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The Ur-Hamlet is the name given to a play, now lost, that apparently was extant before 1589, a decade before Shakespeare wrote his own Hamlet.

In 1589 Thomas Nashe implies the existence of such a play in his introduction to Robert Greene's Menaphon:

English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences, as Blood is a begger, and so forth; and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.^[1]

There is a record of a performance of Hamlet in 1594 in Philip Henslowe's diary and in 1596 Thomas Lodge wrote of "the ghost which cried so miserably at the theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!"^[2]

Nashe makes allusions to Thomas Kyd in the same passage and because of this and disputed similarities between the Shakespearean Hamlet and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, it is often posited that Kyd was the author of the Ur-Hamlet.^[3] However, with the absence of a copy of the play making stylistic and linguistic comparison impossible, there is no direct evidence of this.

How much of the Ur-Hamlet, regardless of who its author was, survives or is utilised in the Shakespeare play? Perhaps Shakespeare ignored the play, using earlier versions of the "Amleth" (or "Hamblet") legend to put together the story (see Sources for Hamlet), in the course of it inventing the ghost and much else. But the surviving references to the ur-Hamlet suggest it was well-known, at least to London writers such as Nashe and Lodge — and presumably to their fellow playwright Shakespeare. So it is likely that he used the contemporary play, perhaps in great detail, and took what else he needed from available versions of the old legend. He worked that way in other plays (most notably, Henry IV, Part 1, where he used Holinshed as well as an extant play).

A few orthodox Shakespeareans, including Harold Bloom, have accepted Peter Alexander's case that Shakespeare himself was the author of the Ur-Hamlet, and that the later play is a reworking by the author of one of his own earliest works.^[4] Harold Jenkins, a well-respected editor of the play,^[5] dismisses this assertion as groundless.^[6][7]

1. ^ Nashe quoted in Jenkins, p.83
2. ^ Jenkins, p.83
3. ^ Jenkins, p.83-4
4. ^ Bloom, pp. xiii, 383
5. ^ "All students of Hamlet are in debt to Harold Jenkins for the results of his patient and exacting research." — Edwards, p. ix
6. ^ Jenkins, p. 84, note 4
7. ^ As Bloom is basing his opinion on the 1964 Alexander's Introduction to Shakespeare there is no reason to assume post-1982 (the year of Jenkins's book) scholarship has changed the terms of the argument.

• Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York, 1998.
• Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Philip Edwards, ed. Cambridge, 2003. Original Edition 1985. (New Cambridge Shakespeare)
• Hamlet, Harold Jenkins, ed. Methuen & Co., 1982. (The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series)