Hamlet and the Loss of Fathers

Claudius on filial grief (I.ii):

'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow...

But of course, when he says "your father lost a father," he is also speaking quite literally of his own father.  He thus could have made this personal -- e.g., "your father and I lost a father" -- acknowledging his own past share in such grief.  Instead, he seeks refuge in the cold, impersonal, generic pattern of death, its inevitability, as if to distance himself from his own personal involvement in this particular and not-so-inevitable death.

* * *

And this focus on the inexorable workings of time (death comes to us all) suddenly reminds me of Macbeth, on receiving the news of his wife's death (V.v):

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time...

Her death, too, has been hastened by human hand -- albeit her own.