King Claudius

King Claudius is a fictional character from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. He is the brother to King Hamlet, second husband to Gertrude and uncle to Hamlet. He obtained the throne by murdering his own brother with poison and then marrying the late king's widow. He is loosely based on the Jut chieftain Feng who appears in Chronicon Lethrense and in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum. Claudius is shown at the beginning of the play to be a capable monarch as he deals diplomatically with such issues as the military threat from Norway and Hamlet's depression. It is not until the appearance of King Hamlet's ghost that it is revealed that Claudius may have poison the old king in his sleep in order to usurp both his throne and his wife. During the play's progression he takes a turn for the worse by first resorting to spy, and, when that fails, murder. It is in Act III scene 3, when Claudius forestalls Hamlet's revenge by confessing his sins to God in his own private chapel, that the... full article at wikipedia