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Lecture Supplement:
"Hamlet and Death"

Woodcut illustrations from Hans Holbein's Dance of Death (1538)

"To philosophize is to learn to die." (Montaigne, after the pre-Socratics)
"To be or not to be, that is the question."
Knowledge / question of being evokes knowledge / question of not-being
Question is philosophical / intellectual, but also physical / corporeal

  • first soliloquy ("O that this too too sullied flesh ...") suggests melancholy (depression) & potential suicide
  • first actual death = loss of father
    = filial grief = sudden yet "natural" or "common" (Gertrude's terms)
  • revelation of "unnatural" death by murder
    = challenge to social & personal ethic = requirement of revenge
  • confrontation with emblem of death = father's ghost
  • assumption of burden of revenge & virtual knowledge (projection) of death
  • "accidental" slaying of Polonius = first act of revenge = mistaken
    = first corpse in play (not counting Ghost)
  • deadly atmosphere of Denmark: the King, his friends
  • heroic self-rescue (on the ship) / R & G sent to their deaths
  • Ophelia enacts options of insanity & suicide
  • graveyard scene (5.1): Hamlet confronts reality + memory of death
    = Yorick, then Ophelia
  • "Here's fine revolution ...": Hamlet pondering brute fact with wit
  • Yorick = emblem of death [multi-layered symbol]
  • "readiness" for death (5.2) / Stoic + Christian posture
  • acceptance of dubious duel with Laertes = suicidal gesture?
  • Hamlet takes action to kill, but only after he is already "dead"
  • "The fell sergeant Death ...": Hamlet as victim or criminal, subject to agent of mortality

Ultimately there is no simple posture in the face of death. Anger, fear, curiosity, humor, denial, acceptance are among many possibilities. Hamlet and Hamlet dramatize these and others. As Descartes recognized, it is impossible to imagine one's own death, because of the irreducible ego. Hamlet, as he weighs Yorick's skull, presents a figure as close as literature may come to that limit of imagination. To fully appreciate Shakespeare's Hamlet, it's useful to spend some time in a graveyard -- or in modern society, a morgue. As Neruda writes (see poem below): "From time to time ... you have to bathe in your own grave."


Shakespeare's tombstone, Stratford-on-Avon, UK (1616)

Click here for Shakespeare's Life & Times information.
Click here for a modern poem by Pablo Neruda.
Click here for a different cultural attitude.
And click here for a brand-new Yorick.


20c Mexican watercolor (dancing muertos)