Counter-Reformation Versions of Saxo: A New Source for "Hamlet?"

Julie Maxwell

12 citations0/0 files storedRenaissance Quarterly

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Renaissance Literature and Culture Medieval Literature and History Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Abstract

It has always been assumed that either Shakespeare or the author of the Ur-Hamlet was the first to introduce controversial religious allusions to the pre-Christian setting of Saxo's Amleth saga. But this article seeks to relocate the legend in the competing confessional narratives to which it belonged in mid-sixteenth-century Europe. A new link between Saxo, Belleforest, and Shakespeare's versions of the story is identified in the ethnographic histories of Johannes and Olaus Magnus of Sweden. The overlooked Historia Olai Magni (1567) is proposed as the source of local details (like the "sledded Polacks ") in Hamlet.

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1998The First Quarto of Hamlet 1996The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare 1994Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton 1991The Renaissance of the Goths in Sixteenth-Century Sweden

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2017From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage 2014"I Lack Advancement": Public Rhetoric, Private Prudence, and the Political Agent in Hamlet , 1561-1609

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