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Hamlet vs. Amleth Parallels · Acedra
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Hamlet vs. Amleth Parallels
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0:02
- To be or not to be. Those might be the most recognizable words in English literature.
0:09
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,
0:41
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
1:10
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.
1:28
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
1:54
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.
2:19
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
2:50
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.
3:22
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.
3:50
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.
4:20
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.
4:45
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.
5:11
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,
5:33
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,
6:01
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,
6:30
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,
6:56
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.
7:19
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.
7:46
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.
8:17
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.
8:45
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.
9:03
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
9:29
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.
9:44
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,
10:10
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
10:37
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
11:06
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
11:37
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
12:08
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.
12:36
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.
13:04
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.
13:30
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,
13:57
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.
14:20
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.
14:49
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.
15:16
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
15:47
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
16:16
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.
16:44
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
17:10
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.
17:30
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
17:58
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.
18:28
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
18:56
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.
19:27
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
19:56
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
20:25
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.
20:54
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.
21:16
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."
21:24
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.
21:54
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
22:26
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
22:55
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.
23:19
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.
23:45
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.
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