Thomas More and Hamlet
Both Thomas More and Prince Hamlet opposed the kings under whose rule they lived, but there are some illuminating key differences:
It is said at his execution, More’s last words were, "I die the King's good servant, and God's first." He did not oppose Henry’s marriage to his dead brother’s widow, because the church gave special dispensation for it, but later Henry would claim it was an incestuous and biblically sinful marriage [1]. It is likely that More would have been fine with Henry VIII having his marriage annulled if Rome had approved, but they did not, so when faced with a choice between obeying the church and his king, More chose the church, and believed this choice was also good service to his king.
Hamlet, on the other hand, opposed a similar marriage of his uncle to his mother. Rome had not given special dispensation, and probably would not have because the previous marriage had already produced Hamlet as a son of Gertrude and King Hamlet.
The incestuous first marriage of Henry VIII (certainly as Henry defined it) caused England a great deal of trouble.
It is as if Shakespeare, through the plot and themes of his play, Hamlet, is suggesting:
England and its princes should have done better than Thomas More, and opposed the incestuous marriage from the start, instead of merely opposing the annulment.
So in Hamlet’s world, we are asked to imagine a Denmark – and an England – where (in part because of an incestuous marriage of the monarch) the time is out of joint and has to be made right [2].
Thomas More was executed for trying to make things right, as he saw them. But it was not enough, and as Marc Antony says in another play, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones" [3]. Through the analogy of old Denmark, Shakespeare’s Hamlet envisioned an England in which there was still much to set right.
NOTES: All references to Shakespeare plays are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online versions: https://shakespeare.folger.edu
[1] Postscript 7 November, 2025: It is possible that when Hamlet calls Claudius a "Moor" in Gertrude's closet scene (3.4.76-77], there are more than just two or three meanings:
a) Geography: That Claudius is a swamp in comparison to Hamlet's murdered father, the fair mountain;
b) Race: That Claudius is of darker haired and/or complexion than his brother *;
c) Religion: Claudius is like an unsaved Moor, outside the salvation of the church,* a Muslim against whom Christendom launched a number of Crusades to reclaim the Holy Land, including one in favor of which St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached (it ultimately failed, but Bernard blamed the failure on the sins of the crusaders) and another during which St. Francis of Assisi met with the Sultan of Egypt, the leader of the enemies, perhaps embodying love of enemy; hence perhaps we have Francisco and Bernardo as the two sentinels first on stage;
d) Tudor History/Religion/Politics: Sir Thomas More (whose name had various spellings in his lifetime and in Shakespeare's) supported Rome's special dispensation for Henry VIII to marry his brother's widow, and in doing so, he supported an incestuous marriage, and also became an enemy to the crown and a traitor, a roadblock to the marriage of Henry to Anne Boleyn, Mother of Elizabeth I.
So in this last sense, to call Claudius a [Thomas] moor [More] would be to call him a supporter of incestuous marriage and an impediment to the Tudor line that resulted in Elizabeth.
While Shakespeare had Catholic sympathies, that doesn't mean all Catholics supported Henry's marriage to his brother's widow, or that all of them opposed Elizabeth merely because she was at odds with Rome.
* For this aspect of "moor" as race, see Patricia Parker's 2003 essay, "Black Hamlet Battening on the Moor" (Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 31). I discuss this in a previous post, in which I also discuss Martin Luther's anxiety about the Ottoman Empire as more unified than Christendom:
MOORISH LIVES MATTER: Hamlet, Luther, & the Expanding Ottoman Empire, 15 September, 2020 https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/09/moorish-lives-matter-hamlet-luther.html
[2] “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right!” Hamlet 1.5.210-211.
[3] Julius Caesar, 3.2.84-85.
IMAGE: Portrait of Sir Thomas More (1527), by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/1498–1543). The Frick Collection, New York. Public Domain, via https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Hans_Holbein%2C_the_Younger_-_Sir_Thomas_More_-_Google_Art_Project.
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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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