Hamlet’s Wicked Stepfather

In early modern England, the figure of the wicked stepmother is already archetypal: the queen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline falsely promises that her stepdaughter Imogen will not find her ‘evil-eyed’ after ‘the slander of most stepmothers’ (I.i.71–3). The figure of the stepfather, however, is more elusive. He possesses far greater power over his stepchildren, and yet the shadow he casts is far fainter. With one significant exception: Claudius in Hamlet.

In making a stepfather his central antagonist, Shakespeare makes visible a figure who barely features in the early modern cultural imagination, and yet is insistently present in the court records of the period. Playwright Thomas Middleton and writer-physician Thomas Browne were both defrauded of their inheritances by avaricious stepfathers (as the records of London’s Court of Orphans show), yet both refer to stepfathers only obliquely in their own works. This paper will interrogate the curious cultural absence of the stepfather, and argue that Claudius’ stepfatherhood is intrinsic to his villainy.

Dr Emma Whipday is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Newcastle University. Her publications include Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies (winner of the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2020), Teaching Shakespeare and His Sisters, the collections Playing and Playgoing (with Simon Smith) and Shakespeare/Play, and the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics Measure for Measure. Emma is an AHRC BBC New Generation Thinker. She is also a playwright; her work is regularly performed at the reconstructed Blackfriars playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center.

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