Surprisingly, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a remake. Its predecessor, which scholars call the Ur-Hamlet, has been lost, but contemporary accounts suggest that it must have been a corker. In 1589, Thomas Nashe, a university man, lampooned a play imitating the Latin tragedian Seneca that was written by the playwright Thomas Kyd, whose father was a scrivener or “noverint:”
THOMAS NASHE, “PREFACE” TO ROBERT GREENE, MENAPHON,(1589)
It is a common practice now a days amongst a sort of shifting companions, that run through every Art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were borne, and busy themselves with the endeavors of Art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck verse if they should have need; yet English Seneca read by Candlelight yields many good sentences, as “Blood is a beggar,” and so forth; and if you entreat him faire in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragical speeches.
In 1594 the impresario Philip Henslowe recorded the performance of a Hamlet that seems too early to have been Shakespeare’s. Two years later Thomas Lodge made fun in passing of a character who “walks for the most part in black under cover of gravity, and looks as pale as the vizard [mask] of the ghost who cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!”
These allusions to Seneca, Thomas Kyd, and the ghost calling endlessly for revenge like a woman peddling oysters up and down the street make it likely that the old Hamlet belonged to that staple genre of Elizabethan melodrama, revenge tragedy. It was probably written (Nashe thinks so) by Kyd, who wrote The Spanish Tragedy, the wildly popular revenge play with many parallels to Hamlet, including a ghost and a scene of a play-within-a-play, around the same time. But by the 1590s revenge tragedy had come to seem old-fashioned. We have already heard from Nashe on the speechifying and Lodge on the hyperactive ghost in the old Hamlet.The Induction, or dramatized introduction, to an anonymous play, A Warning for Fair Women, performed by Shakespeare’s company in 1599, reduced the whole genre to a series of stale clichés: a villain ambitious for a crown, a shrieking ghost, the stage clogged with a heap of dead bodies:
A WARNING FOR FAIR WOMEN, INDUCTION (1599)
How some damned tyrant, to obtain a crown,
Stabs, hangs, imprisons, smothers, cutteth throats,
And then a Chorus too comes howling in,
And tells us of the worrying of a cat,
Then of a filthy, whining ghost
Lapped in some foul sheet, or a leather pelch,
Comes screaming like a pig half sticked,
And cries Vindicta, revenge, revenge:
With that a little rosin flasheth forth,
Like smoke out of a Tobacco pipe, or a boy’s squib:
Then comes in two or three like to drovers,
With tailors’ bodkins, stabbing one another.
Is this not trim? Is not here goodly things?
Given the contempt into which revenge tragedy had fallen, we don’t know why Shakespeare decided to remake Hamlet around 1601. But we do know that the new company of boy actors, the “an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for ‘t,” that Hamlet takes note of (2.2.340-2), had commissioned a new play of their own based on the old Hamlet, probably John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and the eminent English critic William Empson suggests that Shakespeare was told to come up with one of his own for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. And we do have some idea of the problems Shakespeare faced in turning what was a roundly derided example of a creaky old melodramatic formula into a stage-worthy piece.
More or less built into the structure of every revenge tragedy is the problem of dilation or delay. Revenge tragedy demands that the revenger get his man; just try to imagine a revenge play without a revenge. Unlike an opera, which isn’t over until the fat lady sings, a revenge tragedy is over pretty much as soon as the revenger strikes. So the playwright’s problem is somehow to motivate a delay of five acts between the two killings, the dastardly deed and its inevitable reprisal, when everyone in the playhouse knows that is what he is up to.
That delay, as Empson points out, is what people complained about with the old Hamlet. Kyd, or whoever wrote it, wasn’t able to make his audience believe in the obstacles to his hero’s taking his revenge. They knew he was stalling, using “handfuls, of tragical speeches,” and “a ghost . . . like an oyster wife,” as filler. As Empson puts it, “You had a hero howling out ‘Revenge’ all through the play, and everybody knows the revenge wouldn’t come until the end . . . This fact about the audience . . . is the basic fact about the rewriting of Hamlet.” How was Shakespeare going to solve the problem of delay inherent in the structure of revenge tragedy?
Delay and frustration are therefore built into every revenge tragedy. Since the play ends when the revenger strikes, the revenger’s success must be put off. Dramatists motivate this structural delay in different ways: usually some kind of obstacle, often external, like determining the identity of the killer (as in a whodunit) or getting close enough to the powerful enemy to be able to kill him (how to do it) explains why it takes the revenger the whole play to get his man.
In Elizabethan revenge tragedies the obstacle is usually the monarch or strong man himself, who blocks justice by protecting the guilty party and who is often the guilty party himself. The avenging hero, we’ve seen, is always a subject, a subaltern or dependent, and the enemy who has wronged him is always a powerful prince or magistrate, who abuses the position he has inherited or usurped. Suffering from some intolerable wrong, the hero cannot appeal to the law for justice. His enemy has corrupted the very institution from which he seeks redress and wields all of the power of the state to cover up his guilt. Instead the vulnerable hero must hide what he knows and use guile to evade his enemy’s power. So the revenger does not so much act as react, biding his time until his enemy unwittingly offers him an opportunity to strike. His premeditated schemes are seldom successful, and typically he strikes on the spur of the moment.
Shakespeare avails himself of both of these strategies for motivating this structural delay, although he masterfully transforms the action of detecting the killer’s identity into one of detecting the identity of his sole eyewitness and accuser, the ghost. Is the ghost a “spirit of health” or a “goblin damned”? Shakespeare complicates the course of Hamlet’s revenge first of all by hedging the crime itself with doubts valid within the play even though the genre requires that the ghost is truthful and vengeance is achieved. The effect of these doubts is to postpone Hamlet’s certainty; only after he stages the “Mousetrap” and catches “the conscience of the king” (2.2.603) is Hamlet certain of Claudius’s guilt. Only then can Hamlet “take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound” (3.2.295-6) (although he never finds out whether the Ghost is heavenly or demonic) and begin to seek the means and opportunity to pierce the circle of soldiers and sycophants who defend the throne. InHamlet Claudius has draped himself in legitimacy, the very “divinity [that] doth hedge a king,” (4.5.125), so that Hamlet’s quest for justice looks to Claudius’s court like treasonous ambition.
Shakespeare also complicates the simple plot of revenge by setting the play in a Christian cosmos (unlike Kyd, who sets his play in Catholic Spain, all of whose inhabitants Shakespeare’s Calvinist contemporaries thought were going to hell anyway). Playing on the moral ambiguity of revenge, he is constantly reminding his audience that the good Christian renounces revenge and practices patience. He constantly raises questions about the state of the soul after death, from Hamlet’s jocular “would I had met my dearest foe in heaven” (1.2.182) to the “maimed rites” held for Ophelia, thought dead by her own hand. By contrasting Hamlet with Laertes, his alter ego as a revenger of a dead father, who declares:
To hell allegiance! Vows to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation. (4.5.133-5)
Shakespeare struggles to reconcile the revenger’s task with the Christian’s pilgrimage to salvation. How, his Hamlet asks, can “flights of angels sing” a revenger, a man of blood, “to [his] rest” (5.2.354)? He makes his hero a man of conscience, a philosopher from Luther’s university painfully aware of “the Almighty’s canon against [all] slaughter,” of both the Biblical injunction to leave vengeance to the Lord and of the way that heaven makes men its “scourge and minister.” And in motivating his Hamlet’s delay Shakespeare draws on several contemporary debates—about the nature of ghosts, divine wrath, and divine providence—that turned a hoary old melodrama into what must have been for his audience a sparkling drama of ideas as well as gripping murder mystery.