The wild Prince Hal must die so that the
virtuous King Henry V can live. This
transformation is the first, essential burden:
the sacrifice of the self to the state.

A king is both a fallible human ( "the body
natural") and the divine embodiment of the
kingdom ("the body politic"). To rule, he
must suppress his personal desires and flaws.

"Consideration, like an angel, came
And whipp'd the offending Adam out of bim,
Leaving his body as a paradise."
- The Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry V

Not all burdens are sought. For Prince Hamlet, the duty of kingship is thrust upon him not as a crown, but as
a terrible command for revenge. He is tasked with purging the corruption in the state of Denmark—a kingly
dutybut without the authority or the temperament for it. His is the burden of a rightful heir forced into
the role of executioner.

common man. He must watch while his subjects sleep, bearing the weight of their lives on his conscience.

ere, Shakespeare gives the most profound articulation of the monarch's burden. The king is the vessel
for his subjects' fears, sins, and fates. He enjoys general ceremony' but is denied the simple peace of a

"Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls, / Our debts, our careful wives, / Our children and our sins lay
on the king! I We must bear all O bard condition, I Twin-born with greatness.."

The burden of existence, amplified by the specific duties of a prince, becomes so immense that
suicide presents itself as a logical escape. It is only the fear of the unknown—the ultimate existential
dread—that forces him to continue. For the burdened ruler, even death offers no certain peace.

"...who would bear the whips and scorns of time... To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death—
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns—-puzzles the wil..."

A king does not only inherit a crown; he inherits the moral debts of his
predecessors. Henry V fears his father's usurpation will doom his cause at Agincourt.
Hamlet is literally haunted by his father's ghost, his entire purpose now
defined by an ancestral crime. The burden spans generations.

'Revenge his foul and most
unnatural murther.'

Not to-day, O Lord,
O, not to-day, thinh not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!'

"...when France is mine and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine."

For Shakespeare's monarchs, the crown is not a prize, but a sentence. It is the weight of
a nation's soul, the isolation of absolute responsibility, and the tragic knowledge that
even a king is merely a player on a stage, whose final curtain is always death.

Public Health Slides

The_Burden_of_Kingship