In the character of Hamlet, Shakespeare has created one of the great literary punching bags of all time. Critics seem to take great joy in attacking Hamlet's courage, his conviction, and (most of all) his apparent lack of action. Every critic worth his salt has an opinion about the Danish prince. It might serve, then, to examine where Shakespeare himself first found the suggestion for the character of Hamlet.

It is commonly agreed that Shakespeare's primary source material for Hamlet was an earlier tragedy, probably penned by Thomas Kyd, which has come to be known as the Ur-Hamlet. Although there are clear records of the production of the Ur-Hamlet as early as 1589, the play itself has unfortunately been lost. Still, from contemporary references, it is clear that Shakespeare's version owes much to the earlier play, leading some critics to suggest that Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's Men, may have purchased the play from Kyd for performances and later given the play to Shakespeare who seems to have revised it substantially, possibly over a period of many years. Although this entire scenario is conjecture, there is clearly some connection between the two plays, even if the exact nature of the connection cannot be determined. How much material still survives from the earlier play in Shakespeare's version, we do not know. However, we do know that both tragedies were influenced by pre-existing versions of the story.

Hamlet's tale most likely originated as an oral folk tale, passed down from generation to generation by storytellers in Denmark and Scandinavia. The tale made its way into written form through the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, an anonymous Scandinavian legend that tells of a murdered king whose two surviving sons take fake names (one of them "Ham") in order to avoid their father's fate and hopefully avenge him. A similar story, the Roman legend of Brutus, is also an incarnation of the Hamlet tale. In this particular incarnation, the hero feigns madness and eventually avenges his murdered father and brothers by killing the king who took their lives. Both of these stories seem to have passed plot elements on to Vita Amlethi, a medieval tale by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish historian. This tale, in turn, seems to have passed numerous plot elements on to Shakespeare's Hamlet including Hamlet's plotting of revenge against his uncle (the current king) for the murder of his father (the former king), the feigning of Hamlet's madness, the murder of one of the king's spies (Polonius) in his mother's bedroom, and Hamlet's banishment to England along with two of the king's loyalists whose deaths Hamlet substitutes for his own.

François de Belleforest translated the Vita Amlethi into French in 1570, and in so doing put his own imprint on the story, emphasizing the prince's melancholic nature and substantially lengthening the story in the process.

If the Ur-Hamlet had survived, it might be possible for scholars to compare the two texts and determine what debt Shakespeare's Hamlet owes to the earlier play. Unfortunately, in its absence, it is almost impossible to determine how much of the plot and story elements come from Kyd's version of the story and how much comes from the versions of Grammaticus and Belleforest. It is fairly certain that a few plot elements are Shakespeare's creation alone, including the characters of Laertes and Fortinbras, the testing of the king through the players reenactment of the murder, and Hamlet's own tragic demise at the end of the play after he has finally enacted his revenge. Even this, however, cannot be certain. Still, as William J. Rolfe once wrote of one of Shakespeare's other famous tragedies, Hamlet "owes to Shakespeare only its dramatic form and its poetic decoration. But what an exception is the latter! It is to say that the earth owes to the sun only its verdure and its flowers, the air only its perfume and its balm, the heavens only their azure and their glow."

Baudelaire Jones is a the author of Dialogues of the Dead. For further reading on the subject of Hamlet, he suggests Hamlet, and Hamlet Quotes.