1437459 1514 (editio princeps) of Saxo Grammaticus - Source of Shakespeare's Hamlet
10326.
Folio in eights, measuring 11.5 x 8 inches: 208 leaves. Early blind-tooled and paneled calf over wooden boards, partial metal clasps, raised bands, remnants of paper spine label, manuscript title to top edge. Woodcut title page printed in red and black, decorative initials throughout text, leaf “cxcix” misnumbered “cxcviii;” colophon at rear. “CP” printed in central woodcut decoration on title, a nod to editor Christiern Pedersen; issue “A” (assumed export issue) without inscription beneath central woodcut. Early ink underlining and notes throughout text, marginal paper repairs to first two leaves, occasional wormhole. Boards patched with later repairs, binding rubbed, cords exposed. Housed in a custom box.
First edition of Saxo Grammaticus’s history of medieval Denmark, known as the Gesta Danorum, the original source material for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Although Shakespeare is not generally believed to have consulted Saxo directly, the legend of Prince Amleth in Books III and IV, translated into French by François Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques, laid the groundwork for Shakespeare’s play. Saxo provides the rivalry between royal brothers, the murder of Amleth’s father and and incestuous remarriage of his mother, the prince’s performative “madness,” the treacherous journey to Britain, and Amleth’s avenging return. The prince of Danish legend, unlike Shakespeare’s hero, survived to rule as king -- though not for long. A remarkable survival, in an early binding, of an important Shakespearean source.
“The first connected account of the hero whom later ages know as Hamlet is that of Saxo, called Grammaticus, in [the work offered here], written at the end of the twelfth century and first published in 1514” (Harold Jenkins, ed., Introduction to The Arden Shakespeare Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare).
“The [1514 editio princeps] of Saxo probably had a political purpose, to strengthen the legitimacy of the young Danish king, Christian II, vis-a-vis his new family-in-law, the Hapsburg dynasty. Saxo’s patriotic history of Denmark, written in language which the Renaissance humanists could appreciate, had finally reached a European public, and thus after a long delay it contributed to the reputation of Saxo’s country and its kings, exactly as he would have liked” (Karsten Friis-Jensen, ed., Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes).
Saxo’s preface to his book is charmingly modest: “Because other nations are in the habit of vaunting the fame of their achievements, and joy in recollecting their ancestors, Absalon, archbishop of Denmark, had always been fired with a passionate zeal to glorify our fatherland; he would not allow it to go without some noble document of this kind and, since everyone else refused the task, the work of compiling a history of the Danes was thrown upon me, the least of his entourage; his powerful insistence forced my weak intellect to embark on a project too huge for my abilities” (Peter Fisher’s translation, in Friis-Jensen, op. cit.). Yet whatever the deficiencies of the author or the work, Saxo deserves credit for passing on the story that fired Shakespeare’s imagination and led him to create what is arguably the greatest play ever written in the English language.
“In this primitive and sometimes brutal story the essentials of Shakespeare’s plot — fratricide, an incestuous marriage, feigned madness, and the ultimate achievement of a long-delayed revenge — are already present. And it is the kind of potentially dramatic story in which ‘carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts’ show ‘ purposes mistook Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads’ ([Hamlet] v.ii.386-90) The woman who waylays the hero, the man who spies on him in his mother’s chamber, and the retainers who escort him to England to be killed already adumbrate the roles of Ophelia, Polonius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern... Likenesses do not stop at incidents. In Shakespeare’s big set scene between Hamlet and his mother [Act III, sc. 4], the very drift of the dialogue is anticipated in Saxo... Something of Saxo also remains in Hamlet’s savage contempt for Polonius’s corpse [Act IV, sc. 3]” (Jenkins, op. cit.).
A beautifully printed book with title in red and black and with highly decorative woodcut initials throughout.
THE 1514 FIRST EDITION - PARTICULARLY IN AN EARLY BINDING - IS SCARCE.