It was the mystery that had everything: love, intrigue, murder, insanity and feuding, all at the highest levels of society. Now, all of Europe is stunned to learn that police in Elsinore have arrested Denmark’s Prince Hamlet on two counts of murder.
Initially, they had regarded the ‘Blonde in the Pond’ drowning of Ophelia, daughter of royal minister Polonius, as a suicide prompted by her father’s death. Hamlet became a suspect once it emerged that Polonius had been stabbed to death at the palace and had been in love with Ophelia himself.
‘I can confirm that we are treating her death as suspicious,’ Superintendent Stefan Jorgensen told the press. ‘British tabloids, please note: Yes, she was young, blonde and beautiful. Yes, her first name was Ophelia. No, her surname was not ‘Boobs’. Do grow up.’
According to rumours on social media, Hamlet had been driven mad by his father’s death, following which his uncle had usurped the throne and married his mother. Hamlet’s increasingly eccentric behaviour had driven the royal couple and Polonius to spy on him and attempt to send him to England. Or something like that.
The prince’s lawyers have dismissed talk of him pleading insanity. ‘Our client is but mad north-north-west. When the wind is from a southerly direction, he knows a hawk from a handsaw,’ said defence counsel Henrik Rasmussen. ‘No, me neither – that’s what he told me to say. Twenty kroner, please.’
‘I’m relieved he’s behind bars,’ said a palace source. ‘If this had gone on any longer, he might have had the two school friends we sent to spy on him murdered, got kidnapped and released, come home and fought a duel with Polonius’s son in which he stabbed his uncle, his mother drank poison by mistake and he ended up dead after being scratched by a poison-tipped sword. Well, it could happen, couldn’t it?’
Hamlet himself has vigorously denied any role in Ophelia’s death. ‘I didn’t even fancy her – I told her to get her to a nunnery once,’ he told reporters shortly before his arrest. ‘Well, all right, I did fancy her a bit, but not as much as I fancy my mum. Oh shit, you won’t print that will you?’
