Key Takeaways:
- A lost play known as the “Ur-Hamlet” may have existed before Shakespeare’s famous version.
- Debate continues over whether Thomas Kyd—or Shakespeare himself—wrote this earlier play.
- The mystery of the Ur-Hamlet shapes our modern understanding of how Hamlet evolved.
Arguably the most influential work of theatre in the Western canon, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet has inspired countless works across multiple mediums since debuting between 1600 and 1601. Allusions to the vengeful Danish prince and visitations from a ghost influence literary works from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to James Joyce’s Ulysses to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest; and without Hamlet, we wouldn’t have The Lion King.
Now, the 2025 film Hamnet, which explores Shakespeare’s family life after the death of his young son, Hamnet, has reignited interest in how the real history behind the Bard’s world shaped the creation of Hamlet.
But if it might seem all roads lead back to Hamlet, that doesn’t mean Shakespeare’s play is the first work in this literary lineage.
Part of Biography.com’s special coverage of Hamnet, exploring how the 2025 film reimagines Shakespeare’s family, grief, and the world that shaped his work.
The Mystery of the Lost “Ur-Hamlet”: Was There a Hamlet Before Hamlet?
Hamnet’s focus on Shakespeare’s private life has also renewed curiosity about how early versions of Hamlet may have taken shape, including whether a lost “Ur-Hamlet” preceded the play we know.
Many scholars believe there was a Hamlet before Hamlet, a play they refer to as the Ur-Hamlet (Ur- is a German prefix indicating “the original”). How much this Ur- text resembles the much-acclaimed Shakespeare is unknown, as the script is lost to time, leaving scholars to infer not just the possible content, but what hand held the pen that wrote it.
If there was once an Ur-Hamlet, it would hardly be the only lost theatrical work modern scholars have had to reconstruct from inference alone. Whole swaths of Greek tragedies, such as Agathon’s Anthos, survive today only as passing allusions in Aristotle’s treatise on dramatic theory, Poetics (ironically, half of Aristotle’s Poetics, which analyzed Greek comedy, is also lost to time). In this sense, the Ur-Hamlet endures in a similar manner, evidenced only by references in commentaries.
However, inferring the truth about the Ur-Hamlet is more challenging than gleaning Greek theatre history from Aristotle on two counts. One is the vagueness of the commentary alleged to allude to the Ur-Hamlet. The second is that, while Aristotle gives proper attribution to who wrote the plays he discusses, no one ever clearly stated who, if this Ur-Hamlet was authored at all, was the dramatist behind the original text. This leaves scholars to scour offhand comments in search of sarcastic code words, and worse, leaves them susceptible to falling into a far more pervasive Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theory.
“The origins of Shakespeare’s most famous play are as shrouded as Hamlet’s textual condition is confused,” celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom wrote in his 1998 survey Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Bloom leads his chapter on Hamlet by acknowledging an Ur-Hamlet “that Shakespeare’s drama revises and overgoes,” but notes, “we do not have this trial work, nor do we know who composed it.”
Did Thomas Kyd Write the Ur-Hamlet—or Was It Shakespeare’s Own Early Draft?
A prominent theory on who composed the earlier Hamlet is the playwright Thomas Kyd. A contemporary of Shakespeare’s, Kyd is credited with inventing the Elizabethan theatrical genre of the “revenge play” with his seminal work The Spanish Tragedy, written sometime between 1582 and 1592.
Of course, plays about revenge extend as far back as Ancient Greece. To draw a comparison for modern audiences, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy was to the Elizabethan stage what Die Hard later was to Hollywood: It created a template for a specific subgenre, with vengeful spirits, twisted machinations, and even a play-within-a-play, that countless playwrights simply remixed to great success. In that regard, plays like Hamlet and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi are as indebted to Kyd as Speed and Under Siege are to Bruce Willis and John McTiernan.
Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare is inarguable, but Kyd’s authorship of the Ur-Hamlet is less clear. Beyond the similarities between Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy, this authorship theory hinges on a vague and rather catty Elizabethan commentary by the poet Thomas Nashe.
In 1589, Nashe composed an introduction for the romance Menaphon by his friend Robert Greene. In it, Nashe takes a swipe at men who were once noverints, a term for legal clerks (a profession both Kyd and Shakespeare are believed to have practiced at one time) who now pursue the dramatic arts, comparing them unfavorably to the Roman tragedian Seneca:
“and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragicall speeches[…]and Seneca, let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needes die to our Stage; which makes his famished followers to imitate the Kid in Aesop…”
Proponents of the Kyd-wrote-Ur-Hamlet theory point to this sarcastic comment as confirmation, since it alludes to a Hamlet existing before any of the extant versions of Shakespeare’s play were known to be published, and goes further to suggest that the “Kid” is a cheeky allusion to Thomas Kyd.
However, it’s also possible it instead plays on the Aesop fable often translated as either “The Kid and the Wolf” or “The Lamb and the Wolf,” wherein the predatory wolf imagines a grievance done against him by an innocent lamb in order to permit himself a guilt-free kill in the name of revenge (thereby Nashe is instead ridiculing the revenge play genre as a whole).
Indeed, Peter Alexander has posited that those who take Nashe’s commentary to be an assertion of Kyd’s authorship of Ur-Hamlet misread it entirely:
“To conclude from this, as many do, that Kyd was the author of the early Hamlet is an assumption that the text does not justify and that later evidence makes questionable. Nashe is referring to 'a sort,' that is a group, of writers; that Kyd was one of them and a Hamlet one of their productions is as far as this deliberately teasing passage can by itself take us.”
Instead, Alexander and Bloom both believed that while there was an Ur-Hamlet lost to time, its author was in fact Shakespeare. They posit that the Ur-Hamlet was merely an earlier draft of the famous play we all know, preceding all three versions we already know to have existed, drafts referred to as the Second Quarto (dated 1604), the First Folio (1623), and the much shorter First Quarto (1603), which was rediscovered in 1823.
The Hamnet Connection: Why Shakespeare’s Son Still Shapes the Debate
This theory suggests that the scrappy version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet seen in the First Quarto version, which features a much more active Queen Gertrude siding with Hamlet and an earlier version of Polonius named Corambis, was building on this earlier Ur-Hamlet version of the play that a younger, less dramatically experienced Shakespeare had penned.
Bloom asserts that rather than Shakespeare stealing from a contemporary, he was instead constantly revising and re-conceiving a story he likely came across in the French author Belleforest’s Histoire Tragiques, wherein the Danish prince Amleth must avenge the murder of his father Horwendil after his uncle Fengon kills the king and takes Queen Gerutha as his bride.
“Whatever it was that first attracted Shakespeare to the figure of Amleth/Hamlet began early,” Bloom writes, “because in 1585 the playwright named his infant son Hamnet, presumably with some reference to the Danish hero.”
This emotional through-line is central to the 2025 film Hamnet, which imagines how the playwright’s grief for his son may have informed the creative evolution of Hamlet.
We may never know if Ur-Hamlet was a Kyd play pilfered by a young Shakespeare or an early draft of a masterpiece later revised by its own author. But whether or not Shakespeare’s Hamlet was the first, its long-reaching legacy is undeniable.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
