Originality In Shakespeare's Hamlet

Originality is a concept which has changed and evolved over hundreds of years. Indeed, the definition of originality, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the “ability to think or express oneself in an independent and individual manner” , has not always been so rigid. In the Elizabethan era the concept of originality was not concerned with whose idea was whose. In fact, originality was all about how the idea was portrayed, for instance, whether it was performed on stage or by other means. Much like the concept of originality, ideas themselves evolve and change from the moment they are conceived and this concept can easily be seen in Shakespeare’s works.
Shakespeare is widely considered Britain’s most celebrated playwright and national …show more content…
An example of this would be King Lear, which appears to have been based upon the anonymous Elizabethan play King Leir. In fact, the stories behind a large majority of his thirty-eight plays (forty by some counts which include two lost plays attributed to him) are not attributed to him, and, as James Shapiro commented, “In terms of plot Hamlet is Shakespeare’s least original play”. This is not to say this makes Shakespeare’s play void of credit, but merely that Shakespeare used pre-existing texts to create a platform for which he imposed his own spin on the tale. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Nietzsche famously explored “the genealogy of ideas” in his book On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, where he looked to explain that no idea was completely original and that the history of this idea could be traced just like a family tree. Thus, through exploring the origins of the Hamlet story, not only will I be able to trace the idea back in time to discover what influenced Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but also be able to asses to what extent Shakespeare was actually influenced in his writing of