Gertrude enters with tragic news: Ophelia, mad with grief, has drowned in the river. Anguished, Laertes leaves the room. Claudius summons Gertrude to follow; he says that it was nearly impossible to quiet Laertes’s rage, and that he worries the news of Ophelia’s death will reawaken it.
Commentary
One of the important themes of Hamlet is the connection between the health of a state and the moral legitimacy of its ruler. Claudius is rotten, and as a result, Denmark is rotten, too. Here, at the beginning of Act IV, scene v, things have palpably darkened for the nation: Hamlet is gone, Polonius is dead and has been buried in secret, Ophelia is raving mad, and, as Claudius tells us, the common people are disturbed and murmuring amongst themselves. This ominous seed bears fruit in the truncated, miniature rebellion that accompanies Laertes’s return to Denmark. Acting as the wronged son operating on open fury, Laertes has all the moral legitimacy that Claudius lacks, and that Hamlet has forfeited.
It is extremely important to note the powerful contrast between Laertes and Hamlet, each of whom has a dead father to avenge. (A third figure with a dead father to avenge, Fortinbras, lurks on the horizon.) Whereas Hamlet is reflective and has difficulty acting, Laertes is active and has no need for thought; he has no interest in moral concerns, only in his consuming desire to avenge Polonius. When Claudius asks Laertes how far he would go to avenge his father, Laertes replies that he would slit Hamlet’s throat in the church. This statement–indicating his willingness to murder Hamlet even in the house of morality and piety–indicates sharply the contrast between the two sons: Hamlet will not even kill himself for fear of crossing God.
The scheming Claudius encounters Laertes at approximately the same moment as he learns that Hamlet has survived and returned to Denmark (through the somewhat improbable deus ex machina of the pirates, one of the single most incongruous elements in the play). His immediate thought is that he can derail Laertes’s anger and dispense with Hamlet in one fell stroke, and he hits upon the idea of the duel in order to use Laertes’s rage to achieve his own ends.
Ophelia’s tragic death occurs at the worst possible moment for Claudius; as Laertes flees the room in agony, Claudius follows, not to console him or even to join him in mourning, but simply because, as he tells Gertrude, it was so difficult to quiet him down in the first place. The image of Ophelia drowning amid her garlands of flowers has proved to be one of the most enduring images in the play, represented countless times by artists and poets throughout the centuries. Ophelia is associated with flower imagery from the beginning of the play: in her first scene, Polonius presents her with a violet. The fragile beauty of the flowers resembles Ophelia’s own fragile beauty, as well as her exquisite, doomed innocence.
Hamlet
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Act V, Scenes i-ii
Summary
In the churchyard, two lowly gravediggers shovel out a grave for Ophelia. The gravediggers argue at length over whether Ophelia should be allowed to be buried in the churchyard, since her death so closely resembled suicide, and according to religious doctrine, suicides may not receive Christian burial. The first gravedigger, who speaks cleverly and mischievously, asks the second gravedigger a riddle: “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?” The second gravedigger answers that it must be the gallows-maker, for his frame outlasts a thousand tenants. The first gravedigger corrects him: it is the gravedigger whose constructions are stronger than those of the stonemason, the shipwright, or the carpenter, for the gravedigger’s “houses” will last until Doomsday.
Hamlet and Horatio enter at a distance, and watch the gravediggers work. Hamlet looks with wonder at the skulls they are excavating to make room for the fresh grave, and speculates darkly about what occupations the owners of these skulls served in life: “Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now…?” Hamlet asks the gravedigger whose grave he is digging, and the gravedigger spars with him verbally, first claiming the grave is his own, since he is digging it, then that the grave belongs to no man and no woman. At last he admits that it belongs to one “that was a woman sir; but, rest her soul, she’s dead.” The gravedigger, who does not recognize Hamlet as his prince, tells him that he has been a gravedigger since the old King Hamlet defeated the old Fortinbras in battle, the very day on which young Prince Hamlet was born. Hamlet takes up a skull, and the gravedigger tells him that the skull belonged to Yorick, the old king’s former jester. Hamlet tells Horatio that he knew Yorick, and he is appalled at the sight of the skull; he realizes forcefully that all men will come to dust, even Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, whom Hamlet imagines has disintegrated and is now part of the dust used to patch a wall.
Suddenly the funeral procession for Ophelia enters the churchyard, including Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and many mourning courtiers. Hamlet, wondering who has died, notices that the funeral rites seem “maimed,” indicating that the dead man or woman took his or her own life. He and Horatio hide as the procession approaches the grave. As Ophelia is laid in the earth, Hamlet realizes who has died; at the same moment, Laertes becomes infuriated with the priest, who says that to give Ophelia a proper Christian burial would profane the dead, and leaps into Ophelia’s grave to hold her once again in his arms. Grief-stricken and outraged, Hamlet bursts upon the company, declaring in agonized fury his own love for Ophelia. He leaps into the grave and fights with Laertes, saying that “forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.” Hamlet cries that he would do things for Ophelia that Laertes could not dream of–he would eat a crocodile for her, he would be buried alive with her. The combatants are pulled apart by the funeral company. Gertrude and Claudius declare that Hamlet is mad; Hamlet storms off, and Horatio follows. The king urges Laertes to be patient, and to remember their plan for revenge.
The next day at Elsinore Castle, Hamlet tells Horatio how he plotted to overcome Claudius’s scheme to have him murdered in England: he replaced the sealed letter carried by the unsuspecting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which called for Hamlet’s execution, with one calling for the execution of the bearers of the letter–Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves. He tells Horatio that he has no sympathy for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who “did make love to this employment,” but that he feels sorry for having behaved with such hostility toward Laertes. In Laertes’s desire to avenge his father’s death, he says, he sees the mirror image of his own, and he promises to court Laertes’s good favor.
Their conversation is interrupted by Osric, a foolish courtier who tries to flatter Hamlet by agreeing with everything he says, even when he contradicts himself–in the space of seconds, Osric agrees that it is cold, then that it is hot. Osric begins to praise Laertes effusively, but Hamlet and Horatio are unable to penetrate his overly elaborate proclamations and determine what it is that he wants. Finally a lord enters, and tells them that the king desires Hamlet to fence with Laertes, and that he has made a wager with Laertes that Hamlet will win. Hamlet agrees to fight against Horatio’s advice, saying that “all’s ill here about my heart,” but that one must be ready for death, since it will come regardless. The court marches into the hall, and Hamlet asks Laertes for forgiveness, claiming that it was his madness, and not his own will, that murdered Polonius. Laertes says that he will not forgive Hamlet until an elder, an expert in the fine points of honor, has advised him in the manner. But in the meantime, he says, he will accept Hamlet’s offer of love.
They select their foils (blunted swords used in fencing) and the king says that, if Hamlet wins the first or second hit, he will drink to Hamlet’s health, then throw into the cup a valuable gem (actually the poison) and give the wine to Hamlet. They begin the duel; Hamlet strikes Laertes, but declines to drink from the cup, saying that he will play another hit first. He hits Laertes again, and Gertrude rises to drink from the cup. The king tells her not to drink, but she does so anyway. Under his breath, Claudius murmurs, “It is the poison’d cup: it is too late.” Laertes remarks under his breath that to wound Hamlet with the poisoned sword is almost against his conscience; but they fight again, and Laertes scores a hit against Hamlet, drawing blood. Scuffling, they manage to exchange swords, and Hamlet wounds Laertes with Laertes’s own (poisoned) blade.
The queen falls. Laertes, poisoned with his own sword, declares, “I am justly kill’d with my own treachery.” The queen declares that the cup must have been poisoned, calls out to Hamlet, and dies. Laertes tells Hamlet that he, too, has been slain by Laertes’s poisoned sword, and that the king is to blame for the poison on the sword and the poison in the cup. Hamlet, in a fury, stabs Claudius with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies crying out for help. Hamlet tells Horatio that he is dying, and exchanges a last forgiveness with Laertes, who dies after completing his absolution.
The sound of marching echoes through the hall, and a shot rings out nearby. Osric declares that Fortinbras has come in conquest from Poland, and now fires a volley to the English ambassadors. Hamlet tells Horatio again that he is dying, and urges him not to commit suicide in light of all the tragedies, but instead to stay alive and tell his story. He says that he wishes Fortinbras to be made King of Denmark; he then dies.
Fortinbras marches into the room accompanied by the English ambassadors, who announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Horatio says that he will tell all assembled the story that led to the gruesome scene now on display. Fortinbras orders Hamlet to be borne away like a soldier.
Commentary
Called “clowns” in the stage directions of the play, the gravediggers represent a humorous type commonly found in Shakespeare’s plays, the clever commoner who gets the better of his social superior through wit; this type of clown was designed to appeal to the “groundlings” (those who could not afford seats and thus stood on the ground) at the Globe Theater, though in this scene the clowns assume a kind of macabre aspect, in that their jests and jibes are made in a cemetery, about the dead. Their conversation about Ophelia, however, arguing over whether it is morally acceptable to bury a possible suicide victim, furthers an important theme in the play–that of the moral legitimacy of suicide under theological law. By giving this serious subject a d
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