In all of them, some grievous insult or wrong requires vengeance. Revenge tragedies typically share a few plot points. The Spanish Tragedy was one of the first and most popular Elizabethan 'revenge tragedies,' a genre that Hamlet both epitomizes and complicates. The Spanish Tragedy shares many elements with Hamlet, such as a ghost seeking revenge, a secret crime, a play-within-a-play, a tortured hero who feigns madness, and a heroine who goes mad and commits suicide. Most scholars attribute it to Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy of 1587.

Shakespeare was likely aware of Saxo's version, along with another play performed in 1589 in which a ghost apparently calls out, 'Hamlet, revenge!' The 1589 play is lost, leading to much scholarly speculation as to who might have authored it. This story is on the whole more straightforward than Shakespeare’s adaptation. With his mother's active support, Amleth succeeds in killing Feng. He acts the fool in order to avoid suspicion, a strategy which succeeds in making the others think him harmless. Horwendil's and Gerutha's son Amleth, although still young, decides to avenge his father's murder. In it, the unscrupulous Feng kills his brother Horwendil and marries his brother's wife Gerutha. This version was later adapted into French by Francois de Belleforest in 1570.

The story of the play originates in the legend of Hamlet (Amleth) as recounted in the twelfth-century Danish History, a Latin text by Saxo the Grammarian.

Hamlet by william shakespeare full text