Shakespeare's play was entered in the Stationers' Register on the 26th of July 1602, under the title "A booke called 'the Revenge of Hamlett Prince [of] Denmarke' as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantes."
That it made an instant success on the stage is almost proved by the fact that so early as the 7th of July the opposition manager Henslow pays Chettle twenty shillings for "The Danish Tragedy," evidently a furbishing up of the old play.
The publication of Shakespeare's Hamlet, however, did not take place till 1603. Then appeared the First Quarto, indubitably a pirated edition, either founded entirely on shorthand notes, or on shorthand notes eked out by aid of the actors' parts, and completed, in certain passages, from memory. Although this edition certainly contains a debased and corrupt text, it is impossible to attribute to the misunderstandings or oversights of a copyist or stenographer all its divergences from the carefully-printed quarto of the following year, which is practically identical with the First Folio text. The differences are so great as to exclude such a theory. We have evidently before us Shakespeare's first sketch of the play, although in a very defective form; and, as far as we can see, this first sketch keeps considerably closer than the definitive text to the old Hamlet drama, on which Shakespeare based his play. Here and there, though with considerable uncertainty, we can even trace scenes from the old play among Shakespeare's, and touches of its style mingling with his. It is very significant, also, that there are more rhymes in the First than in the Second Quarto.
The most remarkable feature in the 1603 edition is a scene between Horatio and the Queen in which he tells her of the King's frustrated scheme for having Hamlet murdered in England. The object of this scene is to absolve the Queen from complicity in the King's crime; a purpose which can also be traced in other passages of this first edition, and which seems to be a survival from the older drama. So far as we can gather, Horatio appears to have played an altogether more prominent part in the old play; Hamlet's madness appears to have been wilder; and Polonius probably bore the name of Corambis, which is prefixed to his speeches in the edition of 1603. Finally, as we have seen, Shakespeare took the important character of the Ghost, not indicated in either the legend or the novel, from this earlier Hamlet tragedy. The theory that it is the original of the German tragedy, Der bestrafte Brudermord, published by Cohn, from a manuscript of 1710, is unsupported by evidence.
Looking backward through the dramatic literature of England, we find that the author of the old Hamlet drama in all probability sought inspiration in his turn in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. It appears from allusions in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and Bartholomew Fair that this play must have been written about 1584. It was one of the most popular plays of its day with the theatre-going public. So late as 1632, Prynne in his Histriomastix speaks of a woman who, on her death-bed, instead of seeking the consolations of religion, cried out: "Hieronimo, Hieronimo! O let me see Hieronimo acted!"
The tragedy opens, after the fashion of its models in Seneca, with the apparition of the murdered man's ghost, and his demand for vengeance. Thus the Ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet is lineally descended from the spirit of Tantalus in Seneca's Thyestes, and from the spirit of Thyestes in Seneca's Agamemnon. Hieronimo, who has been driven mad by sorrow for the loss of his son, speaking to the villain of the piece, gives half-ironical, half-crazy expression to the anguish that is torturing him:—
"Lorenzo. Why so, Hieronimo? use me.
Hieronimo. Who? you my lord?
I reserve your favour for a greater honour:
This is a very toy, my lord, a toy.
Lor. All's one, Hieronimo, acquaint me with it.
Hier. I' faith, my lord, 'tis an idle thing ...
The murder of a son, or so—
A thing of nothing, my lord!"
These phrases foreshadow Hamlet's speeches to the King. But Hieronimo is really mad, although he speaks of his madness much as Hamlet does, or rather denies it point-blank—
"Villain, thou liest, and thou dost naught
But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad.
I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques;
I'll prove it to thee; and were I mad, how could I?"
Here and there, especially in Ben Jonson's additions, we come across speeches which lie very close to passages in Hamlet. A painter, who also has lost his son, says to Hieronimo: "Ay, sir, no man did hold a son so dear;" whereupon he answers—