Virtual Grub Street: Reader Beware: Hamlet and its Sources.

Several recent posts at highly reputed Shakespeare sites have recently surprised me. I, like so many, go to these sites from time to time with the understanding that the content on them is trustworthy.

One of the sites is Shakespeare and Beyond: the blog of the Folger Shakespeare Library. It is designed for a general readership so I do not expect it to be closely written or researched. But I am sure that the Folger likes to think that it is careful not to mislead.

So then, it is surprising that two recent posts contain statements of supposed fact that are incorrect. The post I intend to address, here, is a review of a movie adapted from Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum.[1] The review appears in the Folger blog by virtue of the fact that Francois Belleforest’s 16^th century translation of the Amleth tale from the Gesta Danorum is widely accepted as a major source of the plot of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

In my recent book Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589[2] I have described the relationship between Francois Belleforest’s Amleth and Shakespeare’s Hamlet at sufficient length to sketch out Shakespeare’s use of the French text. Belleforest’s tale is a close translation of Saxo Grammaticus’s.

Shakespeare relied upon Belleforest’s translation series Histoires Tragiques on several occasions. There is no particular textual reason, of which I am aware, to think he bypassed the Frenchman to go to the original Latin. Still, he could have been familiar with it.

Austin Tichenor’s review of Robert Eggers’s movie Amleth may compare it to the original Latin text. There is no way to be sure on the face of it. If so, the name of the character is Amlethus in Grammaticus’s educated Latin. It is in Belleforest that the name has been vulgarized to Amleth. If there was a single original Icelandic tale, the name of the character in the original would have been Amlóði. But no such tale is extant or referenced elsewhere in medieval literature.

This might seem too scholarly for a general audience but it would clarify (perhaps to the Tichenor himself) just what he means when he writes:

Eggers goes back to the same source Shakespeare used — the legend of Amleth as it appears in The History of the Danes by medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus — and his film provides fascinating points of comparison to Shakespeare’s treatment of the same material.

To be sure, Tichenor is writing for a general audience. But the Folger Library might be expected to call on their guest author to be more precise.

Matters only get worse if we consider the review to be worth getting right. Now that the reader is informed that the movie takes its story from the original Gesta Danorum of Grammaticus, they are further informed that Amleth

must be reminded to fulfill his sworn vow by Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), this version’s analogue for Ophelia.

It is difficult to imagine to what version of Amleth “this version” could refer. As I have pointed out in my Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff, there is no Ophelia for Olga to be an analogue of in any Hamlet/Amleth except Shakespeare’s. Neither in Grammaticus nor Belleforest.

Shakespeare found the seeds of Ophelia in a scene in Belleforest. In it King Fegon (the original of Claudius in Hamlet) plans to reveal that Amleth’s madness is feigned by placing a beautiful woman in his way. As the scheme is hatched, a beautiful noble Lady, who had grown up together with Amleth, warns him of the plan. Both young women are the seeds of the two aspects of the playwright’s Ophelia. The development of these aspects follows the lines of a particular Commedia Dell’ Arte play. As for her name, it came from a poem by the Italian poet Jacopo Sannazaro who was highly popular among English poets of Shakespeare’s time.

So then, Tichenor goes on, “Ophelia dies tragically, whereas Olga gets a liberating, hopeful future”, even though there is no Ophelia in the Gesta Danorum, or in Belleforest’s translation, and no woman of any name who dies tragically. Neither the name nor the subplot appear until Shakespeare’s play.

What can be said for the Folger post is that it is not so poorly done as the University of Victoria’s “Hamlet: Sources and Analogues”[3] introductory page for the Belleforest Amleth. The immediate source of the author’s text is a 2013 volume entitled The Norse Hamlet (Sources of Shakespeare)[4] which offers a 17^th century English translation from Belleforest’s French that inserted additional touches the translator liked from Shakespeare’s play. In this way, Belleforest’s translation appears under the title The History of Hamlet. Neither the undergraduate (I presume) who has written the web page introduction for this French work nor the author of the book presenting it has bothered with the French original.

The student informs the reader that, in Belleforest “The murdered Horvendil's ghost or shade makes an appearance on the battlements to his son, as in Shakespeare.” Not only is this wrong of Belleforest but it is not one of the items inserted into the English translation either. Perhaps the scene has been collated into The Norse Hamlet but it hardly seems worthwhile to buy it in order to find out.

Elsewhere in the page, almost all of the information is carefully vague such that it cannot demonstrably be either right or wrong. No specifics from the French original are indulged.

The generalities tell us more about the qualifications of the author of the page than anything. “Belleforest's version” we are informed

is longer than is Saxo's, providing ample room for psychological insights and moralizations.

For all that observations on the column length of each text had surely seemed safe, and valid, however much the writer couldn’t read the texts, both versions of the tale have the same number of incidents. As for word count, Latin employs declensions as well as conjugations, and, therefore, almost always uses fewer words in its descriptions than languages using only limited such constructions.

The moralizations, we are informed, are due to Belleforest writing from a Christian perspective. To our best knowledge, the 12^th century Grammaticus was a far more observant Christian than the 16^th century libertine poet however much the former just stuck to telling the tale. The difference is one of era rather than creed.

[1] Tichenor, Austin. “Bothered by madness: ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Northman’” Shakespeare and Beyond. May 22, 2022. https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2022/05/27/hamlet-the-northman-amleth-madness/

[2] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (2022). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WC94FGW

[3] “François de Belleforest, Histoires Tragiques.” Internet Shakespeare Editions. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/m/doc/Ham_Sources/section/Fran%C3%A7ois%20de%20Belleforest,%20Histoires%20Tragiques/

[4] Filipski, Soren. The Norse Hamlet (Sources of Shakespeare)(2013).