Did You Know?
Shakespeare’s
wife, Anne Hathaway, gave birth to twins named Judith and Hamnet in 1585, when
Shakespeare was a mere twenty-one years old.
Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died tragically at the age of eleven in
1596. It is quite possible that
Shakespeare had his son’s name in mind when writing this most famous of his
tragedies.
There
is significant historical evidence to suggest that an earlier version of Hamlet
existed, most likely written in the early 1590s, although there are no extant
copies of the text. Many scholars
speculate that this Ur-Hamlet was authored by Thomas Kyd, an important
Elizabethan dramatist who penned revenge tragedies. One of them, The Spanish Tragedy, was immensely
popular in the decade following the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) and
served as a prototype for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Ghosts figure prominently in both dramas, as do plays within plays, and
the main character in each studies to seem the thing he is not.
However, other critics – most notably Harold Bloom of Yale University
– have made a case for the young Shakespeare as author of the Ur-Hamlet.
It is thought then that the more mature Shakespeare resumed work on Hamlet
at the height of his intellectual prowess, at the turn of the seventeenth
century, producing the masterpiece we know today.
