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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Julie Maxwell
Julie Maxwell*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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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.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , Summer 2004 , pp. 518 - 560
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I am very grateful for the comments of A.D. Nuttall, Peter McCullough, A.R. Braunmuller, the anonymous RQ reader, Paul F. Grendler, Marius Maxwell, and those present at my delivery of this paper to the Early Modern Literature Graduate Seminar in Oxford of 28 April 2003. Bruno Currie graciously supplied the translation from Johannes Magnus. This research was undertaken during the tenure of a Senior Scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford, and an Arts and Humanities Research Board Studentship, UK.

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