ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to consider how Claudius came to be King of Denmark after the lamentable death of his brother. It seeks to enquire into that ambiguity, to pluck out the heart of Claudius’s mystery. The public aspect is the official report distributed by Claudius’s Bureau of Public Information that while old Hamlet was sleeping in the orchard, his custom always of the afternoon, a serpent stung him. Laertes then makes himself the ‘Organ’ of Claudius’s ‘exploit, now ripe in [his] device’. In moving from the general to the particular, Claudius creates a unique situation. As we have just noted, Claudius’s honest prayer about the murder of his brother relates that event to its Biblical archetype – Cain’s murder of his brother Abel. Hamlet’s use of the word (the seventh instance) comments on Claudius’s uses in an exaggerated manner, as we can well suppose, and gives it a metaphysical resonance.
