When and for Whom the Play Was Written
William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600 for the acting company he was a shareholder in, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which had just opened the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames, in London. The first Hamlet was Richard Burbage, the company's leading actor, and an old tradition says that Shakespeare himself played the Ghost. The audience was mixed: apprentices and tradesmen standing before the stage, wealthier people in the galleries. There was room for all these audiences: the play alternates the verse of kings with the prose of gravediggers and Hamlet's jokes.
England was also worried about the succession. Queen Elizabeth I, who had reigned since 1558, was old, had no children, and named no heir; she died in 1603. A play about a throne passing from a dead brother to a living brother, and not to a son, spoke to a fear of the moment. In scene 2 of Act V, Hamlet says that Claudius slipped in between the election and his own hopes: the monarchy of Denmark was in fact elective, and the prince did not inherit the crown automatically.
Where the Story Came From
The plot is old. Around 1200, the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus told the story of Amleth, a prince who feigns madness to avenge his father, killed by the uncle who married his mother. In the sixteenth century, the Frenchman François de Belleforest retold the story in a collection of tragic tales. Before Shakespeare's play, London had already seen another Hamlet, now lost, in which a ghost cried "Hamlet, revenge!", according to a contemporary recollection.
The genre already existed too: the revenge tragedy, popular since The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, in the 1580s. The audience knew the rules: a ghost calling for vengeance, feigned madness, a play staged within the play, and an ending with nearly everyone dead. Hamlet uses all these elements, but places at the center what the genre usually skipped: the doubt of the one who must avenge. That is why the hero delays, and the audience, expecting action, hears a man thinking.
The religion of a changing kingdom
Shakespeare's England had broken with Rome a little over sixty years earlier, and the Church of England denied purgatory, which Catholic faith teaches. When the Ghost says, in scene 5 of Act I, that he is condemned for a time to burn until the crimes of his life are purged, because he died without the last sacraments, he speaks the language of a doctrine the audience had learned to reject. At the same time, Hamlet and Horatio study at Wittenberg, the university where Luther began the Reformation, in 1517. The prince's doubt about whether the ghost is his father or a demon carried, for that audience, a real religious weight.
Three texts for one play
Hamlet has reached us in three early versions: a short edition from 1603, called the First Quarto; a much longer one from 1604, the Second Quarto; and the First Folio, the volume of collected plays that two of Shakespeare's colleagues published in 1623, seven years after his death. The three differ at hundreds of points, and some passages exist in only one of them, such as the comment about the companies of boy actors who competed for London's audiences, in scene 2 of Act II. The texts read today combine these versions. Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare's plays: performed in full, it runs over four hours.