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You must think, that by my title, I have gone beyond even chutzpah to downright blasphemy. Chutzpah, that would be like the sign I used to pass on the old Yiddish theatre in New York when I was a boy. In big letters, Hamlet. In smaller letters, By William Shakespeare. And in the biggest letters of all, Translated and Improved by Moishe Schwartz. But I'm going even farther than the great Moishe Schwartz. I'm claiming I don't just improve Hamlet, I create it. And I fully expect Shakespeare to hurl down, from whatever Elysium he now inhabits, a sonnet shattering me into fourteen pieces where I stand.
Before he does that, I would like to explain what I mean. We used to say purely and simply that Shakespeare created the tragedy Hamlet. That is, he wrote down certain words which contained certain ideas, characters, themes, and even unconscious fantasies and defense mechanisms. That is what we mean when we say a text has a certain “content”—the text is a container. This is Hamlet as cocktail shaker into which Shakespeare has poured a lovely, cool, exhilarating, and slightly befuddling content.
But if Shakespeare put a certain content into the play, what content did he put in? If he created Hamlet, which Hamlet did he create? In the three and three-quarters centuries since the play was first produced, we have seen at least three very different versions of the hero and therefore of the play. So far as we can tell, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, closest to Shakespeare himself, thought of Hamlet as a young man of great expectation,