Hamlet, a graduate student at a distant university, was not even aware of the death of his father, who he had loved and revered, until long after the fact. By the time the news reached him, and he could make plans to return to the castle of Elsinore, it was to discover that his beloved mother had remarried, and that his father's brother, Claudius, now shared his mother's bed, and was the King. Wrong? Right? Morality apart, this was a situation he had to face on his return home, listening to his new father and sovereign speak for the first time in public.