the one I recommend
because it's the most complete
film version of Hamlet.
It's four hours long almost
because it has nearly every line.
But the look of it is very
original, it's very different.
If you read the text while
you watch another performance,
you might see that some
passages are rearranged.
Even Brannagh's version,
which is the most complete,
takes one speech by Claudius
and puts it in a different
point in the film
so that if you're following along,
you may have no idea when
you first hear these lines,
it's clear that he's reading
something from the text,
but it's not at the point that you are
when you're following along.
You just have to look
around for those lines.
And in most cases, most
performances will omit a lot
of lines because this is one
of Shakespeare's longest plays.
To act out the entire thing
takes about four hours.
So many people decide to omit quite a bit.
But what you're doing while
you watch a film version
and read a text version,
whether it's the Arden version
or the Folger Shakespeare Library
or any other edition, is you're
having to mentally redact
just like you did all the way
back in the Epic of Gilgamesh
and Atrahasis when you're
looking at these broken tablets
and trying to figure out how
do I put all of these fragments
together into one chronological whole.
Well, that takes a lot
of work on your part
as the reader, you're
also redacting the text
in order to create a new iteration
that's not exactly what's on the page
and not exactly what's on the screen.
But something close.
