Characters in Hamlet He is the courtier sent by Claudius to invite Hamlet to participate in the duel with Laertes. (This character is called "Ostricke" in the Second Quarto.) Osric, as well as Polonius, attempts to engage with Hamlet in the elaborate, witty discourse, fully consistent with Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 work, "The Courtier". This work outlines several courtly rules, specifically advising royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. The Players are a company of actors who arrive at Elsinore Castle. Friends of Hamlet, they had earlier performed in "the city" (presumably Copenhagen), but faced stiff competition from boy performers, so they
Critical approaches to Hamlet thus offers a contradiction: does he avenge his father and kill Claudius, or does he leave the vengeance to God, as his religion requires? The play's Protestantism lies in its location in Denmark, a Protestant (and specifically a Lutheran) country in Shakespeare's day, though it is unclear whether the fictional Denmark of the play is intended to mirror this fact. The play does mention Wittenberg, which is where Hamlet is attending university, and where Martin Luther first nailed his 95 theses. One of the more famous lines in the play related to Protestantism is: "There is special providence in the