MovieChat Forums > Hamlet (1996) Discussion > Names of Characters

Names of Characters

posted 15 years ago by TheRationalist
4 replies | jump to latest

Will somebody from Denmark or other Scandinavian country comment on the names given by Shakespeare to the characters in Hamlet? Is Hamlet reasonably Danish? Is Polonius? How about Fortinbras fro a Norwegian...is that reasonable? And how about Laertes...is it likely a Dane would have this name?
And surely there aren't many Danes named Bernardo, a Latinate name for a Mediterranean character? Or Marcellus...wouldn't that be another Roman?

I'm willing to buy Ophelia, Gertrude and Horatio and since Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern come from a college elsewhere their names don't jar me.

So what do you think?

I took the road less traveled by.

[–] kninema 15 years ago

Finally someone has the same question I do. I'm married to a Norwegian and he just scratches his head.

And while Hamlet is a mixture of Danish truth and folk tale, it can be considered a twist on Elizabethan monarchy, with its Ambassadors and royalty...but still doesn't answer the question of romance language sir names.

I'm wondering if Shakespeare just used the same names in the previous writings/plays he supposedly used as his basis for his play.

From wiki: Shakespeare probably based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum and subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest, and a supposedly lost Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet.

Maybe the answer lies there, especially if the original was Saxo Grammaticus....I'll be so interested to see if anyone else lends some knowledge.

[–] Bilwick1 15 years ago

They had polyglot assortment of names because Denmark's motto at that time was "We'd be Northern Europe's Melting Pot . . . if it weren't freezing most of the time." Immigrants from all over the world were pouring in to get jobs as gravediggers, itinerant actors, work in the artificial-snow factories, and labor on the tiny railroads that ran around palaces. Rosencratz and Guildenstern's families ran Denmark's garment industry. The immigrants would sail into the harbor past the giant statue of Old King Hamlet holding a beaver by the tail. (The sculptor, being a typically drunken Dane and getting the instructions from Polonius, misinterpreted "beaver," and believe me, it could have been much worse.)

That all changed when Fortinbras took over, with his policy of "Scandinavia for the Scandivanians." Psycho-historians believe this was an outgrowth over his self-hating embarrassment over his southern-European look and the fact that his mother had been one of Old Norway's Sicilian whores.

[–] jmarkoff2 9 years ago

6 years later, this just has to be bumped up!

[–] 9 years ago

[deleted]