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A lot of kings get killed in Shakespeare plays, and it is difficult (or indeed well-nigh impossible) to learn any lessons from it. For example, in two plays, Richard III and Macbeth, two kings get killed. In Richard III, Richard kills his nephew Edward V but at the end of the play Richmond kills Richard. In Macbeth, Macbeth kills Duncan, but at the end Macduff kills him. It is suggested that it is a bad thing when Macbeth and Richard kill kings but a good thing when Macduff and Richmond kill kings. Ah, but those were bad kings. But Richard II was a bad king and it was still a bad thing when he gets killed by Henry IV in Richard II. And Henry VI was an astonishingly bad king and it is at best a matter of indifference when he gets killed. And our feelings about King John when he gets killed are indeed ambivalent.

The nearest you can come to a common theme in all of these regicides is that it is bad to kill a legitimate king (even a bad one like Richard II) but it is OK to kill a king with a poor title to the throne. Whether or not a person has a good title to the throne is determined using the sensibilities of Shakespeare's time: the throne should pass to the eldest son of the former king. At times this is in conflict with the historical basis of the plays--eldest sons were not automatically entitled to succeed in Republican Rome (Julius Caesar), early Scotland (Macbeth), or Viking Denmark (Hamlet). In fact, Macbeth and Claudius succeeded to the throne perfectly legitimately, but it would not seem so to an Elizabethan audience. To them, Octavian, Malcolm and Hamlet would seem legitimate whereas Brutus, Macbeth and Claudius would not.

Unfortunately, at the end of Richard III, the throne is taken by a claimant with an absolutely terrible claim to the throne: Richmond, later to become Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth's grandfather. Richmond's best claim to the throne was that he had married the sister of Edward V (in much the same way that Claudius's claim to the throne was enhanced by his marriage to Gertrude).

The issue of succession to the throne was a hot issue in Shakespeare's day, where an unmarried woman was queen. Even after the succession of her nephew James, there was uncertainty. Shakespeare's treatment of kingship tends to support orderly, lawful succession and to vilify anyone who interferes with that.

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