Ur-Hamlet

The Ur-Hamlet (the German prefix Ur- means "primordial") is the name given to a play by an unknown author, thought to be either Thomas Kyd, an English dramatist or the more well known English playwright, William Shakespeare. Dated back by scholars to the second half of 1587, no surviving copy of the play remains today. The play was known to be played in London as a stage play, more specifically at The Burbages Shoreditch Playhouse as recalled by Elizabethan author, Thomas Lodge. The play is known to have a character in the play named, Hamlet. The only other known fact about the play is that there is a ghost in the play and he cries "Hamlet, revenge!".

Related writings

The Ur-Hamlet is supposed to be the prequel to Shakespeare's more commonly known play Hamlet. Specifically the 1st quarto is influenced by the Ur-Hamlet.

Some scholars believe that the Ur-Hamlet had influence from the German work, Der Bestrafte Brudermord.

Authorship theories

Because Nashe apparently alludes to Thomas Kyd in the same passage of his Menaphon introduction, and because of similarities between the Shakespearean Hamlet and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd is believed to be the author of the Ur-Hamlet,^[1] and that his play is now lost.

Certain other scholars believe that the play is an early version of Shakespeare's own play, pointing to the survival of Shakespeare's version in three quite different early texts, Q1 (1603), Q2 (1604) and F (1623), suggesting the possibility that it was revised by the author over a period of many years. While the exact relationship of the short and apparently primitive text of Q1 to the later published texts is not resolved, Hardin Craig has suggested that it may represent an earlier draft of the play and hence would confirm that the "Ur-Hamlet" is in fact merely an earlier draft of Shakespeare's play. This view is held in some form or another by Harold Bloom,^[2] Peter Alexander,^[3] and Andrew Cairncross, who stated that "It may be assumed, until a new case can be shown to the contrary, that Shakespeare's Hamlet and no other is the play mentioned by Nashe in 1589 and Henslowe in 1594."^[4] Harold Jenkins, in his 1982 Arden edition, dismisses this assertion.^[5]

The mainstream view which still holds is that Q1 is simply a garbled unauthorised version of the text, explaining the quick publication of the corrected version, Q2.

Notes

1. Jenkins, p.83–4
2. Bloom, pp. xiii, 383
3. Alexander, Peter vol.4 of The Heritage of Shakespeare: Tragedies, p. 638
4. Cairncross, Andrew Scott (1936). The Problem of Hamlet: A Solution. London: Macmillan. OCLC 301819.
5. Jenkins, p. 84, note 4

References

• Bloom, Harold (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead. ISBN 1-57322-120-1.
• Edwards, Philip, ed. (1985). Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The new Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22151-X.
• Jenkins, Harold, ed. (1982). Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The Arden Shakespeare. London, England: Methuen. ISBN 0-416-17910-X.
• Knutson, Rosyln L. "Hamlet." - Lost Plays Database. N.p., `19 Nov. 2012. Web. 21 Apr. 2016. <https://www.lostplays.org/index.php?title=Hamlet#.22Fossils.22_of_.22Ur-Hamlet.22_in_Q1>.