Why Hamlet didn't inherit the throne

Almost every reader of Hamlet stumbles upon the same question and never gets the full answer: if Hamlet was the dead king's son, why was his uncle the one who ascended the throne? The feeling is of a hole in the plot, an obvious injustice that the play simply ignores. It's not that. It's just that the play's Denmark doesn't function like the France or England of Shakespeare's time.

A crown that is voted for, not inherited

In the hereditary monarchies that the public of 1601 knew, the throne passed automatically from the father to the eldest son. This is not the case in Hamlet's Denmark. There, a council of nobles chooses the new king from among candidates from the royal house. The son of the dead king is the natural favorite of this pick, the strongest name at the table, but he is not the automatic heir. The crown depends on one vote.

It's a difference that changes the weight of everything that happens afterwards. There is no usurpation in the strict legal sense when Claudius takes the throne, because there was no automatic right of Hamlet to it to begin with.

What Claudius actually did

This does not absolve Claudius, and the play leaves no doubt about what he did: he killed his own brother. But his crime was not taking something that already rightfully belonged to Hamlet. It was to maneuver the election.

Claudius kills the king, quickly marries the widowed queen, still within the first month of mourning, to consolidate his position before the council, and wins the vote while his nephew is still returning from university, far from the castle, without being able to campaign for himself. When he finally lists the scores he has to settle with his uncle, Hamlet himself names this maneuver precisely: he accuses Claudius of having placed himself between the election and the hopes he had.

It is not the language of a stolen heir. It's the language of a candidate who lost to an opponent who played dirty.

Why this distinction changes the weight of hesitation

Here is the point that often goes unnoticed, and that changes the moral weight of everything Hamlet hesitates to do. If he were a legitimate heir stripped of what is his, killing Claudius would be regaining a right, a correction. But he is not that.

Hamlet is a candidate who lost an election, even though it was won through maneuver and crime. If he kills the king who currently occupies the throne, even if that king is a murderer, he is not correcting a previous illegality. He is committing a new one, against the political order that Denmark itself recognizes as legitimate, the same advice that acclaimed Claudius.

This helps explain why the entire play treats revenge as something weighty rather than a simple settling of scores. Hamlet would not have, by killing his uncle, merely charged a blood debt. He would have overthrown, on his own, a king that an institution chose, even if that choice was born out of cheating.

Who, in the end, gets the throne

The final irony is that the throne of Denmark does not return to either of them. In the last act, with Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude and Laertes dead, the one who arrives at the empty castle is Fortinbras, prince of Norway, a foreigner to the entire Danish royal house. He assumes power and orders Hamlet's body to be raised like that of a soldier, saying:

"He was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royal." (Fortinbras, Hamlet, Act V, scene 2)

The crown that was elective, that Hamlet had a reasonable hope of winning, and that Claudius won by maneuver, ends up in the hands of those who did not contest any election. It's the most coherent ending possible for a play that had already shown, from the first act, that that throne never automatically belonged to anyone.

Continue: Hamlet, by Shakespeare: summary and analysis · Why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius by praying · The fable, from Aesop and Phaedrus to Orwell · Psalm 51: the penitent's prayer
Source class (YouTube): Hamlet, de William Shakespeare (NousCast)