Hamlet – fourth lecture: The thematics of mutability and mortality

1. 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)

2. Hamlet and death Whatever 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.

3. 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.

4. 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)

5. 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?

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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?

9. 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).

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.”

13. 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.

14. “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.”