Amleth

Amleth is the first Hamlet — the prince of Jutland from Saxo's Danish History whose tale Shakespeare would borrow six centuries later. When his uncle Feng murders his father and marries his mother, the young Amleth saves his own life by feigning idiocy, playing the drooling fool so convincingly that his murderous uncle cannot quite believe he is a threat — while underneath, cold and watchful, he lays his revenge. His mad talk is riddling truth; his clumsiness is calculation. Sent to England with a forged death-warrant, he turns it back on his escorts; returned home, he burns the court over the heads of his uncle's drunken men and kills Feng with his own sword. Saxo's Amleth is harder and more triumphant than the Dane Shakespeare made of him — a study in patience and dissimulation as weapons, the fool who is the only sane man in a poisoned court.