"If the name Hamlet comes from the play's sources, one thing that is distinctive about Shakespeare's naming in the play is the doubling of the name Hamlet for both the dead father and the living son. In none of the sources is the burden of the past, the psychic overlap between the two generations, so stressed as in the play. [...] Old King Hamlet symbolizes the past: familial, political, cultural and temporal. And his appearance pulls Hamlet away from the future and into the past. In the play's second scene we see two young men setting off on different courses. Laertes, son of Polonius, requests permission to go to France and is granted it [...]; Hamlet, by contrast, allows himself to be persuaded to stay at home rather than return to university, and in that decision he fixes himself for ever as a child."
—Dr. Emma Smith, This is Shakespeare (emphasis mine)
