Very interesting.Probably they meant “hamlet” as a mini-village. Which is not a Danish name at all by the way.![]()
All foreign ships passing through the narrow Øresund Strait (between Sweden and Denmark), whether en route to or from Denmark or not, had to stop in Helsingør (Elsinore) and pay a toll to the Danish Crown. If a ship refused to stop, cannons in both Helsingør (Denmark) and Helsingborg (Sweden) could open fire and sink it. Apparently, the Danish king of Shakespearean times (either Frederik II or Christian IV) was a bit of a show off. On top of collecting the toll, he once held up all trade ships for days just to show another king how they all leave the harbor at the same time, one after another. As a result, many Europeans didn’t get their goods on time and were pretty pissed off. This may have motivated Shakespeare to use Elsinore and the Kronborg Castle as a setting of the “rotten” state in his tragedy.

