Hamlet 923of the dead. When Hamlet supposes Claudius to be
to praying, he says:
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be
scann’d:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as
May;
And how his audit stands who knows save
heaven? (3.3.73–83)In other words, Hamlet wrongly assumes that
Claudius is praying; if he kills him, then Claudius’s
soul will go to heaven, and he will have done the
murderer a favor. Instead of being damned, Claudius
will be saved for having confessed his sins. This pos-
sibility is doubly distasteful to Hamlet, because he
says that Claudius has sent King Hamlet to death
“full of bread”—that is, he has not had the chance
to confess his sins, and therefore he may not be able
to go to heaven.
A fascinating feature of Hamlet resides in Shake-
speare’s interest in the practical aspects of death
and his dark humor about mortality. When Hamlet
enters the churchyard, for example, he is startled
that one of the diggers is singing, cracking jokes and
tossing bones and skulls about without any sense
of the solemn nature of death. Hamlet wonders
whether the skulls the Clown is tossing up belonged
to a courtier, a politician or a lawyer. Then he asks
the pragmatic question:
Hamlet: How long will a man lie i’ the earth
ere he rot?
First Clown: I’ faith, if he be not rotten
before he die . . . he will last you some eight
year or nine year: a tanner will last you nine
year.
Hamlet: Why he more than another?
First Clown: Why, sir, his hide is so
tanned with his trade, that he will keepout water a great while; and your water is a
sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.
(5.1.144–152)These questions about the decay of the body are
met with semi-merry responses from the grave-
digger, who supposes that a man who turns raw
animal skins into leather will, himself, have water-
proofed his own body and will last a good year
more underground than the average person. This
is the moment at which the jester Yorick’s skull is
produced, and it leads Hamlet to ask Horatio if
Alexander the Great looked and smelled as badly
as Yorick.
Perhaps the most memorable aspect of Shake-
speare’s examination of death in Hamlet centers on
the metaphysical and philosophical meditations that
run through the length of the play. Hamlet’s mus-
ings on suicide, for example, start in the first act of
the play. After Gertrude has chided Hamlet about
wearing black, and he has defended his “inky cloak”
as “denoting his grief ” (1.2.77, 82), Hamlet expresses
his despair over his father’s death and his mother’s
hasty marriage:O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God!
God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
(1.2.129–134)Here, Hamlet is already considering suicide even
before he speaks to his father’s ghost and discovers
that he must shift from contemplative inaction and
grief to killing and revenge.
Shakespeare returns to the theme again in the
famous soliloquy of act 3 that begins, “To be or not
to be, that is the question” (3.1.56). The problem
Hamlet encounters as he soliloquizes about whether
or not he should kill himself is “the dread of some-
thing after death, / The undiscover’d country from
whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.78–80).
Life is filled with woe, but the yawning, unknown
world of death that may be filled with nightmarish