The play is set in medieval times when both Denmark and Norway were electorates, and the court and nobility "elected" a ruler by a consensus-based process not unlike acclamation. While kingly succession was loosely based on primogeniture, there were important exceptions, as when the heir apparent was too young or otherwise unavailable -- or when a surviving queen married laterally within the royalty -- as did Emma, widow of Ethelred II, marry Canute, who became King of England in 1016.

            Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (TLN 678) -- and, indeed, had been in England until around the time of Shakespeare's birth. Elizabeth Tudor -- as biographers (recently David Starkey) are coming to appreciate -- was not only devout but a brilliant practical theologian, benefiting enormously from her religious training in the Protestant court of her stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr.   

          Her predecessor, her half sister, Mary, had reversed Henry VIII's and Edward IV's break with Rome. Mary re-established Catholicism with a vengeance (and scores of "heretics" were burnt at the stake). But Queen Elizabeth prevented religious war in England with a brilliant strategy that was in the main her own creation: She kept many of the rituals of the Church of Rome, to the dismay of the Puritans. She allowed religious freedom within the limits permitted by the active -- and often treasonous -- Counter-Reformation in her realm. And she removed from the Book of Common Prayer passages most offensive to Catholics. Someone once characterized her religious policy generally as, "Believe what you want but use this book!"

           For Shakespeare's audience, Royal England was about the legitimacy of succession. The summit of the Tudor succession was the long peaceable reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603). Because of the lack of male heirs that had plagued the Tudors, the succession was clouded, and several inconvenient pretenders were beheaded, the last being the Earl of Essex in 1601, the year after Shakespeare's Hamlet appeared. Elizabethans would know Lady Jane Grey and Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots --  not as myths but as part of the daily consciousness of her subjects. 

            Elizabeth Tudor was one of the most intelligent and educated people of her time. She was one of the most capable rulers that England ever had. She was immensely popular. Her choice of advisors was almost flawless. She had prevented religious war with her fusion of Catholicism and protestantism into the Church of England -- and stabilized it by the example of her own personal religious tolerance. She (with Gresham and William Cecil) had un-debased the coinage, purified the economy, and brought her realm into unrivalled prosperity. Her thrift and dislike of bloodshed (and, not least of all, her besetting flaw, her procrastination) had preserved the country from the fate of the rest of Europe: almost continual civil and religious wars. But when Elizabeth did go to war, against the Armada, she defeated Spain and became the most respected prince in Europe, grudgingly admired even by her archenemy the Pope.

710      Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. The spirit of a dead Christian returning from a Catholic purgatory to demand revenge troubles some scholars -- and a few even hold that it can't be Hamlet's father at all, therefore, but must be some dark spirit -- why would a Christian ghost demand revenge? Especially why would he imperil his son's soul, if the revenge were a sin?

            But the Greek tragedies had ennobled the concept of revenge. Jesus's teaching that vengeance is the Lord's, coexists with the pagan scream for revenge -- and coexist comfortably  in Hamlet. And for Shakespeare: What Keats termed Shakespeare's "negative capability" (we might oversimplify this to "tolerance for ambiguity and paradox") is powerfully exemplified by the preservation of a sense of free will and personal responsibility in Hamlet despite its assaults by pagan fate on the one side and submission to the will of the Christian God on the other.

711-72    The o'er-hasty marriage -- it is probably this, more than anything else, that inclines to the idea of at least emotional adultery between Claudius and Gertrude before the king's death. There is no textual evidence of actual adultery anywhere in the play. If any would know for sure, the king's ghost (if it is his ghost) would, but that is not one of the accusations he makes. Perhaps the queen was so love-starved from all those years waiting for her warlike husband to come in from the orchard or home from the wars that she jumped at his brother.

            When the Ghost refers to Claudius as an "adulterate beast," he means filthy or lustful, not adulterous. (In all his poems and plays Shakespeare uses "adulterate" as an adjective only six times and, in all cases, the context is for "filthy." When he means adulterous he says adulterous.) What if King Hamlet wasn't such a good husband? He certainly isn't much of a father, at least as a ghostly one: Listen carefully. This speech of his (if in fact it is the late king's spirit) is the only shot we get at directly understanding the late king's character. His one chance to come back and speak with his son, and it's all about him, the king, the husband -- nothing about the son. In the text as written, it's about him, and the Ghost's self-description is self-pitying and embarrassing, with too much focus on all my smooth body, on his pain, his suffering. And he doesn't seem really to know Gertrude, however much he is jealously stalking her from beyond the grave. His interest in her current sexual life is unbecoming, and we wonder whether he's been spying on the newlyweds.

724-76    O horrible, O horrible, most horrible. Some productions put this exclamation in Hamlet's mouth; others have them alternate "horrible." Shakespeare's genius for getting the audience to believe anything is nowhere better showcased than here. His poetry (". . . in the porches of my ears. . . .") somehow certifies the "facts": Nobody notices the absolute medical impossibility of poisoning a normally sleeping man through his ear canals. But Hamlet's horror and belief make us suspend disbelief.

769        This leads into the final command of the Ghost, ". . .nor let thy soul contrive /Against thy mother aught." To avenge him, but not harm Gertrude. Odd that the Ghost suspects Hamlet might harm his mother, odd that it has to specifically protect her. Leave her to heaven. Some scholars have felt this Christian forgiveness proves that the Ghost is truly Hamlet's father, that it cannot be demonic. (But then, the devil can quote Scripture when it suits him.) One nineteenth century scholar points out that Hamlet seems to regard this not just as prohibition against killing his mother but a mandate to alienate her from Claudius and to make her repent her sins -- which he does later, in the Closet Scene.