Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/19

 Ur-Hamlet" of his Thomas Kyd und sein Kreis (1892). It is not improbable that Nash, in the passage where he speaks of Hamlet, puns upon the name Kyd. We may fairly assume that it was a companion piece to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy—itself a play of revenge (a father's revenge for a murdered son, inverting the Hamlet theme); of violent passion bordering on distraction; including among the dramatis personæ a ghost, and presenting, like Hamlet, a play within the play. Kyd translated Garnier's Cornelia from the French, and could read the story of Hamlet in Belleforest. English actors had visited Elsinore, and had lately returned to London, bringing their tidings of Denmark.

Mr. Corbin, in a very ingenious study, The Elizabethan Hamlet (1895), has conjectured that the lost play by Kyd exhibited a Hamlet resembling the Amleth of Saxo in his being rather a man of resolute action than a man of contemplation, and that his assumption of madness was the occasion of vulgar comedy; the affliction of insanity was, as we know, often regarded by Elizabethan dramatists from the comic point of view. The conjecture is well worthy of consideration. In developing his theory Mr. Corbin makes use, however, of one piece of evidence, which must be held as of doubtful value. A rude German drama, Der Bestrafte Brudermord, found in a manuscript dated 1710, is taken by Mr. Corbin and others as based on Kyd's Hamlet, This is possible; but it seems to me far more probable that the German play is a debased adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet in its earliest form. Perhaps, as Tanger has suggested (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxiii.), a few recollections of the