Who wrote Hamlet?

While Hamlet as we know it was written by Shakespeare, very similar stories had been told for centuries prior to Shakespeare's time. Some of the common elements in these others stories include a protagonist prince whose uncle killed the king and stole the leadership of the kingdom, a queen who marries the murderous uncle, the prince pretending to be insane, the prince being sent away with two men who have been ordered to kill him, and the prince finally killing his uncle. These similar stories go by different titles and their characters often go by different names, but many of the themes are the same as our version of Hamlet. However, Shakespeare's Hamlet adds a lot of depth and complexity to the themes established in the earlier stories. One other important piece of Hamlet's origin is another play commonly referred to as the "Ur-Hamlet." "Ur" as a prefix usually means the earliest origin, or earliest version of something. The Ur-Hamlet is a different play that was around during Shakespeare's lifetime. It is not the same play as Hamlet, but we don't know much else about it because all the copies of it were lost to time. We do have some writings from the time which say that this play had a character named Hamlet and a ghost who talks to Hamlet. It might have been written by Shakespeare himself or it might have been written by someone else, but we know for sure that Ur-Hamlet was written before Hamlet and almost certainly had a big influence on Shakespeare writing the Hamlet that we have today.

William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.