Abstract
Why does Hamlet have prequels and sequels? Is it unusual in inviting readers, and more especially writers, to speculate about what might have happened both before and after the events of the play? I’ll begin by citing a few moments in the text that have proved particularly inviting. First, the closet scene: Hamlet, in reply to Gertrude’s calling the murder of Polonius ‘a bloody deed’, says ‘A bloody deed? Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king and marry with his brother’, to which she replies ‘As kill a king’, and he says ‘Ay lady it was my word’ (3.4.25–8).2 The tone of Gertrude’s response is not indicated by punctuation, such as a question mark or an exclamation mark, in either of the ‘good’ texts, the Second Quarto and the First Folio, and the topic is not pursued. Interestingly, in the so-called ‘bad’ First Quarto, the Queen asks for an explanation: ‘Hamlet, what mean’st thou by these killing words?’ and goes on to deny the accusation: ‘But, as I have a soul, I swear by heaven, / I never knew of this most horrid murder’. It would seem that whoever compiled this text felt the need for a clarification of this important point, and many others have followed, arguing the case both for and against Gertrude with enthusiasm and ingenuity.3
This chapter builds on an earlier version published as ‘The New Wing at Elsinore, The Redemption of the Hamlets and other Sequels, Prequels and Off-shoots of Hamlet,’ in Renaissance Refractions: Essays in Honour of Alexander Shurbanov, ed. Boika Sokolova and Evgenia Pancheva (Sofia, Bulgaria: St Kliment Ohridski Press, 2001), 217–29.
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Notes
Quotations from Hamlet are from the Arden version of all three texts edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 2 vols.
Early twentieth-century examples, typically arguing for the Queen’s innocence, would include ‘The Frailty Whose Name Was Gertrude’ in The True Ophelia: And Other Studies of Shakespeare’s Women published anonymously by ‘An Actress’ (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1913); and Lillie Buffum Chase Wyman’s Gertrude of Denmark (Boston, MA: Marshall Jones, 1924).
See Rayner Heppenstall and Michael Innes, Three Tales of Hamlet (London: Gollancz, 1950), 75–89.
Margaret Atwood, Good Bones (London: Virago, 1992).
Originally published in book form in London by W. H. Smith and Son, 1852; reprinted in New York by AMS Press, 1974. For further discussion of Mary Cowden Clarke and some extracts from her work, see Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, eds, Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 81–103.
John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
It is interesting to note that Ophelia has made something of a comeback in recent teenage novels with titles like Dating Hamlet where she is a much more feisty character, capable of saving herself and her prince from the corruptions of the Danish court: Dating Hamlet by Lisa Fiedler (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). See also two similar novels, both called simply Ophelia, by Jeremy Trafford (Thirsk, Yorkshire: House of Stratus, 2001) and Lisa Klein (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).
Percy MacKaye, The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark, or What We Will: A Tetralogy in Prologue to Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ (New York: Bond Wheelwright, 1950).
Percy MacKaye, Caliban by the Yellow Sands (New York: Doubleday, 1916).
See Diane Alexander, Playhouse (Los Angeles, CA: Dorleac-MacLeish, 1984), 107.
Ibid., 106–8.
Helena Faucit, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters: By One Who Has Personated Them (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1885).
See Neil Taylor’s chapter ‘An actress prepares: Seven Ophelias’, in The Afterlife of Ophelia, ed. Deanne Williams and Kaara L. Peterson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) on how seven modern performers were encouraged to prepare for the role of Ophelia by imagining her life before the play.
Graham Holderness, The Prince of Denmark (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002).
Denton Jaques Snider, The Redemption of the Hamlets (St Louis, MO: Mound City Press, 1923).
Denton Jaques Snider, The Shakespeariad (St Louis, MO: Sigma Publishing, 1916).
Much more recently, of course, Janet Adelman has taken a very different line on this topic in her book Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).
See James M. Gibson, The Philadelphia Shakespeare Story (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 139–44, and The Letters of Horace Howard Furness, ed. Horace Howard Furness Jr. (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 198–21, 218.
Published in Rayner Heppenstall and Michael Innes, Three Tales of Hamlet (London: Gollancz, 1950), 17–73.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber, 1967).
Edited in book form by Herbert Farjeon and published as Dramatic Sequels (London: Martin Secker, 1925).
Alexander Welsh, Hamlet in his Modern Guises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Martin Scofield, The Ghosts of ‘Hamlet’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
See William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), Appendix 5, 553–65.
Alex Newell, ‘The etiology of Horatio’s inconsistencies,’ in ‘Bad’ Shakespeare: Revaluations in the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), 143–56.
Marion L. Wilson, The Tragedy of Hamlet told by Horatio (Enschede, The Netherlands: M. L. Wilson, 1956).
Alethea Hayter, Horatio’s Version (London: Faber & Faber, 1972).
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Thompson, A. (2013). Hamlet: Looking Before and After: Why So Many Prequels and Sequels?. In: Brown, S.A., Lublin, R.I., McCulloch, L. (eds) Reinventing the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319401_2
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