Why has this one tragedy become the archetypal Shakespeare play in modern times? Although Hamlet met with success when it was first performed, it was rarely regarded as Shakespeare's most note-worthy play in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many readers found it deeply flawed: as Abraham Wright put it in the 1630s, Hamlet was “an indifferent play, the lines but mean”. The story of death and intrigue at the Danish court was not new – as with nearly all of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet was adapted from other sources. The Norse folk tale of Amleth – recorded by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (c.1200), the French writer Belleforest in Histoires tragiques (1559-80), and in an anonymous play (now lost

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Published 30 June 2002

Citation: Roberts, Sasha. "Hamlet". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 June 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4833, accessed 9 February 2010.]