Jane Austen Tuesday: what is due to us

Hamlet is full of characters who are hemmed in by the strictly legal requirements of last wills.

Hamlet himself, is stuck because his father died without meeting the legal (and legalistic) requirement of making final absolution. One way of thinking about this is that Hamlet's sense of what is due to his father as man has been denied by a strictly legal requirement.

And there are legal requirements all over Hamlet. Consider the duel between old Fortinbras and old Hamlet. We might think, typical heroic stuff here. Two guys stake everything on a fight just like two young men racing for pink slips. Only, when Horatio tells us about the famous duel, he immediately starts talking legal talk about legal requirements:

[Old Hamlet] Did slay this Fortinbras; who, by a seal'd compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands 105
Which he stood seiz'd of, to the conqueror;
Against the which a moiety competent
Was gaged by our king; which had return'd
To the inheritance of Fortinbras,
Had he been vanquisher, as, by the same cov'nant 110
And carriage of the article design'd,
His fell to Hamlet. (Act One, Scene one)

Young Fortinbras does not feel constrained by these legal restraints because he feels that more is due to him as a man. One of the least-noticed aspects of the play is that young Fortinbras (whose name literally means "strong armed") will get his way. We all focus on Hamlet so intently, we miss what the magician Shakespeare is doing with his other hand. Hamlet never has any sense of what is due to him as a man. His sole passion is a sense of what was due to his father.

And that has to make us think somewhat of Mrs. Dashwood.