Claudius

Claudius is the man who killed Hamlet’s father and took his place beside Hamlet’s mother. In Freud’s reading, his importance lies not in a developed personal portrait but in the role he occupies in Hamlet’s psychic conflict: Claudius embodies the realization of wishes that Hamlet cannot consciously acknowledge, and the object of revenge therefore becomes the person he cannot bring himself to punish.

Identity and Function

Freud identifies Claudius through his relation to Hamlet: he is the murderer of Hamlet’s father and the man who has taken the father’s place beside the mother. That combination makes Claudius more than the target of a revenge plot. He represents, in Freud’s interpretation, the fulfillment in another person of Hamlet’s own repressed infantile wishes.

The book provides no independent account of Claudius’s motives or history. Its attention falls instead on what his presence means for Hamlet. Freud translates the prince’s unspoken inner conflict into conscious terms, treating the relation among son, father, mother, and Claudius as the key to the drama’s inhibition.

Hamlet’s Hesitation

Hamlet’s assigned task is to avenge his father, but the play, as Freud describes it, does not state the reasons for his hesitation. Freud sets this uncertainty against two explanations already offered by readers: the familiar view that thought paralyses Hamlet’s capacity for action, and the alternative that he is portrayed as pathologically irresolute. Neither, Freud argues, accounts for the contrast between Hamlet’s delay in taking revenge and his demonstrated capacity to act.

Hamlet acts suddenly when he kills the eavesdropper behind the arras, and later acts purposefully when he sends two courtiers to the deaths intended for himself. His conduct therefore makes a general inability to act inadequate as an explanation. Freud locates the obstacle in the specific identity of the man Hamlet must punish: Claudius has removed the father and taken his place beside the mother, thereby embodying the very wishes Hamlet represses.

Repression and Interpretation

In Freud’s account, Hamlet’s revulsion at Claudius is turned inward. Rather than directing revenge against the man whose position reflects his own forbidden wishes, Hamlet experiences self-reproach and scruples of conscience, as though he were no better than the offender he must punish. Claudius thus helps explain not merely whom Hamlet is asked to kill, but why that particular task arrests him.

Freud compares this concealed conflict with the more openly realized wishful fantasy he finds in Oedipus. The difference, he argues, registers the advance of repression across the centuries: what is explicit in the ancient tragedy remains hidden in Hamlet and becomes legible through its inhibiting effects. Claudius’s narrative function is consequently inseparable from Freud’s interpretive method, which reads a dramatic character’s relation to the hero as evidence of wishes that the hero cannot consciously avow.

Dramatic and Cultural Significance

Freud presents Hamlet as proof that modern drama can remain powerful even when the hero’s character and motives are not fully clear. The play’s central hesitation supplies an opening for psychological interpretation: Claudius’s relation to Hamlet’s parents allows Freud to explain the delay as a conflict with repressed wishes, rather than as mere indecision or excessive thought.

Freud also relates the interpretation to the poet’s circumstances, noting that the drama was written after Shakespeare’s father died and that Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet, whose name Freud connects with Hamlet. These biographical details are offered as possible context for the play’s concern with the son’s relation to his parents, not as a separate account of Claudius. The character’s decisive significance remains structural: by occupying the father’s place beside the mother, Claudius makes revenge confront Hamlet with a forbidden likeness between the punished man and the prince’s own unconscious desire.