Shakespeare – Hamlet Mortality

Resource Description

Hamlet’s inability to understand the significance of life in the face of inevitable death is offset by the human fear of the unknown. Shakespeare dramatised the spiritual uncertainty and shifting ideas of mortality and afterlife in Elizabethan England, through Hamlet’s murder driven plot and closing tragedy. Perverse occurrences have depleted Hamlet’s existential purpose where his father’s death triggered his ____, ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’, revealing his disposition with life. This existential crisis is central to Hamlet’s famous soliloquy where the employment of an infinitive ‘To be or not to be – that is the question’ and use of collective pronouns such as ‘we’ and ‘us’, initiates Hamlet’s dilemma of suicide, delineating two courses of action through the metaphor; ‘to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ and silently suffer the cruelties of fate or ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles’ and end his life. However, Hamlet’s fear of death, ‘conscience does make cowards of us all’, suggests an aversion to the possibility of afterlife being more troublesome than his earthly sufferings, incentives him to choose life over death because of its familiarity. In addition, Shakespeare utilises Yorik’s skull as a protruding symbol of mortality, ‘To what base uses we may return’, which highlights the inescapable disintegration of a person, triggering Hamlet’s cynical questioning of the purpose of living if life is fleeting. The historical allusion to ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay’ and anaphora in ‘Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander was returned to dust’ creates a sense of pessimism and portrays how death is the great leveller and how important things are insignificant. As a result, Hamlet develops a more mature outlook on death, no longer fearing it but seeing it as a natural inevitability, ‘Let be’ where R. Galita proposes that Hamlet finally ‘resigns himself to death’. Thus,  Shakespeare explores the mysteriousness of death on Hamlet’s eschatological evaluation of mortality and suicide, a concern common to all humanity. 

Similarly, the contemplation of death has a pervasive presence in Hamlet, [Q] by forming the basis of the conflict of the play and providing the medium for its tragic resolution. However, while Shakespeare explores the inevitability of mortality, emphasising that “all that lives must die” through incessant imagery of death, more significant is his interwoven reflection upon what meaning death holds for the living. Shakespeare examines, as Robert Ornstein describes, “the debt that the living owe to the dead”, with the appearance of the ghost acting as a dramatic catalyst for Hamlet’s consideration of his duty of revenge his dead father. Through his characterization of Hamlet as a procrastinator, Shakespeare is able to confront the philosophical and moral ambiguity of such a duty, as evident in the insistent dichotomies of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, such as “to suffer…or to take