Fortinbras and Hamlet1

Hamlet is a young man whose father, the King, was murdered by his uncle, who thereupon married Hamlet's mother and succeeded to the throne. Laertes is a young man whose father was murdered by Hamlet; Fortinbras, a young man whose father has been slain in a duel by Hamlet's father and whose uncle has then succeeded to the throne. Gertrude is a woman whose husband was killed by her brother-in-law, whom she then married; Ophelia, a young woman whose father is killed by her lover, and who has “gone to pieces” under the impact of that event. In short, all the chief characters in the play, with the exception of Fortinbras, die violent deaths.

Any notion, however, that all this is due solely to the fact that Shakespeare stuck closely to the traditional account as set forth in the Ur-Hamlet, and that it has no meaning other than what appears in the manifest action, leaves so much of the play unexplained that, to my way of thinking, it is wholly unacceptable.

The Fortinbras story does not appear in the Ur-Hamlet, except for the dying Hamlet's request that Horatio “bring the crown to Norway for my cousin Duke Fortinbras so the kingdom will not fall into other hands” (V. 6). One could consider the idea that the story in the Ur-Hamlet was tailored to a German audience, which was not familiar with the tradition, and that the Fortinbras aspect could easily have been deleted, if only to give the play a more suitable length. On the other hand, the Ur-Hamlet is richer by one character than either Quartos or Folio. This is the court fool Phantasmo, who actually plays a leading role in the earlier version, in that Ophelia, following her rejection by Hamlet, falls in love with Phantasmo in her madness. He is stabbed to death by Hamlet after he confesses that it was he who brought the goblet from which the Queen drank. Parts that are given in Shakespeare's text to Polonius and Osric were assigned in the Ur-Hamlet to Phantasmo.