Was Hamlet just an inept King Edward III?

'Hamlet' has been the centre of much study and the focus of a great deal of theories and character analysis.  Was he oedipal?  Was he bi-polar?  But there is one study I have not seen, and that is an examination of the parallels between Hamlet and King Edward III.

Edward III holding court after 1339

Their stories are strikingly similar - they were both princes and heirs to their respective thrones, both of their fathers were murdered*, both of their mothers entered into a relationship with the man responsible who then assumed power, and both resorted to the use of subterfuge in order to gain their revenge. 

The outcomes were very different.  Hamlet famously perished, killed by the touch of a poisoned sword, his close friend Horatio at his side.  Edward survived, thrived, and ruled for fifty years, surrounded by good, loyal friends.

So, one was successful, one was not.  But was Hamlet doomed from the beginning?  And if so, does that diminish what Edward achieved or does it make him all the more remarkable?

Hamlet's father was killed by Claudius and the first Hamlet knew of any trouble was when he was recalled from university.  He only learned that the death was murder when he spoke to his father's ghost.  By then his mother was already married to Claudius.  Hamlet struggled with the task he was given by his father - avenging his death - and it brought him low.  He contemplated suicide more than once during the play, speaking of 'self-slaughter', and again most famously in his 'To be or not to be' speech.  Was this a natural reaction for a young man in his situation, to the discovery of the murder of his father and his mother's hasty remarriage, to the loss of his birthright to be king after his father?  Or was Hamlet always going to feel this way, even had his father not been murdered, had died a natural death?  Could he ever have ruled?  Was his personality suited to kingship?

The sensible way to answer this would be to look at someone who struggled with a similar situation - King Edward III. 

Edward III's coronation in 1327

Edward's mother, Queen Isabella, began an affair, under his nose, with Roger Mortimer when she took Edward to Paris.  His father, Edward II, sent him numerous, and increasingly distressing, letters demanding he return to England, but he was unable to comply.  The new couple, Isabella and Mortimer, raised an army to invade England, effectively selling Edward's hand in marriage to Hainault for soldiers to swell the ranks.  They captured his father, imprisoned him and persuaded Parliament to declare young Edward king.  However Edward refused until his father had renounced the throne himself and only then did the young prince agree to be crowned.  But despite his new status, Edward was forced to allow his mother's lover Mortimer to take his place, ruling as king in his stead.  He was just fourteen.

Edward was then under what was virtual house arrest with a small household who were constantly monitored and spied on, again reminiscent of the activity at Elsinore that Hamlet so despised, hence the only way Edward could convey his own thoughts to the pope was by subterfuge, adding code words to his letters, another parallel with 'Hamlet' where altered letters play an important part.  All this, you would think, would be enough to make anyone melancholy. 

And yet Edward does not appear to have reacted this way.  He appears to have been a far stronger, more resilient person than Hamlet while facing similar adversity to the Danish prince, more in fact when you consider that Edward was actually expendable as he had a brother (and his father may not have been dead after all*).  His solution was to act and not delay as Hamlet did.  When Roger Mortimer, rightly, suspected a plot and threatened Edward's friends, Edward acted that same day to remove him.  Maybe his childhood at his father's troubled court had prepared him for such a life, whereas Hamlet's childhood appears to have been idyllic.

Another characteristic of Hamlet was his animosity towards his mother demonstrated and much debated in the 'Closet' scene where Hamlet confronts Gertrude - "Good night: but go not to mine uncle's bed; Assume a virtue, if you have it not."  What Edward thought of his mother is unrecorded, but he did not punish her unduly though he must have been as furious at her as Hamlet was at his mother, and she remained a part of his life.  That she referred to her husband in a letter mere months before his deposition as 'my very sweet heart' (mon tresdoutz coer) and that she requested that she be buried with Edward II's heart suggest she may have later regretted her actions as Gertrude did, though she was far more guilty than the deluded Danish queen.

Hamlet and Ophelia

Both princes had a significant woman in their life, a lover, a paramour, and maybe the differing ways in which they approached love could explain why one failed and one did not.  Hamlet chose who he loved and he declared he loved Ophelia, but only really expressing such sentiments after she was dead.  He did all he could to distance her from him and eventually sent her mad, her committing that act that had so troubled Hamlet - suicide - and drowning herself, albeit with some sense of diminished responsibility. 

Again, for Edward, everything was the opposite and played out very differently - he had been forced into an arranged marriage, being told pretty much to take his pick of the Hainault daughters.  He selected Philippa, the eldest unmarried daughter in the family.  He had every reason to resent Philippa, if not for herself then for the circumstances of their union.  But he did not.  He and Philippa made the absolute best of their situation, probably clinging to each other in adversity, both still so young, and producing at the earliest practical opportunity (Philippa was sixteen, Edward seventeen) the son and heir that was so necessary to their security.  Having someone to confide in, someone he could not be separated from, maybe made a difference to Edward, gave him a comfort that Hamlet denied himself.

There is one similarity between Hamlet and Edward where they both used the same tactic to further their interests in their dramas, and it worked for them both, and that is the element of subterfuge. I've already touched on the letters they both used but there was another instance for them both.  Hamlet used a false play to cause Claudius to declare himself, to prove himself guilty - "the play's the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king."  Claudius reacts to the dramatic murder scene and seals his fate in the eyes of Hamlet.  Edward resorted to subterfuge simply and literally to catch a king, or in his case, a usurper.  Once his friends had been threatened by Roger Mortimer at Nottingham and Edward knew he had to do something, he ordered his friends to gain entry to the locked castle using hidden underground passages and thereby catch Mortimer unawares and arrest him before his own retinue had time to react.  It is one of the few instances where both young men achieved what they wanted - subterfuge obviously works!

The final scene in 'Hamlet'

Ultimately, though, Hamlet failed.  Yes, he avenged the death of his father but the price was very, very high.  He sends Ophelia to an early grave, he murders her father and her brother Laertes, his mother is killed with the poisoned wine meant for him and he succumbs to a poisoned blade.  Hamlet is remembered for his inaction and delay and his melancholy in the face of adversity.  Edward on the other hand succeeded spectacularly.  He arrested Roger Mortimer and his closest allies with little fuss.  His mother, we must presume, repented, and she lived comfortably into old age.  He loved the wife who was pressed upon him and they had a long and happy marriage and had a lot of children.  Edward proved himself capable and was a known across Europe as a man of action and one who knew how to enjoy himself.  We must assume, therefore, that Hamlet's personality doomed him and not his circumstances.

Shakespeare was familiar with Edward's story, he had read Holinshed, took much of the detail for his history plays from that chronicle, and there is a great deal of detail about Edward III in the 1577 version.  He is suggested as a collaborator on the play 'The Reign of King Edward III' and if so he was intimate with the history and must have read Froissart, the go-to source for Edward's reign which is the basis for the play.  Even if he was not a writer of it, he most certainly would have known it.  Whether he took elements of the king's life and included them in his version of 'Hamlet', consciously or subconsciously I don't know, I have not read any other study on this aspect of 'Hamlet' and I personally have not had the chance to delve any deeper than I have here, but the parallels are certainly striking.

* It is generally held that Edward II died at Berkeley castle in September 1327 but in recent years material has surfaced that has thrown new light on old sources suggesting that he did in fact survive not just beyond 1327 but possibly into the 1340s, living hidden in northern Italy with the odd trip into Germany to meet with his son.  Many 'old school' historians deny this version of events, but the growing body of evidence is more and more compelling and makes far more sense than the opposing view.  For more information on this line of enquiry take a look at Ian Mortimer's book Medieval Intrigue, Kathryn Warner's website and the Auramala Project.