Some observations--Prince Hamlet

“Alas, poor Yorick”: Hamlet, Act 5.1

I have just finished reading Hamlet with my Shakespeare class. It’s a difficult play to teach—as well as to read—and I tried something new this year: I invited students to take on the role of an expert—on words, on psychology, on the text, on acting, on historical context—and to bring that point of view to class each day. It helped. It gave, at least to the students who took the task seriously, both a voice in the class and, what’s more important, a little wedge by which they could crack their way into the play. Good!

I was struck by a few things as I read through the last act early in the morning on my way into class. The first is this general observation, one that has been creeping up on us since Act 4, namely that we think the play is about how to live (how should Hamlet react and act?), but we discover that is a play about how to die. My reading of the last act is governed by Maynard Mack’s insight that when we see Hamlet in Act 5 (he’s been sent off to England in Act 4), we find “a different man,” a man who has come to a kind of peace with the world he has fought so hard to understand and the self he has also fought with so famously (“To be or not to be” and all that). That peace is somehow defined by words he (rather, Shakespeare) drops on us in stages: “divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10), “heaven ordinant” (48), “special providence” (217-18). It’s hard to gather these scattered leaves together (the “special providence” speech is one of the toughest in Shakespeare, also because its text is vexing), but Hamlet seems to accept that he is less an actor than an agent, and he trusts something larger than himself to bring justice and to make his life (or death!) meaningful. “Let be,” he says, which is a long way from “To be or not to be.”

To the observations. I don’t like the label comic relief, but when I check my Bedford glossary of terms to make sure I’m not abusing the phrase, I find the gravedigger scene (5.1) cited (along with Macbeth’s porter’s scene) as a classic instance. What bothers me about the label is that it can imply the word just, as in “just comic relief.” It says, “There’s nothing more going on here. It’s a break, a bit of relief, an orange thrown back at the groundlings.” But with Shakespeare, there’s always more. In fact, his minor characters often are given the most profound insights, and here’s an instance. The gravedigger, through his jokes, his song, his tossing of bones on the stage, his observations about how long a tanner’s body would be preserved in the grave, brings to the fore the central issue of the play: the common, comic, serious banality of death. This is exactly what Hamlet is coming to grips with in the scene.

I also notice that Hamlet is acutely in touch with his senses in the scene: he mentions that his bones “ache to think on’t” (92) when he contemplates the bones strewn on the stage; later he says his “gorge rises” (187) when he remembers Yorick (he means he’s feeling nauseous); and later he reacts to the smell of Yorick’s skull with “And smelt so? Pah!” (200). These reactions signal the intensity of Hamlet’s thoughts and feelings at this moment—he’s very sensitive to his surroundings—and they point to his being in better control of his emotions: the Hamlet of Act 1 could not have held a skull in his hand without complete disgust. He’s calmer. At the same time, he’s intense. Hmmmm.

His speech on Yorick gives me a hunch: I think you could find in Act 5 Hamlet talking back to each one of his earlier soliloquies—from “Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh” through “To be or not to be” to “How all occasions do inform against me.” In the last act, Hamlet reconsiders everything.

Dr. De Smith