
Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet
The Plot
The Message
Contemplating Life
With the knowledge of his father’s demise at the hands of his uncle, who poisoned him while sleeping, the situation for Hamlet becomes difficult. He is torn by the grief he has for his father’s death and for his mother’s contemptuous marriage to her husband’s brother. Clearly, the king’s brother, Claudius, murdered him to usurp his throne. Wrought by this knowledge and the helplessness he feels for his situation, Hamlet goes to his father’s tomb to seek advice, hoping to learn what he should do. Mourning is seen as a natural part of life, contrary to what many in the play say to Hamlet for doing so. The subtext that comes from this part of the play clearly shows Hamlet’s feelings for his father’s loss, but they also do more than reveal his own subjective views; moreover, they add to the discussion about death that seems to be mounting in the play. This passage becomes one of the most famous soliloquies Shakespeare ever wrote: the beginning to Act III, scene I where Hamlet reasons and debates with himself the notion of suicide and the motivation of life. The richness and depth of this passage is worth quoting in full, which goes as follows:
Hamlet: To be, or not to be, — that is the question: —
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? — To die, — To sleep, —
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is hier to, — ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, — to sleep; —
To sleep! perchance to dream: — ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,–
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns,– puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all (Act III, Sc. I, 1088).
To call death the eternal sleep and to wish it upon ourselves no sooner that it must is the struggle that Hamlet surveys in this soliloquy. His conclusion is that regardless the miseries we face and are conscious of in life, we are not going to rush off to deal with miseries we know nothing about, for death, even today, is still a mystery. Our conscience, the way we perceive life, is what keeps us from ending life prematurely, which Shakespeare so eloquently writes as making cowards of us all. Therein lies a great paradox, being that we are born to die some day but that we endure life and embrace it, often with great fear for death. This is what it means to be mortal, and coming to terms with this is easier said than done.
Perhaps it is as easy as looking death in the face, as the famous scene from the image above portrays. To take a skull in the hand and to look upon its visage, to analyze its features, to imagine it with flesh and hair, to see it as a living and breathing person who once laughed and cried and experienced: all of these things can leave one in a melancholy mood, especially knowing that it could one day be your own skull, but it raises some interesting questions about mortality. Hamlet has such a moment during Act V, scene I where he happens upon a gravedigger playing flippantly with a skull. He inquires of the man whose skull it once was, to which he answers a “whoreson mad fellow” it was– Yorick’s, the king’s jester. Hamlet knew him as a child, and he becomes immediately fascinated by this skull, hence why he grips it and observes it the way he does. But, his fascination for Yorick’s skull goes beyond having known him at one point when he seeks to compare it to the skulls of great men, like Alexander and Caesar. Shakespeare writes:
Hamlet: Let me see. [Takes the skull.] — Alas, poor Yorick! — I knew him, Horation; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs?… Pr’ythee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
Horatio: What’s that, my lord?
Hamlet: Dost thou think Alexander [the Great; inserted by author] looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?
Horatio: E’en so.
Hamlet: And smelt so? pah! [Throws down the skull]
Horatio: E’en so, my lord.
…
Hamlet: No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus; Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw! — (Act V, Sc. I, 1106-7).
It is one thing for Hamlet to find humor in knowing that the skull he holds in his hand belonged to a jester with whom he played with in court, but to lightheartedly compare that skull and to imagine it being the same for great men like Alexander and Julius Caesar seems to make a mockery of the actions we take in life. To think that all mortal men return to the earth, regardless of their stature and fame during their lifetime, puts a different spin on the discourse about death seen up to this point in the play. It suggests that no one is impervious to death; that death humbles the boldest and noblest of people; that we all end up the same in the end — ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Conclusion
The final scene in Hamlet is where the tragedy lies, in that everyone in the cast dies, except for Horatio. His last lines to Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway, and the English Ambassadors who happen upon the final scene, suggest that the story will live on beyond their mortal means. Hamlet begs him in his final death woes to “tell my story –” and Horatio does just that to the young Fortinbras: “You from the Polack wars, and you from England, / Are here arriv’d, give order that these bodies / High on a stage be placed to the view; / And let me speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about: so shall you / hear” (Act V, Sc. II, 1112). The act of telling the story of Hamlet and his family takes them from the mortal realm, where the fleshly bodies are no more, into the immortal realm where storytelling and narrative carries them into the future. After all, am I not writing about Shakespeare even now, some 450 years after his lifetime. Are you not good reader thinking about Shakespeare at this moment, pondering what you know about him or this play? Take this notion of memory and put it into a context you can relate to; think of someone who was once dear to you, to someone you were fond of or who you once loved? Isn’t your memory of them but a kernel of immortality? Do they not live on through you? There have been generations of people who have lived and died on this planet, and we know of them and their lives through the memories we share with future generations to come, often in the written word. Who am I but a mere mortal man, writing about another mortal man who lived beyond his time through his writing. A dear friend of mine once told me: there are only two things that outlive us in our lifetime– our children and our written ideas. Even great men become dust in the end, but their greatness lives on in the stories told about them generations later. Shakespeare is a true testament to this — his plays, written down in the first folios and performed on countless stages over the past four centuries, will forever be remembered as the greatest works of drama ever to come from the English language. Is this not immortality?
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet.” The Complete Works. New York: Random House, 1997. 1071-1112. Print. Image source: Lafayette, James. “Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet.” 1880-1885. Wikipedia. Wikipedia, inc., 20 Aug. 2008. Web. 02 Apr. 2015.