The+Legend+of+Amleth


 * Greg Raupp Hour 1**

As Mr. Mullen has told us several times, William Shakespeare does not write original stories. His writing is his own, however the actual plot is borrowed form somewhere else. "Hamlet" is no exception. The play "Hamlet" by Shakespeare depicts the legend of the Danish prince Amleth. The following links provide the tale and other background information about Amleth.

http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/history/amleth.html

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/amleth.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(legend)

This information is useful for us to have because it supplies us with the history of the story told by William Shakespeare in his play "Hamlet." It also provides parts of the story that Shakespeare may (Or may not) leave out, which of course can lead to a class-long discussion analyzing why Shakespeare wrote this part of the legend and not that other part. And what purpose or importance do these portions of "Hamlet" may serve? I'm sure there's something Rabinowitz going on here, so we can certainly hit that nail on the head as well. Purely from an entertainment perspective, the story of Hamlet is an interesting one, so it would also be nice to have access to the entire story instead of the pieces that Shakepeare writes about. We may also be curious to know just how good of a writer Shakespeare was. We can determine and argue about this by reading the original story written in prose strictly as information and compare it to Shakespeare's iambic pentameter and decide which one we like more.

explanation about why this information is so effective **for us**