[In the following essay, Gurr examines Claudius's role in the play, stating that Claudius initiates every action in the play, except for the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia. In terms of Hamlet's political plot, Gurr argues that it is Claudius's story, "the narrative of his struggle to maintain order and security in the state. . . . "]

Based on an ostensible realism as the play is, the first subject to study, the framework of the action, is the Claudian world, the official, public world where appearances belie reality, and from which consequently Hamlet feels alienated. We begin with the court at Elsinore.

Shakespeare was always careful with his anachronisms. In the political background to his Elsinore story he carefully specifies the historical details and makes it clear that he is doing so. Any anachronisms in his presentation are at risk more from our misreading than his casualness. On the question of succession to the Danish throne for instance, where too many editors have assumed that hereditary succession by primogeniture, the automatic inheritance through the eldest son, was the norm, Shakespeare is careful to describe it as elective. A much older form in Europe than primogeniture, formalised by Charlemagne, election of kings by a council of elders was the standard procedure across medieval Europe, and certainly the normal practice in the ninth or tenth-century Denmark of the historical Amleth. Automatic succession by the eldest son did not replace election in England until 1272, in France in 1270, and later still in the less powerfully nationalistic territories such as Denmark.

One of the advantages of election was that it gave scope for the crowning of any eligible member of the royal dynasty if for any reason the heir apparent was unfit. A brother could rule if the eldest son was still a child, or a younger son if the eldest was an idiot. Normally, the eldest son could expect to be elected, but not automatically. He was truly the "apparent" heir to the throne. The system had its problems, since an elected brother might well promote the claims of his own child ahead of the dead king's infant son, and the in-fighting where an infant or imbecile heir did exist was usually fatal to someone. Five and more centuries of such struggles led in the end to a general preference for the automatic succession of the eldest son, whoever and whatever he might be, and consequently the elevation of primogeniture to the status of a law of nature, a law assumed to be ordained by God for the regulation of all mankind.

Looking back from an age which had found its kings through primogeniture with some degree of success for three hundred years, sixteenth-century writers were conscious of the hazards of the older system. Shakespeare dealt with the hazards of primogeniture in nine history plays. Election offered opportunities for even more mayhem of the kind exemplified in the Amleth story. It had the advantage for this play of clearing out of the way any direct concern for title, the problem handled so extensively in the history plays. Hamlet's problem is personal, not dynastic. His mayhem does not come from a struggle for power. Shakespeare used anachronisms in Denmark, but not over the Danish constitution.

The details of Denmark's elective system are touched in obliquely but fully. We are first given a hint in the parallel case of Norway, which also settled on its kings by election. At I.i.80-104 Horatio tells the story of the wager between the now-dead King Hamlet of Denmark and his opposite, old Fortinbras of Norway, and how young Fortinbras wants to regain the lands lost when his father was killed by old Hamlet. Not for another hundred lines, till I.ii.28-30, do we learn (and then in passing) that the new king of Norway is not young Fortinbras but the dead king's brother, "uncle of young Fortinbras". The parallel between Denmark and Norway is thus made clear. We know the Danish situation by now since Claudius began his speech from the throne with a reference to "Hamlet our dear brother's death".

Several niceties of the election system are touched on in the same scene. Claudius emphasises at the beginning of his opening speech that both his accession to the throne and his marriage were approved by the council. "Nor have we herein barred / Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone / With this affair along." Again, when he addresses the dead king's son as "our cousin Hamlet and my son", he is taking care to claim a closer kinship than young Fortinbras has to his uncle the king of Norway. By marrying the queen Claudius has avoided the problem of choice between the dead king's heir and any children of his own. He confirms this implication of his marriage a few lines later when he explicitly announces that young Hamlet is his choice as the next king.

You are the most immediate to our throne . . .
 Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.

This is the "pledge" to which he announces he will drink that night. He has made as decisive an announcement as Hamlet's own at the end of the play when he declares that Fortinbras "has my dying voice" in the election of a new king (V.ii.338). That the king's pledge has been registered is confirmed when Rosencrantz reminds Hamlet that "you have the voice of the king himself for your succession in Denmark" (III.ii.318-9). With the king's own vote in his pocket Hamlet's election is as nearly guaranteed as any question of power can be. The same pledge leads Laertes and Polonius in the next scene to warn Ophelia that Hamlet is a prince out of her star.

Claudius's pledge has far-reaching consequences. Laertes says Ophelia has to reject Hamlet's love because it can only be lust. Marriage is out of the question because Hamlet's consort will be chosen by the advice and consent of his council—"circumscribed / Unto the voice and yielding of that body / Whereof he is the head." In his choice of human flesh, says the gentle brother, Hamlet being royal may not "Carve for himself." How exalted and guarded Hamlet must be as heir apparent is constantly implied, when the queen calls him "our hope" (II.ii.24) or when Claudius sensibly comments "Madness in great ones must not unwatched go" (III.i.187). And yet the question of the succession is open enough for Claudius to offer it to Laertes and for the mob to riot on his behalf.

The rabble call him lord;
And, as the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,

The rati fiers and props of every word,
They cry,'Choose we; Laertes shall be king!'

(IV.v.98-102)

Custom demands that the council elect him, not the mob. But no custom, even the custom of carousing to his pledge, will hold Claudius to his vote for Hamlet if expediency makes it convenient to offer it to Laertes instead.

Election runs continually in Hamlet's mind. He calls Horatio his soul's "elected" friend (III.ii.60), and his thwarted ambition is one of the three charges he puts up against Claudius, the only one he feels free to declare publicly. In the closet scene to Gertrude he calls Claudius a cutpurse who has stolen the crown. To Ophelia he describes himself—a public and not undissembling statement—as "very proud, revengeful, ambitious" (III.i.125). Rosencrantz in his clumsy attempt to pick up Hamlet's thinking had already used the last word (II.ii.249). Hamlet even does him the convenience of returning it to him (III.ii.317) in reply to a direct question over the cause of his "distemper". Saying he lacks advancement is what he knows his audience expects him to say. But election is in his mind, and there is an element of truth in the admission. In V.ii.65, when he rehearses the list of Claudius's crimes to Horatio, he makes the point explicitly and unambiguously. Claudius has not only "killed my king and whored my mother" and plotted against Hamlet's own life, but has "Popp'd in between th'election and my hopes".

Hamlet's hopes were not only hopes of power for himself. Even before he learns of the murder Claudius committed to gain the throne he is bitter about the new king. In the first soliloquy after he has seen Claudius at his smooth work Hamlet's comparison of dead king to living king carries with it the assumption that Claudius degrades the throne, that there is an honour in the post, an ideal of conduct to which Hamlet himself aspires and which is out of Claudius's reach.

My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules!

(I.ii. 152-3)

Hamlet is disgusted with the Claudian world well before he knows it to be a criminal one. Between the Hamlet world and the Claudian world there is an unbridgeable gulf; they are alternative societies.

The Claudian world is a practical one, and within its own terms markedly more successful than the Hamlet world in maintaining law and order, peace and prosperity in the land. Claudius fights with superb skill and resolution for the security of his "state", a word which encompasses his prosperity, his throne, and his kingdom. Like his travesty Polonius Claudius uses the cunning of age against the rashness of youth. All the threats, a balanced group of challenges, come from the younger generation. Young Fortinbras threatens invasion from abroad; young Laertes threatens rebellion from within; and beyond both of these public dangers is young Hamlet, a secret cause of insecurity both to the king's title and his life. A king who poisons people through their ears manages to defeat two of the threats, the external and the internal, with mere words; he even turns them to his own advantage. Throughout the play Claudius acts with speed and sureness to avert every risk, in a masterly display of political skill. His only failures are in his first plot against Hamlet's life once the threat comes into the open, and in the excess of cunning which this failure draws him on to, what you might call his overkill, in the final scene. At the very end, too, his loyal courtiers do not come when he calls on them for help against Hamlet. He is more alone then than Hamlet himself.

The details of Claudius's manoeuvres are sketched in lightly but fully, and the skeleton of the plot can be seen in them. Claudius initiates every action in the play except the murder of Polonius and Ophelia's suicide. We can trace the whole sequence of events through Claudius.

The first detail is the guarded battlements and preparations for war. Sentries, two of whom we meet at the opening of the play, are on constant watch; armourers and ship-builders are working overtime (their "sore task/ Does not divide the Sunday from the week"). The defences are alert because young Fortinbras is planning to invade Denmark, unknown to his old uncle the king of Norway, to regain lands his father lost to Hamlet's father. A thoroughly serious threat against which Claudius is making serious defensive preparations.

In the scene of the king in council which immediately follows, however, we find him doing more than passively wait for the invasion. The first item on the agenda after the formal words about his predecessor and his marriage is an announcement that the threat of invasion is to be met by sending ambassadors to warn the Norwegian king of his nephew's plan, in the hope that old Norway will honour the agreement over Denmark's annexation of the land and so prevent Fortinbras from trying to regain it. Claudius is in total command of the situation. He trusts himself to assess the danger accurately and to judge the best action to take. He keeps a firm grip on events—the ambassadors are to deliver his written message to the Norwegian king and no more. Eventually of course (in II.ii) we shall hear that his judgement was right and that the stratagem has succeeded. The invasion is stopped without bloodshed and at minimal cost to Denmark.

The next two items on the council's agenda at this first meeting (I.ii) are seemingly trivial domestic matters. They do however have a bearing on state security too, and Claudius well knows it. The first item is Laertes'request for permission to return to the high life of Paris after his dutiful attendance at the funeral and wedding festivities, which Claudius readily grants him. The Claudian world approves of courtly training in Paris as it does of deep drinking at Elsinore. The second item is Claudius's refusal of permission for Hamlet to return to his studies at Wittenberg. Diplomatically he gives the reason that Hamlet is important to the state as the nominated successor to Claudius. This piece of candy he injects with the tart suggestion that as heir apparent Hamlet really ought to learn to behave better and dress more normally. When Hamlet's response is insultingly to ignore Claudius and reply only to his mother Claudius chooses to gloss it over ("'tis a loving and a fair reply"). He has got his way in the important matter, that of keeping Hamlet where he can be watched. And he has put Hamlet in the wrong simply by displaying his own tact and discretion in contrast with Hamlet's surly offensiveness. Hamlet's attitude is anything but the "gentle and unforced accord" which Claudius chooses to call it, as everyone at court can witness, to Hamlet's shame. Only Hamlet sees the iron hand behind the smooth reproof. Denmark's a prison, he tells Rosencrantz later.

Claudius's final words to his council are image-builders too. He is hearty, carousing, carefree. "No jocund health that Denmark drinks today, / But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell, / And the king's rouse the heaven shall bruit again." Not for him the lean and hungry look. He is richly dressed (a peacock Hamlet calls him), and a hearty drinker who can dissemble enough to poison other people with it when need be.

Not that Hamlet, out of step as ever, is above accusing Claudius of thrift ("The funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" I.ii. 179-80). That is a mark of Claudius's inversion of values, like the drinking, which Hamlet also condemns at I.ii. 174 and I.iv.8-22. Claudius's choice of drink as a concealment for his mental sharpness, his disguise for the solitude that the possession of power entails, leads Hamlet into his "mole of nature" speech, about men who suffer condemnation in general for one vice in particular. Since that is not at all Claudius's situation, Hamlet's criticism says more about his antipathy to Claudius, his rejection of the king's way of making himself seem human, than it does of Claudius's standing in the community at large. In outward appearances Claudius wins hands down. His behaviour is impeccable, his policy sound and economical, his handling of an ungracious and hostile stepson discreet and effective.

Claudius next appears in Act 2, after Hamlet has learned the ghost's story and has resorted to his "antic" (clowning) disposition as his own form of image building. Claudius, ever cautious and alert to possible dangers, won't take what he calls this "transformation" at face value and has fetched two of Hamlet's "school fellows", fellow-students from Wittenberg, to spy on him and find what lies behind his strange behaviour. He is sceptical of Polonius's conjecture that Hamlet is merely love-sick, but agrees to test it as an additional line of investigation. The ambassadors have returned from Norway with Fortinbras's invasion successfully scotched, so Claudius is free to turn his full attention to what is clearly developing as the next threat to state security.

Hamlet of course has no trouble baffling both his fellow students and Polonius, so that early in Act 3, when Claudius gets their reports on what they have found he can see that they will never get anywhere. Consequently after he has himself spied on Hamlet's antic behaviour to Ophelia his conclusions are properly cautious, and his decision prompt.

Love! His affections do not that way tend;
Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little,
Was not like madness. There's something in his soul
o'er which his melancholy sits on brood;
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger; which for to prevent,
I have in quick determination
Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England,
For the demand of our neglected tribute.

(III.i.161-69)

Such a mission is proper for a prince. Moreover a sea voyage, he tells Polonius, might help to clear that distracted head. But the Mousetrap, Hamlet's essay at spying, is waiting for Claudius, and when it snaps shut Claudius sees that the egg Hamlet is sitting broodily on (164-5) does indeed contain something dangerous. Before it can hatch therefore Hamlet must be sent away. Claudius is ahead of Hamlet here too. Even before Hamlet has finished his turn at spying Claudius has shifted from suspicion to action, in a prompt and sensible reversal of his earlier decision to keep Hamlet at court where he could be watched. In Ill.iii Claudius, quickly back in control after the "distemper" which Hamlet's Mousetrap play put him in, orders Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to escort him overseas on the grounds that his lunacy and his closeness to the royal family puts the throne in danger.

The terms of our estate may not endure
Hazard so near us as doth hourly grow
Out of his lunacies.

(III.iii.5-7)

A thoroughly reasonable precaution. Unfortunately Claudius's helpers are less prompt than he is. Polonius is still intent on spying, and worse still Gertrude has roused herself to take an initiative. Stirred to action for the first time on seeing the way her son used the Mousetrap to provoke her new husband, she decides to speak to him, to tell him off as if he were an illbehaved child. When he replies with very unchildlike violence, and holds her in her seat to listen to his sharp words, she remembers the violence of lunatics and shrieks for help, with results fatal to her would-be helper behind the curtain, who is also too frightened to do anything but stay where he is and cry for help. On hearing of this catastrophe Claudius, fresh from his attempt to repent his brother's murder, decides that his stepson must be destroyed to prevent more trouble.

Polonius's death is a potential disaster which Claudius can easily turn to his own advantage. He can hold Hamlet prisoner (in the Kozintsev film Hamlet was put in a strait-jacket) till he is safely on board ship for England, and even has a potential excuse for making sure that Hamlet never returns alive. To Gertrude he can explain shipping him off as getting him out of the way till the uproar over the "vile deed" has blown over. He has to do something because he will in any case be blamed for failing to keep mad Hamlet where he could do no harm, and by sending him away he might be able to escape the slanders which would be bound to grow if he did nothing to check his errant son and heir.

In IV.vii, moreover, Claudius admits a further difficulty, that besides the problem of upsetting his doting mother Hamlet's popularity with the people makes it difficult to "put the strong law on him". So to Hamlet and the immediate court he announces that the reason for sending Hamlet overseas is for Hamlet's own safety. His soliloquy announcing the secret reason, that Hamlet is to be killed while away, follows immediately. We can take it, presumably, that Claudius has inserted this further twist of policy into the original plan as a result of Hamlet's murder of Polonius, though it might equally well be a result of the Mousetrap's revelation that Hamlet knows about his father's murder. I think we should take it that after the Mousetrap at first Claudius is genuinely penitent, and that only the omninously short work Hamlet makes of Polonius, a surrogate for the king, pushes him into the decision to kill him. Expediency forces him into more and more devious turns as the pressure of Hamlet's threat to his security mounts.

Turning Polonius's murder to his advantage in this way is adroit enough, but there are other troublesome consequences of the deed, in Polonius's orphaned children, which call for even more speedy footwork. The furtive burial of the corpse was necessary to keep the queen believing in her husband's desire to protect Hamlet, but it causes problems with both children. Ophelia's madness is obviously Hamlet's fault, another item in his crime sheet, but the burial does make it seem that Claudius is protecting Hamlet. It is therefore some sort of pretext for Laertes to raise his rebellion on. "We have done but greenly, / In hugger-mugger to inter him" (IV.v.79-80), admits Claudius. He already knows of Laertes'return and the rumour-mongering which is stirring up a general suspicion against him as king: "necessity, of matter beggared, / Will nothing stick our person to arraign / In ear and ear" (IV.v.88-90). There is evidently popular support for Hamlet's invidious comparison of Hyperion-Hamlet to his satyr-brother. Claudius does not command the universal respect his brother had.

But Claudius is a man for all occasions. Just as he stopped the invasion by Fortinbras with a word in old Norway's ear, so now he stops Laertes'insurrection with words, and turns one enemy against another by diverting Laertes'passion against Hamlet. Claudius is at his best in the scenes with Laertes because we know for the first time exactly what he has to cope with and see him doing it. He is cool, steady, ripe with the native hue of resolution, a perfect actor of a part he knows to perfection. Supremely disingenuous, reminding Gertrude in passing that her son is "most violent author / Of his own just remove", he uses her when Laertes bursts in as a foil to his own brave stand. He draws Laertes from violence into an exchange of words, and once on his own ground sets to work to adjust him from a blind to a precisely aimed hatred.

That I am guiltless of your father's death . . .
It shall as level to your judgement'pear
As day does to the eye.

(IV.v.146-9)

He knows perfectly what the outward appearance of events will show.

Make choice of whom your wisest friends you will,
And they shall hear and judge'twixt you and me,

a judgement he gives a price to by putting his crown and life on it. His plan is clear: "Where th'offence is let the great axe fall". Laertes will learn that Claudius is already in the process of executing justice on Hamlet.

That of course can't happen in Gertrude's hearing, and only in IV.vii, once the judgement has been passed in Claudius's favour and Gertrude is absent, can Claudius describe the details of the execution. He explains that he hasn't punished Hamlet openly because the queen is so devoted to him and because of his general popularity, "the great love the general gender bear him". But Laertes may be satisfied.

You must not think
 That we are made of stuff so flat and dull

That we can let our beard be shook with danger
And think it pastime.

The Mousetrap play, danger in pastime, evidently still rankles. And then just as Claudius is on the point of telling Laertes his plot to kill Hamlet comes the news of the prince's return. On hearing that calamity Claudius changes direction without a tremor. He wisely omits to tell Laertes that he's already tried to kill Hamlet once and has failed, and within a few seconds is offering Laertes the chance to do it himself with a new scheme which he ironically claims is "ripe in my device". Once again it has to be devious, to appease both Hamlet's partisans and his enemies.

. . . for his death no wind of blame shall breathe;
But even his mother shall uncharge the practice,
And call it accident.

So, resourceful as ever, Claudius manoeuvres Laertes into position with that implausible account of Hamlet's jealousy over Laertes'reputation as a swordsman. Italianate poisons are added to the French notion of a duel (Claudius evidently has less faith in Laertes'swordsmanship than he lets Laertes know), and the plan for Laertes'revenge is ready.

The two contrasting scenes about death, Ophelia's suicide and the gravedigging scene, hold us off until the plan is ready to be set in motion. When Hamlet and Laertes fortuitously meet at the graveside and fight, Claudius tells both Laertes and Gertrude to have "patience", for opposite reasons. Still playing the game both ways, Claudius says confidently to Gertrude when they learn of Ophelia's suicide that he'd only just managed to cool Laertes down, and that the news would set him on his path of revenge again.

That note, the ambiguous voice of the seemingly wellmeaning diplomat, sounds again at the outset of the duel when Claudius, having laid his fatherly bet on Hamlet, makes the contestants shake hands and declare a truce to animosity. Even in the scuffle when the poisoned foil cuts both of them he pretends peacemaking—"Part them. They are incensed." To the very end he keeps up his act. When Gertrude collapses poisoned by the drug meant for Hamlet he desperately declares "She swoons to see them bleed." But finally, when Laertes gasps out the truth and Hamlet swoops to his revenge, he is alone. His plea for help—"O, yet defend me, friends; I am but hurt"—goes unheeded. Words at last will not serve. They have substituted for general popularity only for so long as Claudius has remained conspicuously in control. Now, as his most complicated plot begins to go astray and strew more bodies on the stage, an action at last begins which only Claudius himself, face to face with Hamlet at last, can play. The final action belongs to the two most solitary figures alone.

This is the story of what happens in the play at its political, Claudian level. Claudius is an efficient king, supremely competent at handling challenges to his state, external and internal alike. He is just in the routine performance of his rule, commanding the loyalty of the old king's chief counsellor and the allegiance of the court. There is no illegality in his being elected ahead of young Hamlet to the crown of Denmark; he cannot be challenged as an usurper. Marrying the former king's widow was useful to secure his position, but it is also obviously a love match of sorts on both sides, whether or not we take the ghost's allegation of adultery to mean a liaison preceding the murder. The only intractable problem in the way of a peaceful and prosperous rule is young Hamlet. And how childishly he behaves. Sulky, and solitary, he refuses to cast off his mourning clothes when the new king decrees that the proper period is over. He seems to enjoy the public contrast of his own gloomy black with the celebratory colours and deep-drinking of the court. He won't even concede the semblance of good manners towards the king, in spite of a promise that the king will give his support to Hamlet's succession. Openly hostile and ambitious in the eyes of the court, he becomes when afflicted by seeming insanity openly threatening. He insults the tender Ophelia as readily as he insults the king his stepfather. He assaults his mother and murders the chief counsellor of the state. He treats the corpse of his victim shamefully and shows little sign of penitence for his deed. He fights with the murdered man's son in the grave of the daughter, a tender girl driven to suicide by Hamlet's acts against her and her father. He insults even the seemingly well meaning Osric. He is utterly at odds with the court and his position in it. He is the only discordant note in the well orchestrated Claudian world.¹

That, very roughly, is the sequence of political actions in the story of Hamlet. It is Claudius's story, the narrative of his struggle to maintain order and security in the state for which, as king, he has total responsibility. Kings kept order and administered justice, and in return their subjects owed obedience. Hamlet's disobedience ended in the total destruction of the royal family and dynasty, and the family of Denmark's chief counsellor. On almost every count it is a story of political disaster caused by Hamlet alone.

Political collapse is what happens in the play on the Claudian level. Above it though is Hamlet's level, the region where all the major structural parallels and contrasts combine to focus attention not on Claudius as the centre of political events but on Hamlet. In the pattern of political challenges to state security Hamlet is in the centre, Laertes and Fortinbras on either flank, Claudius the target for all three, for reasons which emphasise the solitary eminence of Hamlet's perspective against the merely expedient calculations of all the others.

The parallels of Fortinbras and Laertes to Hamlet are precise, each one taking up a different aspect of Hamlet's situation. Young Fortinbras is in the same position in Norway as Hamlet is in Denmark, the king his father and namesake dead, his father's brother on the throne. Laertes is in the same position as Hamlet, too, in having a father killed, his murderer unpunished and a target for the son's revenge. The two unthinking men of action, "outstretched heroes", flank the doubt-ridden student prince who shares their problems but not their psychology.

A more complex set of parallels and contrasts putting Hamlet above Claudius can be found in the two triangular patterns already mentioned. The first, old King Hamlet, his murderer Claudius and his queen, is explicitly made by young Hamlet to match its successor, King Claudius, murdering Hamlet and the queen, by means of two groupings of literary figures, King Priam—revenging Pyrrhus—Hecuba, and Player King—Lucianus—Player Queen. This matching of roles is a complex exercise. It links Hamlet and Claudius as regicides, and so makes a love triangle (husband, wife, lover) into a political issue. It puts Hamlet into Claudius's shoes as criminal murderer, regicide, and in some sense a rival for Gertrude's affections. Where the obvious value of the Laertes—Fortinbras—Hamlet parallels lies in the emphasis they give to Hamlet's inert suffering of his shame and his ultimate triumph, the two triangular patterns put his task of revengeful murder into deeper focus. Brother Claudius has murdered King Hamlet and married the queen out of political ambition and earthly love. Nephew Hamlet must murder King Claudius and yet not destroy the queen with grief. His dilemma is the moral one in the act of revenge, the difficulty of punishing an evil act without committing an exactly parallel act.

Hamlet's first literary analogy to this problem is the old account of Priam's murder by fell revenging Pyrrhus, who hesitates before his sword falls as he hears the walls of Troy collapse around him but still sets Hecuba to her grief and the narrator to his tears. In this first analogy to his situation Hamlet is more concerned to incite himself with revenging Pyrrhus's example than to dwell on the grief of Hecuba. She of course laments the death of old Priam as Gertrude so conspicuously did not for old Hamlet: a noble Trojan precedent for ignoble Denmark. But will Gertrude weep this time, when revenging Hamlet drops his sword on the old head of Claudius?

In his soliloquy following the speech about Troy Hamlet checks himself for such a self-indulgent use of literary precedents, and sets about preparing a better analogy for his situation. The analogy he sets up, his Mousetrap, the murder of Gonzago, follows the ghost's account of King Hamlet's murder by Claudius in all its details, including the thirty years'marriage, except one. Hamlet gleefully points out to the increasingly worried Claudius as the Mousetrap unfolds, that the Player King's murderer is "one Lucianus, nephew to the King". Just as brother Claudius had been positioned in the triangle as rival and murderer of King Hamlet, so now nephew Hamlet will position himself in the new triangle as murderer of King Claudius. Even to the extent of winning the queen's love from the king.

Hamlet's problem over this last point is neatly illuminated in a third analogy when, on the point of visiting Gertrude after the Mousetrap, Hamlet tells himself he will not have the heart of a Nero. This, the reason Shakespeare changed the name Fengon from his sources into Claudius, is an allusion to Tacitus's view that the Emperor Claudius in marrying Nero's mother Agrippina was committing incest. He was her uncle. And of course Nero murdered not Claudius but Agrippina.

The two sets of triangular relationships and their historical analogies are patterns making it clear that Hamlet son must emulate his uncle's sin in avenging his father's death. It has the neatness of an eye-for-an-eye justice. It is the pattern Hamlet father expects his son to follow as unquestioningly as Fortinbras and Laertes follow their revenges. And as before what stands in the way of direct accomplishment, of a precise parallelism, is Hamlet's mind, his better consciousness of the implications of the larger pattern of things.

A trio of young men all aim their revenges against Claudius and the security of his state. Young Fortinbras is after Claudius to avenge his father's loss and the territory which went with it. Young Laertes is ready to overturn the throne for its murky involvement in the cover-up of his father's murder. Claudius turns both aside from their vengeance, Fortinbras into a futile "fantasy and trick of fame" as Hamlet calls it, the classic method of taking out one's frustration on a secondary target, and Laertes is diverted into serving the king. Laertes for his pains is sickened by what he has to do so much that he loses his desire for revenge altogether and asks his victim to "exchange forgiveness with me". Fortinbras for his acquiescence gains a kingdom.

Between these two casual slaughterers stands Hamlet, more powerfully impelled to murder (by three offences to Laertes'one), pushed by the ghost where Fortinbras and Laertes struggle only for their notional honour. All the structural analogues, the triangles and the parallelisms, draw our attention firmly to Hamlet's mental problem and indicate some of the complexities of his situation. Unlike his peers he pauses. Like rugged Pyrrhus he hears Troy falling. He hesitates over obstacles where Laertes and Fortinbras see only a clear road. He diverts his passion onto secondary targets as he sorts out the tangle of morality and psychology in which he is caught. The whole interim of Hamlet's delay between the order to take revenge and its execution is the central matter of the play.

Notes

¹ G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London 1930), pp. 32-41 and 318-20.