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King Claudius is a fictional character and the main antagonist of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the brother to King Hamlet , second husband to Gertrude and uncle and later stepfather to Prince Hamlet .
W. S. Gilbert's play (1874) is a comedy in which Rosencrantz plots with his friend Guildenstern to get rid of Hamlet, so that Rosencrantz can marry Ophelia. They discover that Claudius has written a play. The king's literary work is so embarrassingly bad that Claudius has decreed that anyone who mentions it must be executed.
Gertrude reveals no guilt in her marriage with Claudius after the recent murder of her husband, and Hamlet begins to show signs of jealousy towards Claudius. According to Hamlet, she scarcely mourned her husband's death before marrying Claudius. Her name may derive from Gertrude of Bavaria, who was Queen of Denmark in the late 12th century.
Claudius also questions Hamlet regarding his continuing to grieve for his father, and forbids him to return to his university in Wittenberg. After the court exits, Hamlet despairs of his father's death and his mother's hasty remarriage. Learning of the ghost from Horatio, Hamlet resolves to see it himself.
Claudius is the King of Denmark, elected to the throne after the death of his brother, King Hamlet. Claudius has married Gertrude, his brother's widow. Gertrude is the Queen of Denmark, and King Hamlet's widow, now married to Claudius, and mother to Hamlet. The Ghost appears in the image of Hamlet's father, the late King Hamlet (Old Hamlet).
En route to England, Hamlet discovers a letter from King Claudius which is being carried to England by Hamlet's old but now untrusted friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The letter commands that Hamlet be put to death upon his arrival in England. Hamlet rewrites the letter to command that instead, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be put to death.
Unfortunately, Rosencrantz is in love with Hamlet's fiancée, Ophelia. She joins in their plan to break her unwanted engagement to the mercurial prince: Guildenstern and Rosencrantz will trick Hamlet into playing Claudius' tragedy before the king and thereby incur death.
Laertes / l eɪ ˈ ɜːr t iː z / is a character in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Laertes is Polonius' son and Ophelia's brother. In the final scene, he mortally stabs Hamlet with a poison-tipped sword to avenge the deaths of his father and sister, for which he blamed Hamlet. While dying of the same poison, he implicates King Claudius.