Hamlet’s story is the reign of Elizabeth

Fort.  Where is this sight?	308
Hor.        What is it ye would see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.
Fort.  This quarry cries on havoc. O proud death!
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,	312
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
First Amb.        The sight is dismal;
And our affairs from England come too late:	316
The cars are senseless that should give us hearing,
To tell him his commandment is fulfill’d,
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Where should we have our thanks?	320
Hor.        Not from his mouth,
Had it the ability of life to thank you:
He never gave commandment for their death.
But since, so jump upon this bloody question,	324
You from the Polack wars, and you from England,
Are here arriv’d, give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view;
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world	328
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,	332
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ heads; all this can I
Truly deliver.
Fort.        Let us haste to hear it,	336
And call the noblest to the audience.
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune;
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,
Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.	340
Hor.  Of that I shall have also cause to speak,
And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more:
But let this same be presently perform’d,
Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance	344
On plots and errors happen.
Fort.        Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,	348
To have prov’d most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this	352
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.  [A dead march. Exeunt, bearing off the bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.

Fortinbras here commands a performance of the story or the play we have just seen–we are being given theatrical imagery by the author to suggest that the new king of Denmark has asked to hear the play of Hamlet, Hamlet’s story that Horatio has sworn to the dying Hamlet he will tell the world.  The new King of England’s Coat of Arms appears on the frontispiece of the 1604 Quarto, which suggests that James had a personal interest in the play. De Vere’s cousin was the esteemed soldier Sir Horatio Vere.

Hamlet and de Vere were both imbued with the values of Castiglione’s The Courtier, de Vere’s father-in-law Lord Burghley has been viewed even by traditional scholars as a major inspiration for the character of Polonius.

And Shakespeare wrote Hamlet with his “dying voice.”