COMIC RELIEF

What a piece of work is a man…

What is this quintessence of dust?

Comic Relief

The use of a funny scene to interrupt a succession of intensely dramatic moments

Other Comic Relief Scenes in Shakespeare

The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet

Other Comic Relief Scenes…

The Porter in Macbeth

Comic Relief in Hamlet

Act V, scene I – the gravedigger’s scene

C.S. LEWIS

“Then comes the comic relief…surely the strangest comic relief ever written-comic relief beside an open grave, with a further discussion of suicide…”

Through Shakespeare’s Eyes by Joseph Pearce

Hamlet Comic Relief

Up to this point in the play, Polonius has provided comic relief.

But both Polonius and Ophelia are now dead.

Solid facts about comic relief

Shakespeare uses lower class people to play such scenes

Allows a freer use of vulgarity and earthiness

Comedy is full of topical references (based on events of the day)

Often uses puns, slapstick, and riddles

The Gravediggers

Also referred to as the clowns

Medieval clown were often used to play up physical and vulgar comedy

As buffoons, able to talk about risky topics

“Here’s a skull…”

Topical References

Suicide – a double standard where the Church was concerned

A richer person who committed suicide more likely to be buried with proper burial

“If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’ Christian burial” (V.i.24 – 26).

Elizabethan View of Suicide

Saw those who committed suicide as “perpetrators not as victims”

Guilty of felonia de ipso or felo de se- a vile crime against oneself.

http://elsinore.ucsc.edu/burial/burial/Suicide.html

Church’s View

Despair seen as an unforgivable sin against God

Despair might be the vehicle of the Devil (Horatio afraid that the ghost “might tempt Hamlet toward the flood” or off a cliff)

Excluded from God’s grace Denied Christian burial (Ophelia receives

“maimed rites.”); “lodged in grounds unsanctified” (232).

Burial Very Harsh

…a woman who committed suicide received the following treatment:

…carried from her sayd howse to some cross way neare the townes end and theare tht should ha (ve) stake dreven thorowgh her brest and so be buried with the stake to be scene for a memorayll that others goinge by myght take heede…

Richard Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England, p. 535.

Sidenote Exceptions were sometimes made for

those who were determined to be “not in their right minds.”

Perhaps Ophelia falls into this category. “Of the 803 verdicts delivered to the

King’s Bench in the decade before the writing of Hamlet, only 5” were determined to be insane.

http://elsinore.ucsc.edu/burial/burialSuicide. html

Gravedigger and Hamlet

Battle of wits between clown and Hamlet

Hamlet doesn’t win!

Comic Elements Used in Scene

Puns Malapropisms Irony Slapstick Riddles

Comic Elements

Puns – play on words‘A was the first that ever bore arms. (l. 34)

Could he dig without arms? (l.38)

Malapropisms- mixing/confusing/substituting words in a comic manner

“It must be se offendendo.”(self offense!)

Skull

Used as centerpiece on Elizabethan banquet tables

Serves as a memento mori- a reminder of death (as if a person needs to be reminded after reading 4 acts of Hamlet!)

Carpe diem

Seize the day!

2.

Whether or not Ophelia should be buried in Christian cemetery

Is she to be buried in Christian burial when she willfully seeks her own salvation? 1-2

3.

Who is he who builds stronger than a mason, a shipwright, or a carpenter?

3. con’t.

The gravemaker-his houses “last until doomsday” 60

4. Comic elements

See other notes

5.

Yorick was the king’s jester. Hamlet knew him. Seeing his skull personalizes the “corruption” of the body

5.

Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come.194-6

6.

The physical body decays-could be used for mortar or to stop a beer barrel.

Alexander the Great, a world conqueror, becomes loam

Caesar plugs up a wall to keep out the wind.

7.

Her death was doubtful (questionable)

The priest thinks she should not have had even the prayers that she did...just “shards and pebbles”

8

“40, 000 brothers…could not make up my sum…” l. 274 on

Hamlet jumps into the grave with Laertes-fights him