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PAGE 103
EXPLANATION OF HAMLET'S MYSTERY
feeling finds its spontaneous expression, without any inquiry
being possible on his part as to the essential nature or source.
of that feeling.
This conclusion is amply supported by a historical study
of the external circumstances of the play. It is well known
that Shakespeare took not only the skeleton but also a sur-
prising amount of detail from earlier writings.1 It is probable
that he had read both the original saga as told early in the
thirteenth century by Saxo Grammaticus, and the translation
and modification of this published by Belleforest.2 For at
least a dozen years before Shakspere wrote Hamlet a play of
the same name was extant in England, which modern evi-
dence3 has clearly shewn to have been written by Thomas
Kyd. Ruder accounts of the story, of Irish and Norse origin,
were probably still more widely spread in England, and the
name Hamlet itself, or some modification of it, was very com-
mon in the Stratford district;4 as is well known, Shakspere
in 1585 christened his own son Hamnet, a frequent variation
of the name. Thus the plot of the tragedy must have been
present in his mind for some years before it actually took form
as a play. In all probability this was in the winter of 1601-2,
for the play was registered on July 26, 1602, and the first,
piratical, edition appeared in quarto in 1603. Highly sugges-
tive, therefore, of the subjective origin of the psychical con-
flict in the play is the fact that it was in September, 1601, that
Shakspere's father died, an event which might well have
had the same awakening effect on old "repressed" memories
that the death of Hamlet's father had with Hamlet; his
mother lived till some seven years later. There are many in-
dications that the disposition of Shakspere's father was of
that masterful and authoritative kind so apt to provoke rebel-
lion, particularly in a first-born son.
1No doubt much detail was also introduced by Shakspere from
personal experience. For instance there is much evidence to shew
that in painting the character of Hamlet he had in mind some of his
contemporaries, notably William Herbert, later Lord Pembroke,
(Döring, Hamlet, 1898, S. 35) and Robert Essex (Isaac, Hamlet's
Familie. Shakespeare's Jahrbuch, Bd. XVI, S. 274). The repeated
allusion to the danger of Ophelia's conceiving illegitimately may
be connected with both Herbert, who was imprisoned for being the
father of an illegitimate child, and the poet himself, who hastily
married in order to avoid the same stigma.
2Belleforest: Histoires tragiques, T. V., 1564. This translation
was made from the Italian of Bandello.
3See Fleay: Chronicle of the English Drama, 1891; Sarrazin:
Thomas Kyd und sein Kreis, 1892; and Corbin: The Elizabethan
Hamlet, 1895.
4Elton: William Shakespeare. His Family and Friends, 1904
p. 223.
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