The story of Hamlet is actually much older than Shakespeare’s play. The earliest presentation of the story in a still existing literary form was in the 12th century, by Dane Saxo Grammaticus. This version was expanded by Francois de BeIleforest in ‘Histories Tragique’, in 1582. It is generally believed that this book is the source of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet was played in 1600 or 1601, and it was printed first in 1603.
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Hamlet was the Prince of Denmark. His father, the king died suddenly. Soon after the king’s death, his brother Claudius married the queen, Gertrude, and started to rule. Hamlet was very sad about these events.
Then a strange thing happened. The castle guards and Hamlet’s friend Horatio saw the ghost of the murdered king. Hamlet sought the ghost out. The ghost said, “The one that took my life now wears the crown. Avenge this murder! Spare your mother, and let her suffer the punishment of sorrow.”
Hamlet was shocked to hear this, and he did not want anybody to know about it. So he started to act like a mad man so as to hide his feelings. Hamlet was in love with a girl, Ophelia, the daughter of a wise courtier named Polonius. Polonius and Claudius thought Hamlet’s love for Ophelia had caused his madness. At the same time Hamlet’s mind was full of confusion: can evil undo evil? Was the ghost actually telling the truth? Too many thoughts clouded Hamlet’s mind, and he was unable to do anything.
To make sure of the truth, Hamlet arranged to stage a play before the court, including in it some scenes that looked like the murder of his father. During the scene of the poisoning, Claudius suddenly stood up and left. Now, Hamlet was sure about what had happened.
Hamlet and his mother had a bitter argument. Polonius, hiding behind the curtains was shocked to hear Hamlet’s accusations. He made a noise. Hamlet thought it was Claudius and he killed him. Soon after, Hamlet was sent away to England with two courtiers who carried a sealed letter asking the king of England to put Hamlet to death. On the way, Hamlet secretly read the letter and wrote in it the names of the two courtiers, rubbing out his own. Later, some pirates helped Hamlet to return to Denmark. On his return Hamlet was of full grief to learn that Ophelia had taken her own life. Ophelia’s brother Laertes was very angry with Hamlet.
Claudius made an evil plan to use Laertes to kill Hamlet and arranged a duel between the two. The plan was to give Laertes a poison tipped sword. If at all Hamlet won, Claudius would be ready with poisoned wine to celebrate the match. In the fight, both Hamlet and Laertes got wounded by the poisoned sword. In the meantime the queen accidentally drank from the poisoned wine and fell dead. Before his own death, Hamlet rushed at the king and stabbed him with the poisoned sword.
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There are quite a few soulful heroines in Shakespeare’s plays. Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Portia, Ophelia, Rosalind, Cordelia, and Gertrude are some of them. Who played these characters on stage?
In reality, women were forbidden to perform in plays, as it was illegal for women to appear on stage. Therefore, there were no female actors in the Elizabethan theatre. In fact, women in general considered it beneath their dignity to act in plays. Neither did their guardians allow them to do so, as it was a matter of prestige and status. Shakespeare’s women characters were played by young boys who had not developed masculine features in their faces. Boys between 13 and 19 years of age were selected to play these roles because their voices were still high, and their muscles had not fully developed.
The costumes for the female roles were very elaborate. There were many layers of clothing, and therefore, it would have taken considerable time, and the help of a dresser, to dress a boy actor in the costume of a female. The make-up used for these boy-artists was lead-based and, hence, was toxic. It was quite normal that such boys were very unhealthy. They had facial skin diseases and many died of lead poisoning! These boys were employed as apprentices; and therefore, were not paid well. In fact, they were the worst paid lot among the crew.
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Do we have all of Shakespeare’s plays? Is there any play lost to us? Many plays, which were once considered to have been written by Shakespeare, have now been discovered to be written by others. Shakespeare also has written plays in collaboration with others. A couple of his plays, however, are known to us only because they are mentioned by their name by his contemporaries and are lost. They are Love’s Labour Won and Cordenio.
Francis Meres, an English churchman and author, lists a dozen or so plays by Shakespeare in his book Palladis Tamia. One of them is Love’s Labour Won. An English book-seller, Christopher Hunt also mentions the name of this play as Shakespeare’s work. Both of them were Shakespeare’s contemporaries and knew the bard’s works. Some say that this play was a sequel to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. There is a reason for this speculation. In the play Love’s Labour Lost, the weddings that were to take place at the end of the play were delayed for a year. Maybe, Shakespeare, scholars think, had a sequel named Love’s Labour Won in mind. There is also another theory that this is the alternative name of an already existing play.
Cardenio, on the other hand, is thought to be a collaborative effort by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, another Elizabethan writer. Scholars say that this play’s plot was based on a story from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Cardenio is a young man who lives in misery and madness in Sierra Morena, a mountain range in Spain, driven there by the apparent infidelity of his beloved Lucinda and the treachery of Duke Ferdinand. Lewis Theobald, and 18th century British writer, had written a play named Double Falsehood or The Distressed Lovers. Some say that this play is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Cardenio.
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As can be easily imagined, Shakespeare’s plays were written primarily to be performed, and not to be read. Though Shakespeare authored so many plays, he never bothered about printing any of them as books. It was only after his death that his plays were compiled, and were made into respectable books. However, they were available during Shakespeare’s lifetime in the form of flimsy-looking booklets, called Quartos. Quartos were normal papers folded twice to make four pages. The people who printed these quartos did not have access to Shakespeare’s texts. Therefore, they were poorly printed, and contained many mistakes. Parts of these printed plays contained wrong passages or paraphrased texts. Some of them were adaptations. Shakespeare had not approved of them at all.
It was not common for writers to publish their works in folios. Ben Jonson defied this convention, and published a folio collection of his own plays and poems in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. Had Shakespeare’s friends not stepped in, and performed the most gracious act they could ever have done for the writer, probably, Shakespeare and his plays would have faded into oblivion! John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s close friends from the King’s Men collected 36 texts of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623, seven years after the bard’s death. This collected edition is known as the First Folio. The Second Folio appeared in 1632 and the Third Folio in 1663. Seven more plays were added to Shakespeare’s name in the Third Folio. The Fourth Folio was published in 1685 and retained all 43 plays. However, later scholars discovered that some of these plays were not, in fact, authored by Shakespeare.
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Did all the wonderful tales that Shakespeare told through his plays have their inception in Shakespeare’s brain? Did he fashion all those tales from scratch? In fact, the plots of most of his plays are borrowed from various sources. This, however, does not diminish his brilliance. The bard’s genius lies more in the fabulous way he presented those tales than his originality.
The sources of his plays with Greek and Roman themes such as Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens are Plutarch, a Greek biographer, and Ovid, a Roman poet. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, written probably in the second century, has many biographies of famous men. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, on the other hand is a series of mythical stories.
Raphael Holinshed was an English chronicler, meaning a historian, who lived in 16th century England. He undertook an ambitious project of writing the history of the world and was successful in completing only a small portion, which he published in 1577 as The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Shakespeare borrowed the themes of most of his historical plays and the plots of Macbeth, King Lear and Cymbeline from Holinshed’s Chronicles.
The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio was another major source of Shakespeare’s plays. Boccaccio was an Italian writer and poet, whose Decameron is a collection of hundred stories told by seven young women and three young men. Many of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances have been inspired from the stories of this book. He has borrowed tales from Arthur Brooke, a 16th century English poet, and Saxo Grammaticus, a 12th century Danish historian, too. Another great book that inspired Shakespeare was, certainly, the Holy Bible.
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