Hamlet | Historical Background
There is general agreement about the sources for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. About 400 years prior to the Elizabethan version, Saxo Grammaticus told a similar tale in his Historia Danica (c. 1200). About 15 years before Shakespeare’s version, François de Belleforest adopted the essential story in his Histoires Tragiques (1576), a popular collection of tales in French. Both of these sources survive as literary manuscripts.
However, most critics believe that another source, the so-called Ur-Hamlet, is the version most directly responsible for many of the...
[The entire page is 787 words long]
Join eNotes
The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:
Summary and Analysis – Themes – Characters – And much more...
