Hamlet’s
World
Readers live in Hamlet’s world, a world of chaos and confusion
with philosophies of conflicting values pulling some, like Hamlet, against the
edges of madness with unanswered questions. Is God real? Does he guide man? Does
life continue after death? Is mortality more than living, dying, and rotting to
become part of earth? Can I know? “What
is man… but to sleep and feed?” asks Hamlet with inner turmoil, as he ponders
man’s creation and ability to reason (Shakespeare, p.101, 4.4.33-5). Using
reason and inspiration given by his maker, Hamlet concludes “There’s a divinity
that shapes our ends” (p.130, 5.2.10). Despite
his mother’s cajoling to remember “all that lives must die” and pass “through
nature… [in]to dust” (p.12, 1.2.71-3), and the foreshadowing counsel of his
step-father uncle regarding the “common theme [in life, that] is death of
fathers” (p.13, 1.2.103-4), Hamlet inherently understands that he and all
people have within something everlasting. He asks, “What should be the fear… for
my soul… being a thing immortal as [the ghost] itself” (p.26, 1.4.64-7)? Though
difficult, Hamlet comes to accept and reference the reality of seeing the apparition
of his father. Speaking for Shakespeare, to all who read or hear his words (and
later for Hamlet as a witness against doubt), the ghost presents that despite
every man passing through death, the spirit of man yet rises and lives.
In the mouths of his characters, multiple times
throughout the play Hamlet, Shakespeare witnesses the supremacy of God, and the
immortality of souls, as well as the need for souls to seek reconciliation (redemption)
with God through repentance, that being a change from wickedness in life—“Till
the foul crimes (sins) done in [the] days of nature are burnt and purged away”
(Ghost of King Hamlet, p.28, 1.5.12-13). After King Hamlet’s death, as Prince
Hamlet mourns the “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable…world” (p.14, 1.2.133-4)
of life without his father, he also affirms the existence of God as he resists a
suicidal urge: “O that… the Everlasting had not fixed His canon (law) ‘gainst
self-slaughter” (p.14, 1.2.131-2). Through Prince Hamlet’s interactions with
his father’s ghost, the existence of souls after death and their ability to
escape the “sepulcher” (p.26, 1.4. 48) for ongoing existence (whether in happiness or misery
unknown) is affirmed, even though the fate of all to
return to earth is rehearsed as ‘common.’ Hamlet eulogizes the similarity of beggars
with even the greatest men, as maggots transform them by the cycles of nature
whereby “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the
fish that hath fed of that worm… [showing] how a king may go a progress through
the guts of a beggar” (p.98, 4.3.27-31), or
Imperious Caesar, dead
and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to
keep the wind away.
Oh, that that earth,
which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall t'
expel the winter’s flaw! (p.126, 5.1.215-19)
Ophelia’s loss of reason during grief belies the moral truths
she speaks about chastity and virtue as valuable for men and women (p.21, 1.3.45-51;
p.104, 4.5.52-66), and the veracity of her witness that “we know what we are,
but know not what we may be” (p.104, 4.5.43-4). Faced with Ophelia’s demise,
and many declaring dust is the only and final end, Hamlet’s reason wavers (depicting
the doubt any reasoning person may face). Pondering such future possibilities
in the well known soliloquy “To be, or not to be” (p.63, 3.1.56) Prince Hamlet
eventually reiterates that the unknown qualities of life after death are the
“undiscovered country” encouraging all to “rather bear with those ills we have,
than fly to others we know not of” (p.64, 3.1.79, 81-2). Although all truth
isn’t known, each person has some light and must make choices based on the truth
possessed.
The understandings that all life is precious, and raw murder unacceptable, prevail as the body
count reaches for the new understanding that every death is a sorrow, and noticed to
God. Hamlet alludes to this truth when he tells Horatio,
“We defy augury [the omen’s of the future]. There’s a special providence in the
fall of a sparrow” (p.137, 5.2.220-1), specifically referencing Matthew 10:29,
“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not
fall on the ground without your Father” (p.137). In context, the Biblical
passage counsels all caught in the confusion of mortal sophistries to “fear
not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but
rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and
body in hell… [T]he very hairs of your head are all
numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many
sparrows” (King James, Matthew 10:28-32). Although Hamlet’s life is set in a
time when it was popular to discount the reality of God or eternal existence,
Shakespeare weaves into his drama the sorrow, fear, and doubt such beliefs
cause, while still depicting the pervasive truth extant throughout the culture
of English literature, particularly the fact that life continues beyond the
grave. The same questions even now, in the time of
internet-information-overload remain urgently unanswered for some, with similar
confusion. Each mortal must, as Hamlet, reconcile their questions with the
truth available, and seek answers for self.
Works Cited
The Bible. Authorized
King James Version, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2013, https://www.lds.org/scriptures/nt/matt/10?lang=eng
Shakespeare, William, and Sylvan Barnet. Four Great
Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. New York, NY, Signet, 1982.
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