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The Historical Hamlet
(Warning: I'm a lit geek. I'm also a history geek. When these two forces combine, I am Captain Planet! I get really geeky. You might want to skip down to the next section.)
[Cut this section out as an optional backdated post]
It's a fairly well-known fact that Shakespeare took the stories from other sources for his plays, and this one is no exception. In the case of the Tragedy of Hamlet, however, there's a few more layers to the borrowing than usual.
There's a number of scholars who believe that the original Prince Hamlet was a real person, a 7th century Viking prince named Amlóði, who lived in the northern part of the Danish peninsula known as Jutland. It's thought that the historical story of Amlóði was first written down in an Old Norse document known as the Skjöldunga Saga (The Saga of the Scyldings), which has since been lost to the ages, except for a short summary in Latin. This saga supposedly had the entire history of the rulers of the Scylding family, to whom Amlóði was related. (You may have heard of the Scyldings before - the Old English hero Beowulf was also a member of this family.) As it currently stands, all we still have today are mentions of Amlóði in other Old Norse sagas, and a couple carvings in Scandinavia that mention his name.
The first full version of the story that's still around today is a Latin version written by a 13th century Danish monk named Saxo Grammaticus, probably using a copy of the Skjöldunga Saga. Saxo was an ambitious guy, who wrote a 16 volume series all about the early history and mythical history of Denmark and its rulers known as the Gesta Danorum (The Deeds of the Danes). At the end of Book III and the beginning of Book IV of this series, Saxo tells the story of the life and actions of Amlethus, a viking prince of Jutland whose uncle murdered his father and married his mother. (Sound familiar?) Although the basics of the plot are the same, there's quite a few differences between Saxo's version and Shakespeare. For starters, all the characters have good Viking names: the dead king is named Horwendil, the unfaithful queen named Gerutha, the evil uncle named Feng. There are no ghosts or other supernatural elements, although there's still a whole lot of killin'. Amlethus pretends to be crazy to save his own skin due an old Viking belief that killing a crazy person made you crazy too. Amlethus gets way more sex than Hamlet does. There's a whole bunch of adventures that take place in England. Near the end of the story, not only does Amlethus successfully pull off his revenge scheme, he does it with style. After escaping certain doom in England and marrying a pair of hot British princesses, Amlethus returns home to Denmark, where (still pretending to be crazy) he gets all of his uncle's guards completely wasted on alcohol, ties them all up, stabs his uncle through the heart with his sword, and then sets fire to the hall where they all are. He then goes on to live a nice long life, and dies a warrior's death in battle by being slain by a strong enemy.
That would sure be a different ending to the play, wouldn't it? ^-^
In the early 1500s, an Italian bishop named Matteo Bandello wrote a very large collection of tales, which included an adaptation of Saxo's story. In the 1560s, a writer named François de Belleforest took a number of Bandello's stories (including his Hamlet tale and the original version of Romeo and Juliet) and published them in a very popular French translation titled Histoires Tragiques (Tragic Stories). Belleforest's version toned down a lot of the sex and violence from Saxo's version, but added a ghost into the story. The Amleth in this version of the story still manages to kill his uncle and become king, although he only married one hot British princess. There's also a lot of boring details added like a whole rant about Rome and some long winded discussion about morality which would be entertaining for an Elizabethan reader, but really, really boring for modern audiences.
Belleforest's book was only translated into English in 1608 as The Hystorie of Hamblet, a few years after the famous play came out, but French editions would have been pretty easy to come by in England for years before that.. There's also a couple mentions of an earlier play adaption of Hamlet that would have been on English stages in the 1590s, which is called Ur-Hamlet by scholars, but there's not enough evidence left over from then to say who it was by, only that it was a pretty bad production.
And then in 1604, William Shakespeare and his troupe at the Globe Theatre put on their version of the play, which is the one that everyone has known and talked about for the last 400 years. Shakespeare's take on the play is the only one with a "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending.