There is certainly an air of mystery about the tragic Prince Hamlet. It always has been. It seems that much that is mysterious and obscure about him will be unmasked in the future. The same can be said of the play Hamlet, the most discussed of all the dramas ever written.

In the attached essays I have not tried to unmask all the mysteries about Hamlet, only what I prefer to call the heart of its mystery. That is to say, the strangeness that puzzled me when, at age seventeen, I watched Hamlet on the stage for the very first time. Assuredly, it was a brilliant performance--and a dialogue consisting largely of familiar quotations. But what was the actual purpose of the play? What did Shakespeare want to communicate with all this? To me, the proper import of the play seemed like a mystery, an impenetrable mystery.

Not that I would have been ill prepared and afflicted with wrong expectations. On the contrary. Just a few weeks previously, our history teacher had spoken devotedly about Shakespeare and his most famous play, Hamlet. The whole class had sat straight as ramrods listening to the story about the poor boy from Stratford-upon-Avon who came to London and got a job at a theater, attending "parked" horses during performances. The boy who soon became an actor and who even began writing plays himself, and who eventually, at a mature age, wrote Hamlet. The teacher had told the whole plot of Hamlet to us teen-agers attentively listening. But not only that. He also noted that the story about the groom-actor-playwright had not been accepted by all. Some people were said to maintain the idea that the plays were written by a scholar, a man with a different experience of life than that of Shakespeare.

I remember quite clearly the reflection I made at this point of the teacher’s story: If the plays were written by an Englishman with a university education, then he must have revealed himself by his linguistic style. Francis Bacon and other scholars have, as we know, left behind them written or printed documents. It should be an easy task to compare the language of these documents with the language of Shakespeare in order to find out if the distinctive features are identical or not. Such a comparison would certainly solve the problem once and for all.

Otherwise there is nothing absurd or even unusual in the story about the provincial boy who goes to the big city and becomes a famous writer. That is what Hans Christian Andersen did. The lives of Robert Burns, Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, D.H. Lawrence, William Saroyan and H.G. Wells were rather similar.

What I call the heart of Hamlet’s mystery is evident from a comparison. Take another outstanding dramatist, and you will find in his plays surroundings and experiences that were familiar to the author. For example Eugene O’Neill, the foremost American dramatist, has obviously revived much of his own life in his plays. We may notice the setting in Desire under the Elms and Ah, Wilderness! and compare with the places where he spent his young days. The same with Sinclair Lewis (Main Street/Brainerd, Minn.), William Faulkner (Yoknapatawpha County/the South) and many others. In Shakespeare’s plays we find nothing of the sort. Instead we notice foreign settings in more than half of his plays and historically given settings in most of the remainder. We find no setting in a country town, nothing about the life behind the scenes of a London theater. How could Shakespeare neglect to use the resource consisting of all the surroundings that were familiar to him? Other authors seem to have considered this a virtual gold mine.

For me, this was a riddle. It was also a challenge. If nobody had compared the literary style of Shakespeare with those of the learned lords, then there was a task for me. But first I had to learn English. I went to school in the little town of Porvoo in Finland, a Swedish school called Borgå Lyceum, where the languages taught were Finnish and German (and a little Latin). So I had to study English on my own which turned out much better than the boning up Finnish and German. My private studies brought in its train acquaintance with a number of American dramatists, especially Eugene O’Neill. I could also begin to read Shakespeare in the original.

But in the mean time the riddle had been solved, or so I thought. I learned about a German theory that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Roger Manners, 3rd Earl of Rutland. At first, the argumentation sounded attractive enough. Much in the life of Rutland tallies with the knowledge that manifests itself in the plays. One has to know that almost a dozen of these were written before 1594 to realize the absurdity of this theory. This year Rutland was 18 years old. Maybe the author was not a learned lord after all?

Much later, I read a comment by a successful dramatist who should really know: "In the work of the greatest of geniuses humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere--but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare". It was Sir Charles Chaplin who said this in his My Autobiography (1964). And he certainly knew how much his own humble childhood had mattered when he created his plots and characters.

For many years I thought that it was necessary to be a qualified expert in order to be a judge of Hamlet and to elucidate possible mysteries. That was before I had read On Hamlet by Salvador de Madariaga. This book taught me that the principal source for the interpretation of meaning of a certain text is the text itself--not what other interpreters, however learned, have said. The most important thing is to read carefully what it says in the text, word for word. We laymen even may have certain precedence over the professional experts who have often read so many commentaries and interpretations that they have lost contact with the original text. It was after reading Madariaga’s book that I started inquiring seriously into Shakespeare and his plays. It was to prove to be immensely rewarding.

In addition to On Hamlet, I have naturally read quite a few books on Shakespeare and his plays--especially about Hamlet. Much in these books proved to be about non-essential details. Such things may constitute interesting problems to the specialist although they leave the layman unconcerned. Madariaga, on the other hand, devoted himself to what should be the essential task of literary criticism, i.e. the interpretation of meaning of literary works. That is to say that the literary critic should give his or her readers a better understanding of the work treated than what they could have attained on their own. This is a program that has been formulated in so many words by Encyclopædia Britannica. Madariaga has evidently put it into practice, and even I have made it my guiding-star. To "pluck out the heart of Hamlet’s mystery" becomes a means to increase our understanding of the play Hamlet and to profit more from watching a performance of it. The identity of the author of Hamlet is secondary, but if it proves to be crucial for the understanding, it certainly has to be determined.

Ever since I read the books by Madariaga and Titherley almost 50 years ago, I have collected more and more evidence for the theory that Professor Abel Lefranc had already brought out in 1918 (as I was to learn from Titherley). After a couple of decades I started to write essays presenting results of my own research as well as some new theories that followed quite naturally. Since the appropriate journals refused my first essays, I wrote the rest of them in Swedish and in 1995 published them as a book titled Hamlets hemlighet. On the exhortation of my friend Bob Cornish in Kirkland, Washington, I started translating all the essays into English—with Bob checking the language. The essays have been stored in my computer for six years until I got this homepage. Now they are finally available for everybody.

Alvor, Peter, Das neue Shakespeare-Evangelium, München 1906.

Bleibtreu, Karl, Shakespeares Geheimnis, Bern 1923.

Chaplin, Charles, My Autobiography, 1964.

Lefranc, Abel, Sous le masque de "William Shakespeare", Paris 1919.

Lefranc, Abel, À la découverte de Shakespeare, Paris 1945-50.

Madriaga, Salvador de, On Hamlet, London 1948.

Titherley, Arther Walsh, Shakespeare’s Identity, Winchester 1952.