Claudius Analysis - Hamlet

Claudius
In ‘Hamlet’, major antagonist is a shrewd, lustful, conniving king who contrasts sharply with the other male characters in the play. Whereas most of the other important men in ‘Hamlet’ are preoccupied with ideas of justice, revenge, and moral balance, Claudius is bent upon maintaining his own power. The old King Hamlet was apparently a stern warrior, but Claudius is a corrupt politician whose main weapon is his ability to manipulate others through his skillful use of language. Claudius’s speech is compared to poison being poured in the ear, the method he used to murder Hamlet’s father. Claudius’s love for Gertrude may be sincere, but it also seems likely that he married her as a strategic move, to help him win the throne away from Hamlet after the death of the king. As the play progresses, Claudius’s mounting fear of Hamlet’s insanity leads him to even greater self-preservation; when Gertrude tells him that Hamlet has killed Polonius, Claudius does not remark that Gertrude might have been in danger, but only that he would have been in danger had he been in the room. He tells Laertes the same thing as he attempts to soothe the young man’s anger after his father’s death. Claudius is ultimately too crafty for his own good. In Act five, rather than allowing Laertes only two methods of killing Hamlet, the sharpened sword and the poison on the blade, Claudius insists on a third, the poisoned goblet. When Gertrude inadvertently drinks the poison and dies, Hamlet is at last able to bring himself to kill Claudius, and the king falls to his own cowardly doings.
As with all the supporting characters in ‘Hamlet’, Claudius is not developed to his full potential. His primary role in the play is to spawn Hamlet's confusion and anger, and his subsequent search for truth and life's meaning. However, Claudius is not a straight forward character. While his qualities are not as thoroughly explored as Hamlet's, Shakespeare crafts a whole human being out of the treacherous King of Denmark.
When we first see Claudius, he strikes us an intelligent and capable ruler. He gives a speech to make his country proud, addressing his brother's death and the potential conflict with Norway. Claudius knows that a change in government could start civil unrest, and he is afraid of possible unlawful alliances and rebellion. His speech juxtaposes the people's loss with the new beginning they will have under his care, and he uses the death of Hamlet's father to create a sense of national pride, "the whole kingdom...contracted in one brow of woe". Claudius has assumed the role of the chief mourner, and the people can unite behind a collective suffering. He can now concentrate on his kingly duties, and he takes immediate and decisive action by appeasing the Norwegian king. He also deals skilfully with Laertes' request to leave for France. "On the whole, then, there emerges a King who is well qualified for his office... Hamlet's words their real value”. But Claudius, in private, is a very different person. The Ghost refers to him as "that incestuous, that adulterate beast", and we soon realize that his crime is what is "rotten in the state of Denmark." The King has committed regicide and has corrupted the Queen with "the witchcraft of his wit". Claudius represents the worst in human nature; lust, greed, corruption, and excess.
In ‘Hamlet’, Claudius is essential to progressing the story and developing the character of Hamlet. At first he seems like a simple character who we can easily label as treacherous and evil, but as the play continues we notice that his conscious is very much controlling him in every way shape and from and that he is sorry for his sins. His demise at the hands of Hamlet affects the audience more so than we thought it would at the beginning of the play as we see his transformation in to the personification of melancholy.