Transcript Hamlet – Third lecture: mutability, mortality

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)
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.”