Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

English audiences - after recent attempted invasions by the Spanish Armada, and anticipating more - may have felt Hamlet was their hero, to change Claudius’ secret letter that ordered Hamlet's death so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are executed instead. Early audiences may have opposed any suggestion of oppression by a foreign power, Spanish or Danish. Hamlet and his former school-friends-turned-spies had been sent by Claudius, who claimed they must collect England’s "neglected tribute" (3.1), like insurance payments to organized crime: Pay, and we won't hurt you. It may have seemed to them satisfying that the rebellious, "mad" Danish prince would change the letter intended to bring about his own death, so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would be executed by the very English from whom the three were told to collect this tribute. Although Elizabeth prohibited speculation about her successor, many knew that James of Scotland, who had married Princess A...

“CLAUDIUS” WAS NOT A NEUTRAL NAME in Shakespeare’s England, nor was the fact that Claudius I of Rome had invaded England with elephants in 43 AD [1]. By the time Shakespeare’s first and second quartos of Hamlet were published (1603-4), two Roman Catholic popes had excommunicated Elizabeth (Pius V, 1570; Sixtus V, 1588) and openly encouraged her assassination. Rome also supported three Spanish Armada’s attempts to invade England during her reign (1588-1597). All of this colored England’s views of Roman history and of native resistance, such as that of Boudica [2], sometimes called “Queen of the Iceni” tribe, who led a rebellion against Roman occupiers slightly less than two decades after the invasion of Claudius. When her husband, King Prasutagus died, Boudica was flogged and her daughters were raped. Killing as many as 80,000, Boudica’s revolt destroyed a settlement of Roman military veterans at Camulodunum (now Colchester), where a large and expensive temple to Claudius I was locate...