SOURCE: Amory, Frederic. “The Medieval Hamlet: A Lesson in the Use and Abuse of a Myth.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 51, no. 3 (September 1977): 357-95.

In the following essay, Amory explains how myths may be transformed by the very act of being studied and searches for the historic Hamlet, in part, in Saxo's Gesta Danorum.

I.

Hamlet's Mill: a Myth of Mythography

It is significant that in common critical parlance one cannot really distinguish terminologically between the making of myths and the study and analysis of them in speaking of mythology, or mythography. In English as in other languages they are terms which do not exclude the imaginative, and incautious, habit of myth-making, even when they are applied to the so-called “science of myth.” Perhaps this disconcerting confusion of terms stems from the fact that while the making of myths is as old as Eden, the sober...