Hired or Commissioned Murder
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Under Elizabethan law, if a person instructs or commands another person to murder someone, that person is as guilty of the crime as they would be if they committed the crime with their own hands.
This consideration would apply to Claudius' using Laertes as his agent in the murder of Hamlet. Laertes is the agent of Hamlet's death, and certainly complicitous in the plot, but so too is Claudius. In effect, Claudius is equally guilty even though Laertes does the actual deed.
Nor is Hamlet innocent of commissioning the murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern through the altered letters he sends on to the English authorities. This too, is premeditated murder. Nor is it the only murder for which Hamlet anticipates having to answer in the afterlife. As he says of Polonius,
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For this same lord, |
