“He knew that thought clings round dead limbs”: Materiality, Representation, and the Corpse in Hamlet
By David Beckman
What do we think of when we think of Hamlet (or Hamlet)? For many, the image that comes to mind is of a youngish man, dressed likely in black, holding a skull, reciting the lines that begin, “Alas, poor Yorick…” (Many may not recall what follows those first three words, or may misremember the very next clause, which is not in fact “I knew him well, Horatio…”)
That is, by now, a common observation with which to begin a discussion of Hamlet’s Act V, Scene 1.[1] And most critics are in agreement as to what that image signifies within the play’s narrative and historical contexts: the recognition of death’s inevitability, of one’s need to bear in mind and prepare for that end, and of death’s power as a social leveler. Inevitably, critics note the prominence of human skulls in the memento mori tradition[2] of icons communicating those sober reminders, and Marjorie Garber is undoubtedly right in observing, “When we hear someone say ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ we do not think that he or she is speaking of Hamlet’s childhood jester. We know that what is at stake is rather the general case of mortality and the human condition” (Garber 467). Bettie Anne Doebler, Roland Mushat Frye and Harry Morris most exhaustively examine the scene’s connections to the memento mori tradition, and many of their conclusions are sound. Doebler, for instance, links up the historical and narrative contexts of the scene by observing: “The audience awaits Hamlet’s discovery of the particular death of Ophelia while he generalizes upon the frailty of all worldly things that men value” (Doebler 69). But Morris perhaps goes too far when he more sweepingly concludes, “All then is here in Act V, Scene 1, to mark the scene as a set piece clearly in the memento mori–timor mortis genre” (Morris 1038). Goes too far because what seems most affecting about this moment—and what has too infrequently been discussed—is not its role as an iconographic “set piece” but rather its own representation of “particular death” (in Doebler’s phrase) in conjunction with those iconic generalities.
The real impact of Hamlet’s musings in this scene, it has always seemed to me, is not in the broader implications and associations he offers, but in where he begins: with the immediate, physical substance of Yorick’s skull. What critics tend to overlook—what we all, perhaps, forget when recalling this image out of its fuller verbal context—is that Hamlet’s encounter with the skull is at least as much about (in fact both begins and ends with) that horrible material reality:
Ham. This? [Takes the skull.]
Grav. E’en that.
Ham. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now—how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.—Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
Hor. What’s that, my lord?
Ham. Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’the’ earth?
Hor. E’en so.
Ham. And smelt so? Pah! [Puts down the skull.]
(V.i.176-194)[3]
The opening pronouns’ emphasis on concreteness; the final attention to the skull’s offensive smell; and especially that remarkable sentence, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft”—these details remind us (as they show Hamlet himself to be realizing) that Yorick’s skull is more than what Yasuhiro Ogawa suggests when he writes: “a didactic property of emblematic significance, the skull serves as a grim reminder of the end of all human endeavors” (Ogawa 201). To say so quickly and assuredly, as Ogawa and others do, that the skull serves as a memento mori ignores the far more basic and powerful fact that the skull is most simply and above all the material that remains of one who once was. That may seem smaller, indeed; it may seem primary and obvious. But a line like “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft,” with its (Horatio might say curiously) particular attention to Yorick’s actual, decayed flesh, shows that what is being examined here is not (or not only) the idea of the temporal flesh, but rather the flesh itself. Or rather, again, what is being examined, quite visibly, is the palpable absence of that flesh on the skull in Hamlet’s hand—an absence that inevitably leads to the flesh’s being reimagined, remembered, represented. Which is, of course, just another kind of “idea of the flesh.” If, as T. S. Eliot famously wrote,[4] John Webster “saw the skull beneath the skin,” then Hamlet, in this scene, sees the skin “beneath” the skull (Eliot 47).
What is at issue here, then, is not mere iconicity, but materiality—and the material, bodily artifact’s relation to representation. If Ogawa seems reductive in calling the skull a “property” (by which I take him to mean a dramatic “prop”[5]), he is by no means altogether wrong. Indeed, throughout the play, Hamlet holds his mirrors up to nature precisely by creating such representational stagings of what is or was. What makes this example unique, though—and what makes the skull as memento mori different from other mementi of its kind (snuffed candles, decayed flowers, an hourglass)—is that the skull is not simply a mirror. It is no mere “counterfeit presentment” like the picture of another dead man that Hamlet shows to his mother in Act III, Scene 4, but is rather simultaneously a representation of the thing and the actual thing represented. The special frisson of this scene, I think, for Hamlet’s audience and perhaps for Hamlet himself, comes from this recognition that, in the case of the corpse, representation and reality can (might in fact necessarily) co-exist. We learned early on of Hamlet’s awareness that the social manifestation of an interior reality could only be representational[6]—that to express one’s inner emotion was only to seem to be in grief, in love, or what have you. Here, though, while Yorick’s skull leads Hamlet out into his relatively abstract reflections on loss, vanity, and earthly power—i.e. while it functions as a representational symbol of those more abstract truths—it also and insistently brings him back in to a focus on itself, on that which it most immediately and tangibly is: in Douglas Robert Reifler’s words, “the rotten skull of someone he actually knew” (Reifler 329). This is why, as Reifler notes, the common misquotation of Hamlet’s “I knew him, Horatio” betrays a failure to grasp the precise nature of the skull’s effect on him. Even Hamlet, who has just noticed the desensitization of the gravedigger who “sings in grave-making” (V.i.65-66), has clearly been desensitized himself, such that seeing the particular skull of Yorick, a man whom he actually knew when in life, makes the experience of seeing such an object newly arresting.
The impact is emphasized through comparison with the skulls Hamlet sees immediately before this, when his comments in fact fit much more closely the descriptions of critics who emphasize the memento mori aspects of the later encounter. What is new in the Yorick passage is not the ubi sunt of Hamlet’s “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment…?”; for we heard that before in his “Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?” (V.i.97-98). Nor do we first hear a reflection on vanitas or an expression of contemptus mundi in his “let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come” and “Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’the’ earth?”; for those, too, were suggested in his “…and now my Lady Worm’s, chopless, and knocked about the mazard with a sexton’s spade” (V.i.87-88). The only earlier moment that comes close to the Yorick speech’s affecting immediacy is in the lines that closely follow the Lady Worm comment: “Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with ’em? Mine ache to think on’t” (V.i.90-91). This line shows the visceral hitting-home of the first two skulls’ (as Hamlet reads it) memento mori message; and the Yorick speech goes yet further in evoking the even more literally visceral memory of flesh that has been lost. Because Hamlet confronts now the skull of one he actually knew, representation back through memory to that (physically rooted) prior knowledge is made possible—and in fact not only possible but even necessary. The sting of Hamlet’s holding this piece of the body of one he once knew comes from the recognition that a body can be (in part) physically present and yet no longer stand for itself; instead, now, the representational work of memory must be performed in order for the skull to stand for the body that once was.
For the sake of comparison, consider Mistress Quickly’s description of the death of Falstaff in Henry V:
So a’ bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone.
(Henry V, II.iii.23-27)
The body’s transformation from living flesh to mere representational material (stone, of course, being the material of statues) gives this scene an uncanny power not unlike Hamlet’s description of the skull’s absent lips; what makes the moment so striking is the fact that Falstaff’s body is apparently dead—has become the representational material of a body rather than simply a body—though his speech and mind continue to exhibit life. Whether Mistress Quickly follows the progress of that death up through the limbs, or whether she only progressively discovers a process already complete, is ambiguous, but in any case death, here, is signaled by the substitution of stone for flesh, by the end of that flesh’s capacity to represent itself and by the beginning of the need for others to rely on their own representational work in order to maintain the dead’s presence in our socially representational world—work that occurs in this very speech, as Mistress Quickly narrates a scene we do not see.
It is this work that Hamlet takes up when he takes up Yorick’s skull; it is this work, in fact, that has been Hamlet’s task ever since swearing his oath in Act I, Scene 5, of the play:
Now to my word.
It is ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me.’
I have sworn’t.
(I.v.110-112)
What the Yorick speech, and in particular the description of the skull’s absent lips, shows us is that grim but powerful representational work of memory. The material presence of the jester’s remains and the material absence of his flesh itself together spur the re-membering that Hamlet performs in his mind and words—which is, as more than one critic has pointed out, the very social work that tragedy itself performs. Jennifer Wallace, for instance, describes that work as “the bewildered demand for an opportunity to reflect upon conflict and suffering finally being answered with a body on which to focus that reflection” (Wallace 106). Wallace writes about Act V, Scene 1, in the context of an essay on the “Portraits of Grief” series of biographies published daily in The New York Times for more than three months after September 11, 2001. “To those who had disappeared without trace [the profiles] gave back a recognizable solid body, even if only in the form of a text” (Wallace 103). The title of the Times series speaks to Wallace’s point: the profiles were “portraits of grief” not in the sense that grief was what they attempted to represent, but rather in the sense that such portraits are the representations that grief must produce.
While tragedy in literature attempts to make sense of individual suffering by setting it in a universally recognised pattern, it also demands compassion for the specific case. It traditionally focuses our attention upon the body, so centrally indeed that the eccyclema—or contraption for displaying the dead body—was a vital part of ancient Greek stage machinery. So the need to bear witness to the individual faces of the 11 September attack (a photograph accompanied each profile) was analogous to the chorus’s desire to see the blinded Oedipus, or the shattered Astyanax on his father’s shield.
(Wallace 104)
This sense of the Yorick speech’s necessary attention to bodily specificity is precisely what is lost in the general critical attention to the memento mori elements of that scene. In a similar vein to Wallace’s, Richard Fly notes that tragedy arises from (or at least in) resistance to the common sense of death as a general condition faced by humanity; Fly identifies “a relentless force operating generally in the world of Hamlet to erode hierarchies of value and collapse systems of differentiation” (Fly 263). Ironicially, Hamlet himself would seem to be a part of this force, in his reflections upon death-the-leveler in the Yorick speech and before. But although he does indeed recognize that death comes for all—for “my lady” and for Alexander as for the jester himself—he also insists here upon conjuring for a moment through his representational speech the particular body that in this individual case has been lost.[7]
That the need for such representation arises from the inability of the dead to perform their own representational acts is further emphasized by Hamlet’s earlier comment on the first anonymous skull: “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once” (V.i.74). And given the identity of the newly dead one whose grave is displacing this very skull, we cannot help but think of Ophelia and her songs of madness, those we heard ourselves and those “snatches of old lauds” that were themselves only represented for us by the words of another (IV.vii.176). The connection is solidified when Hamlet takes Yorick’s skull in his hand in a pose not unlike that which had been evoked by Ophelia’s own earlier description of his behavior:
He took me by the wrist and held me hard.
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And with his other hand thus o’er his brow
He falls to such perusal of my face
As a would draw it.
(II.i.87-91)
That Hamlet is described as planning here his own representation of her flesh—“the artist experiencing,” in Martin W. Walsh’s own evocation of Eliot, “the skull beneath the skin” (Walsh 77)—may in retrospect bring home to us the extent to which, in the social world within the play, Ophelia is, in representational terms, dead even before her early time. That her own songs in Act IV, Scene 5, are not attended to or are only in the most narrow terms construed (“Pray you mark” is her punctuating refrain) makes Hamlet’s line about the anonymous skull a bitter though unwitting commentary on her lack of representational power in that world.
The tableau described by Ophelia (in, of course, something of an exception to my last point) is remarkable in that it involves an attention to the physical material of her body that is otherwise curiously and almost wholly absent in the play—especially curious given that body’s constant strategic and rhetorical manipulation by the play’s more powerful, politically maneuvering figures. The most strikingly obvious absence of Ophelia’s body comes in the scene just prior to Hamlet’s graveyard visit, when the Queen describes Ophelia’s death to Laertes and Claudius:
There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
(IV.vii.165-182)
As numerous critics have pointed out, there are many oddities in this speech—the most troublesome of which include its description of a death not apparently the result of suicide, and the question of how and by whom this scene was even observed. And even on the most basic grammatical level, Gertrude’s lines actively subvert our critical grasp specifically through their syntactic evasion of the body, in line with the tendency I have more generally described. Whatever the Queen’s purpose in portraying Ophelia’s death as something other than a suicide—whether because it was indeed accidental, or because the Queen for some reason did not know or did not want to reveal that it wasn’t—the absence of Ophelia’s body from the Queen’s description furthers the sense of Ophelia as without agency in her death. Beginning not with Ophelia but with “There is a willow…” (an opening which, in its self-consciously narrative formulation, foregrounds the representational rather than more narrowly verisimilar nature of the speech as a whole) and with a digression (however apt) on the flowers Ophelia used and their variously suggestive names, the speech marks this bodily absence from its very start. But syntactically, and in a sense despite itself, the speech soon engages in an even more active avoidance of that body as well. This is most clear in Gertrude’s third sentence, when an introductory modifying clause describes a subject that is in fact displaced by the willow with which the speech began. “There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds / Clamb’ring to hang” can, of course, only describe Ophelia herself, and yet the sentence’s active main verb, “broke,” is attributed not to her but to the (aptly personified) “envious sliver” of a branch. And as the sentence continues, Ophelia’s body is yet further displaced by becoming—through the awkward and bizarre zeugma of “her weedy trophies and herself”—only the second in a pair of things that “[f]ell in the weeping brook” as a result of that break. “Her clothes,” furthermore, are the acting subjects of the next two clauses, with “mermaid-like” (a phrase much-discussed in the criticism, but always, so far as I have seen, unquestioningly attributed to Ophelia herself) therefore having an ambiguous referent. Again, the fact that it is “her garments” that “[p]ull’d the poor wretch…[t]o muddy death,” and not some conscious (or even unconscious) act of the woman herself that got her there, most immediately suits the Queen’s purpose (whatever it may be) in describing Ophelia’s death as an accidental occurrence; but the absence of Ophelia’s body in the description also epitomizes her fate throughout the play as one who is subject to others’ representational control.
If death marks the limit of the body’s capacity to represent the self and the taking over of a trajectory of representations wholly in the control of others, then tragedy is, as I and others have suggested, just one of the forms of representation serving to assuage both communal and individual senses of loss. We can see throughout Act V, Scene 1, the desire to maintain a sense of the body’s inviolable integrity that accompanies these forms. The flip-side of Hamlet’s grim (though, I would argue, self-comforting) re-memberment of Yorick’s missing flesh are his observations throughout the scene (as to Claudius in Act IV, Scene 3) that the material of flesh itself, once decayed, becomes transformed and intermixed in the most unsettling ways. In the burial of Ophelia’s body with no casket but only a shroud,[8] this fact would of course have been impossible to overlook, and so it is unsurprising that Laertes is moved to assert his own imaginative control over the imminent process of putrefaction as well:
Lay her i’th’ earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring.
(V.i.231-233)
I called Hamlet’s earlier attention to Ophelia’s body remarkable, but it is in fact repeated in Laertes’ words here, when the brother himself confronts and in part resists what Stephen Grenblatt describes as the “drastic leveling, the collapse of order and distinction into polymorphous, endlessly recycled materiality” (Greenblatt 243). The social leveling Hamlet sees in death, common as that observation is in the memento mori tradition, is at this moment shown to have a disturbing counterpart or even basis in the material reality of decay. It is no longer, as in the Act III, Scene 1, soliloquy, only the soul of man whose fate after death leaves Hamlet troubled and uncertain; for as Hamlet himself reminds us at several points in Acts IV and V, the body too will continue through an endless cycle of decay and reformulation that constitutes an unknown afterlife of its own. By contrast, the skull that Hamlet holds is a reassuring suggestion of some more stable and self-contained permanence, as Susan Zimmerman describes:
[B]ones are emblems of death that bear no trace of nature’s cannibalism; they are the hard, clean, sanitised remnants of putrefaction. It is as if it is easier for Hamlet to focus on extinction than formlessness: there is still some comfort to be taken from contemplating the dead as determinate if anonymous material artifacts.
(Zimmerman [2005] 190)
The skull, then, while in the memento mori tradition representing life’s transience, simultaneously represents that part of the self that (at least in time as measured on a human scale) is exempt from the processes of “polymorphous, endlessly recycled materiality,” that part that maintains a physical integrity and even (as in the Gravedigger’s confident identification of the skull Hamlet holds) an identity of its own.
One is tempted to argue, in reading the last two acts of the play, that Hamlet is confronting here for the first time these unsettling material implications of death, and that his doing so plays some distinct role in the development of his character. The catalyst for that development, by such an argument, would most likely be the first death he directly causes, that of Polonius in Act III, Scene 4. And indeed, Hamlet’s gruesome “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room” as he exits the stage at the end of that scene must evoke for us in retrospect his language three scenes later when he first describes death’s material implications to Claudius by noting “how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (III.iv.214; IV.iii.30-31). Polonius’s is in fact not only the first death Hamlet causes but also the first this famously bloody play directly represents, while its earlier four (those of King Hamlet, Priam, the dumb-show king, and The Mousetrap’s Player King) are given only in framed representational form, either in spoken narrative (for the first two) or as dramatic enactments within the drama of Hamlet itself. But the material reality of the body after death is very much at issue even in the first of these examples—though again, critics have tended to overlook that fact despite the attention they have given to the ghost as an entity.
While a seemingly endless critical discussion continues regarding Shakespeare’s, Hamlet’s, the Globe audience’s, and others’ ideas of what exactly the King’s ghost must spiritually represent, very few critics (Zimmerman is a notable exception) ask instead what, in fact, the ghost might materially be. Marjorie Garber, for instance, sets the ghost in direct opposition to the skull of Act V (itself, as I have argued, insufficiently considered as material) when she writes: “The skull of Yorick…is in a way the antitype of the Ghost, material rather than spiritual. But it is also a memento mori, a reminder of death, and thus, like the Ghost, another invitation to ‘remember’” (Garber 503). But the play does not allow Garber’s confident division of material and spiritual to remain intact; to do so, as I have already begun to suggest, would result in a much more comfortable experience for Hamlet and his fellow characters, as well as for their audience. Garber earlier notes that “[t]he stage direction says ‘Enter the Ghost,’ but the apparition is not so concretely described by the immediate onlookers” (Garber 479)—citing for example Horatio’s and Marcellus’s descriptions of the apparition as “this thing,” “this dreaded sight,” and “illusion” (I.i.24, 28, 130). But while such descriptions may indeed mark the question of whether or not the ghost is really ‘there,’ they seem at least equally to mark the no less troubling question of just what kind of ‘thing’ it is.
Indeed, two passages closely adjacent to those Garber quotes reveal the latter uncertainty while suggesting an apparent acceptance of the ghost’s material manifestation. The first is Horatio’s initial address:
What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march?
(I.i.49-52)
The word “form” here, admittedly, may not unambiguously denote a material entity—but paired with the verb “usurp,” it suggests that some physical appropriation has indeed occurred. In which case, furthermore, these lines suggest that the material presence being addressed not only may be shaped like “the majesty of buried Denmark,” but in fact may be the usurped material being of that majesty itself—or perhaps, as the second passage would lead us to imagine, the material armor that material being previously wore:
Mar. Is it not like the King?
Hor. As thou art to thyself.
Such was the very armour he had on
When he th’ambitious Norway combated.
(I.i.61-64)
This “very armour,” as a long note on page 425 of the Arden points out, “is repeatedly stressed,”[9] and is, as Zimmerman suggests, an invitation to ask the question that almost necessarily follows: what is contained within?
I would argue that Hamlet’s vision of the interior of the ghost—what lies behind the warrior’s armour—is a compelling but fatal apprehension of death as indeterminacy. This apprehension, because detached from categorical fixities…is theoretically unrepresentable.
(Zimmerman [2005] 181)
Unrepresentable it may indeed be, but as the constant compulsion of a dramatic art is representationally to manifest, the play cannot seem to leave this indeterminacy unexamined. When the first scene’s observers reveal to Hamlet what they have seen, and even more distinctly when Hamlet himself first sees the ghost, the identification of this armor’s contents as the actual corpse of the dead king will again be proposed:
Ham. Arm’d, say you?
All. Arm’d, my lord.
Ham. From top to toe?
All. My lord, from head to foot.
Ham. Then saw you not his face?
Hor. O yes, my lord, he wore his beaver up.
Ham. What look’d he, frowningly?
Hor. A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.
Ham. Pale, or red?
Hor. Nay, very pale.
(I.ii.226-233)
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements, why the sepulcher
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d
Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again.
(I.iv.46-51)
Though in anger, the flesh is pale in the manner of a corpse, and the source of this fleshly being is not some spiritual beyond but rather the “cerements” (glossed in Arden as “burial clothes”) and “sepulcher” of that being’s resting place in earth. The ghost’s need to return and “render up [it]self” “to sulph’rous and tormenting flames” further supports this sense of materiality (I.v.3-4), as does Hamlet’s meta-representational playing on the physical presence of the ghost-actor-“mole” in the “cellarage” or “hell” (as terms from the Globe’s stage geography) beneath the boards (I.v.157-70).
What this last set of meta-theatrical jokes further serves to do, I want to suggest, is draw attention to the liminal state of the ghost as yet another figure existing unsettlingly as both representation and reality. This is just one part of the broader “death as indeterminacy” that Zimmerman finds evoked in these scenes. She elaborates further this aggregate of indeterminacies in two descriptions of the corpse as a more general figure:
From an anthropological perspective, the fearsomeness of the corpse resides in its putrefaction, or unbecoming; that is, in the dissolution of those boundaries that mark the body’s former union of parts.
(Zimmerman [2005] 2)
As the foremost emblem of the uncategorizable, the corpse blurs the fundamental distinctions between life and death, material and immaterial. In so doing, it serves to focus the subject’s revulsion/attraction to the annihilative/generative properties that constitute ‘nature.’
(Zimmerman [2004] 81-82)
One thing the play’s insistent attention to the ghost’s armor may signal, then—beyond, for instance, the obvious attributions of valor and strength to the figure of the dead king—is an anxious need to reestablish those boundaries that death has begun to dissolve.[10] Without such a physical boundary intact, the bodily integrity of the corpse that may literally be within cannot be ensured. The boundaries are necessary, in fact, for representation itself to be possible, because the representational matter as well as the matter represented (which may, as I have suggested, be in this case one and the same) must be identifiable and self-contained. And when representation becomes thus impossible, the identity of the human along with its bodily matter is finally lost. Robert N. Watson suggests as much, though in less material terms, when he observes:
Revenge may be ‘a remedy for grief’ but it is also a remedy for terror; it pretends to be a bloody horror, but it blocks another, paler kind of horror, one less susceptible to fictional adjustments into consolation. Pursuing the specter of a father…allows one to flee the specters of decay and annihilation, of unaccommodated death.
(Watson 201)
Whatever else the ghost represents, then, it fulfills a fantasy of the dead’s capacity to remain in a state of physical and representational integrity even after the apparent limit of that capacity (i.e. death) has passed.
That limit is what Hamlet faces at the end of the play, when he attempts to ensure his own future representationality in his dying instructions to Horatio:
You that look pale and tremble at this act,
Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
(V.ii.339-345)
The scene’s meta-theatricality is of course both notable and much noted, but a number of points must be made in bringing this end to bear on what I have discussed. First, we see Hamlet anticipating here the lost capacity for self-representation that his own death will entail, stated with the barest simplicity in that distinction, “I am dead, / Thou livest.” It is in fact the point again of his final words—“the rest is silence”—some twenty lines later. In preparing for death, then, Hamlet (ever the theatrical director) is compelled to arrange for the representation of himself that will endure:
O God, Horatio, what a wounded name
Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me.
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
(V.ii.349-354)
This has always seemed to me a rather odd end for Hamlet, the most introspective and socially isolated of heroes. Granted, we do not see but only hear of him as the “expectancy and rose of the fair state” he once was (III.i.154). Still, though, for Hamlet and his play to end with such a narrowly and socially construed transcendence of the death he now immediately faces seems a disingenuously comforting deflection of the more disturbing recognitions with which he had begun these final two scenes. Consider what follows, then, to be at worst an act of interpretive wishful thinking on my part, an attempt to make Hamlet an even better play than the quite remarkable creation it already undoubtedly is. But a number of other details from these final moments of this final scene suggest that the play may in fact be wiser to my objection than it at first seems to be.
Hamlet’s last phrase, for instance, may not be as single-minded as I have suggested above.
Ham. So tell him, with the’occurrents more and less
Which have solicited—the rest is silence.
Hor. Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
(V.ii.362-365)
Horatio’s response is clearly in dissonance with the words Hamlet has just spoken, a fact given emphasis by his turning of the word “rest” from the sense of what remains to the sense of a post-life state of peace. That this word—rest—is among the most important in the established rituals with which society responds to the occurrence of death furthers the apparent shift here from the individual and private experience of the dying to the social and public experience of those who respond to that death after it has occurred. That the two experiences are necessarily at odds is a fact that Watson links to critical misdirections such as those I have discussed in relation to Yorick’s skull and the former king’s ghost:
By engaging in elaborate explications of the ars moriendi, the rituals of funeral, and the traditions of tomb making, [most modern studies of Renaissance attitudes toward death] tend to participate in the very mechanisms of distraction and denial they purport to be studying…The moment of dying is not death; the responses of the living are not the experience of the dead. Furthermore, by studying the various ways death was represented, scholars tend to overlook the crucial premise that death is representable, the fact that visualizing death begs the question of whether death is mere blankness.
(Watson 213)
Is drawing attention to this question perhaps one of Shakespeare’s aims in packing these final key moments with so many of the trappings of dramatic representation?—with “mutes or audience to this act,” “to tell my story,” and yet more fully with Horatio and Fortinbras’s final exchange:
Hor. …give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view,
And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world
How these things came about…
…All this can I
Truly deliver.
Fort. Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience…
Hor. But let this same be presently perform’d
Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.
(V.ii.382-400)
Of course, as Garber points out, such meta-theatrical elements are far from unique in the closing of this play: “in almost every tragedy Shakespeare wrote, this invitation to ‘speak of these sad things,’ is a way of making tragic events bearable, by retelling them, by placing them at once in the realm of the social and of the aesthetic” (Garber 505). But as in the earlier scenes I have discussed, the physical presence of the corpses onstage as Horatio speaks these lines brings with it a collapse of the distinction between the material of the former beings and the material of the representation with which those beings are to be evoked. In encountering Horatio’s instructions here—as in encountering Yorick’s skull and the dead king’s ghost—we will be tempted as critics and audience to take our attention away from the bodies in favor of the stage. But the meta-theatrical image that Horatio here proposes[11] is a radical departure from the traditional conception of art as an enduring and unchanging monument to that which has been.
It is apparently
Heidegger’s understanding of the unrepresentability of death on which Watson
draws in his observations above, and in Being and Time Heidegger
explains that it is precisely representation’s compulsion to limit its subject
in time and space that makes it incapable of conveying what is most urgently
distinctive about the reality of death. We are always, according to Heidegger,
from the moment of our coming into awareness of life, living with the
experience of dying, an experience that will never be complete until our lives
have already reached their ends. Aesthetically immortalizing representations are
fundamentally unlike death, just as they are unlike living beings
themselves, in that they are apparently changeless and stable in their
identities. But we know, of course, that even art—like even a skull—is indeed
subject to deterioration over time on a vaster scale. And it is this living and
dying art that Shakespeare seems committed to presenting us (and his
characters) with throughout this play. That final image of a drama that will
materially decompose as it attests to the events that have occurred refigures
the earlier representations of the dead that I have described in its insistence
that the material basis of representation—like the material bases of life and
death—not be overlooked.
Works Cited
Doebler, Bettie Anne. “Hamlet: A Grave Scene and Its Audience.” Hamlet Studies 3.2
(Winter 1981): 68-82.
Dox, Donalee. “And All Was Cold As Any Stone: Death and the Critique of
Representation.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 12.1 (Fall 1997):
103-11.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York:
Penguin, 1998.
Fly, Richard. “Accommodating Death: The Ending of Hamlet.” Studies in English
Literature 24.2 (Spring 1984): 257-74.
Frye, Roland Mushat. The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600.
Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Trans. Joan
Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.
Maslen, Elizabeth. “Yorick’s Place in Hamlet.” Essays and Studies 36 (1983): 1-13.
Morris, Harry. “Hamlet as a Memento Mori Poem.” PMLA 85.5 (Oct 1970): 1035-40.
Ogawa, Yasuhiro. “Grinning Death’s-Head: Hamlet and the Vision of the Grotesque.”
In The Grostesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, ed. James
Luther Adams and Wilson Yates. Grand Rapids, MI: Erdmans, 1997 (193-226).
Reifler, Douglas Robert. “‘Poor Yorick’: Reflections on Gross Anatomy.” In Teaching
Literature and Medicine, ed. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Marilyn Chandler
McEntyre. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2000 (327-
32).
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Harold Jenkins. London:
Methuen, 1982.
__________. Henry V. The Arden Shakespeare, ed. J. H. Walter. London: Methuen,
1960.
Triggs, Jeffery Alan. “A Mirror for Mankind: The Pose of Hamlet with the Skull of
Yorick.” 17.3 (Fall 1990): 71-79.
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Cambridge Quarterly 32.2 (June 2003): 103-11.
Walsh, Martin W. “‘This same skull, Sir…’: Layers of Meaning and Tradition in
Shakespeare’s Most Famous Prop.” Hamlet Studies 9.1-2 (Summer-Winter
1987): 65-77.
Watson, Robert N. “Giving Up the Ghost in a World of Decay: Hamlet, Revenge, and
Denial.” Renaissance Drama 21 (1990): 199-223.
Zimmerman, Susan. “Killing the Dead: The Ghost of Hamlet’s Desire.” Shakespeare
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__________. The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre. Edinburgh:
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[1] See, for example, Maslen, Triggs, and especially Garber and Walsh.
[2] For the sake of ease, I use this term to represent an aggregate of traditions also including ars moriendi, timor mortis, contemptus mundi, vanitas, danse macabre, and ubi sunt iconography—all of which are explored in detail by these critics, who often differ in the ways they privilege, group and subordinate those terms.
[3] Citations from Hamlet will appear in this format throughout. (In all instances the emphasis is mine.) All other citations will be attributed.
[4] In his poem “Whispers of Immortality,” from which I take my title.
[5] Robert N. Watson similarly writes of the effect on Hamlet and the audience of “seeing the attitude of the gravediggers toward the bodily remains—the way the props are treated by the stagehands after the funeral show is over…” (Watson 212).
[6] See, most prominently, I.ii.76-86.
[7] Fly goes on to suggest that the play’s characteristic wealth of apparently insignificant, dramatically unnecessary detail similarly works to ensure that “even in this death-oriented action life will retain its particularity and value” (Fly 272).
[8] See Frye 243-253 for the details of contemporary burial practices in relation to the funeral of Ophelia.
[9] See also, for example, Hamlet’s first address at I.iv.51-52: “What may this mean, / That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel…”
[10] Garber suggests that “the play is about the whole question of boundaries, thresholds, and liminality or border crossing,” and notes especially a number of elements that arise in these early scenes: “boundary disputes between Norway and Denmark, boundaries between youth and age, boundaries between reality and imagination, between audience and actor. And these boundaries seem to be constantly shifting. The most inexorable boundary possible would seem to be that between life and death, yet the play opens with the appearance of a ghost…Even language seems to lose its boundaries…” (Garber 470).
[11] To whatever extent it is indeed a specifically meta-theatrical image; lines 382-383 are cited in the OED’s definition of “stage” as, more generally, “A floor raised above the level of the ground for the exhibition of something to be viewed by spectators.”