Hamlet – fourth lecture: The thematics of mutability and

mortality

“Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with

them? Mine ache to think on’t.” (V, 1, 86-87)

Hamlet and deathWhatever else the play is about – the morality of

revenge, madness, theater and the world --

it’s about death.

The visual icon of the play is inevitably a man holding a skull and looking intently at it.

And Hamlet seems intensely preoccupied with death in all its aspects . . .

. . . and with the instability of human existence.

Hamlet’s shock at his mother’s “forgetting” of his father

• The source of his dark vision of reality: a kind of moral entropy:

• First soliloquy expresses a longing for death, non-existence: I.2.129ff.

• “Frailty, thy name is woman (I, 2, 146).• And everything seems to follow from this.• To R & G, the reversal of Renaissance

celebration of man: “What a piece of work is a man . . .” II.4.274.

• “And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?”

• Nothing appears stable, lasting.• Except Horatio? III, 2, 53ff.

And death as the end to which everything tends

• Hamlet’s riff on the body’s decay after Polonius’ death, IV.3.

• “Your worm is your only emperor for diet.” (IV.3. 20ff)

• “. . . a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”

• Ophelia’s madness: “is’t possible a young maid’s wits should be as mortal as an old man’s life?” (IV, 5, 159-60).

• Ophelia: “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may become.” (IV, 5, 43)

• Her song: “And will he not come again . . .” (l 183)

Hamlet’s addition to “The Murder of Gonzago”?

• Hamlet asks the player king if he could study a speech of “some dozen or sixteen lines” which he would write and insert into the play.

• Knowing Hamlet’s mind, can we find those lines in the play as it’s performed (in III.2)?

• What does obsess Hamlet? • He’s certainly struck by his mother’s “falling off”

(as ghost calls it).• Does he also generalize from this to a

consciousness of the mutability of all human love?

Finding Hamlet’s additions in III, 2

• How long have king and queen in “Murder of Gonzago” been married?

• Could Hamlet have made additions to the player queen’s role?

• Player king’s speech generalizes, makes a philosophical principle of the mutability, mortality of human love.

• “This world is not for aye, nor ‘tis not strange/ That even our loves should with our fortunes change/ For ‘tis a question left us let to prove/ Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.”

• The player queen’s vow, ll. 212ff.

Claudius to Laertes

• Claudius interrupts himself at IV, 7, 105. • “I know love is begun by time . . . Time qualifies

the spark and fire of it.”• “There lives within the very flame of love/ A kind

of wick or snuff that will abate it, And nothing is at a like goodness still . . .”

• Or will Laertes be constant in his desire for vengeance?

• As inciter to revenge, Claudius becomes for Laertes the equivalent of the ghost for Hamlet

The gravediggers, V, 1• Who builds stronger than the mason, the

shipwright, or the carpenter?

• Maybe the gallowsmaker?

• But really the gravemaker – “The houses he makes lasts [sic] till doomsday.”

• “Has this fellow no feeling of his business?”

• Should one sing while digging a grave?

Hamlet’s meditation on death• “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing

once.” • “A fine revolution, an we had the trick to see’t.

Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with them? Mine ache to think on’t.”

• Skulls, skulls, more skulls. • Death as grimly comic: none of these skulls can

prevent the gravedigger’s abuse.• When did the gravedigger come into his

profession?• The very day of Hamlet’s birth!• How long will a body last you? Some eight year

or nine year (especially tanners).

Death comes closer and closer• “Here’s a skull now hath lien you i’ th’ earth three

and twenty years.” • “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” All that

he was is now reduced to this stinking skull.• Clip from Branagh Hamlet: Billy Crystal as the

gravedigger. • “To what base uses we may return.”• Alexander or Caesar – the most powerful human

beings – have turned simply to dust.• And death comes even closer: “Enter King,

Queen, Laertes, and the Corpse.” • “What, the fair Ophelia?”• Laertes’ curse of Hamlet, l. 236.

The culmination of Hamlet’s madness

• “I loved Ophelia.”

• And yet his actions have driven her to madness and death.

• And does this drive Hamlet to madness? V.1.229ff.

• And what is his madness but a response to all he has seen, understood?

• And to his consciousness of moral entropy, mortality.

Hamlet’s eventual fatalism

• The return of his sanity, calm, V.2• “There is a special providence in the fall of a

sparrow.” • And l. 296: “We defy augury . . .” • “If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come,

it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

• A seeming acceptance of the inevitability of death.

• “Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.”

The symmetries of the duel • Laertes accomplishes vengeance against

Hamlet.• But ends up dying himself in the process.• And Hamlet now accomplishes his vengeance

against Claudius, who will go to damnation. • Death wins? Simply entropy?• Laertes: “Exchange forgiveness with me, noble

Hamlet./ Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee,/ Nor thine on me.”

• And Horatio, the stoic, is entrusted with Hamlet’s “story.”

• Fortinbras? The rash, hotheaded non-entity in control.

• The futility in the politics of the play.

“O proud Death . . .”“ . . . What feast is toward in thine eternal

cell/ That thou so many princes at a shot/ So bloodily hast struck.”

The final toll: Ophelia, Hamlet, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius – and finally R & G.

Final scene is a funeral cortege, as all the bodies are solemnly taken off.

And finally Hamlet’s body, borne “like a soldier to the stage . . .

“For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royal.”