The Hamlet Project

The Queen really ought to know better than to call Hamlet’s stepfather/uncle his father. Anyone with a blended family learns this lesson pretty quickly. You just don’t do that – PARTICULARLY when they have a contentious relationship. It’s incendiary. You might as well pour out some emotional gasoline and light a match.
A complete and total stranger could call my stepmother my mother and I would likely lose my shit just as quickly. I would shoot back, “She is NOT my mother.” So fast it would make your head spin.
There are families where the step-parent becomes so much like a father or mother that eventually it can shift to a changing of identifications. But this is very rare and takes a LOT of time. The only examples I can think of are ones in which a step parent really steps up and takes care of a child (and it does tend to be a CHILD) and essentially acts so much like a father or a mother that it becomes possible to be called such. But I’ve never met anyone for whole this was true. Everyone I know is VERY CLEAR that a step parent is not their parent. Even if they’re great. Which Claudius definitely isn’t.