Mortality Flashcards
The Ghost keeps appearing on the castle battlements—almost as if the “whole kingdom” hasn’t really been able to move on after Old Hamlet’s death.
His existance will forever live on
“What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” (Horatio)
When the play starts, Hamlet is clearly suicidal; the world he sees is so totally corrupted
But there’s a problem: suicide is a sin. That’s a lot of internal conflict for one tortured adolescent.
“O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on ‘t! ah fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.”
Claudius attempts to advice the “whole kingdom” to move on quickly.
Complete self interest at play, wants people to forget so he can be king peacefully
“That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.”
Death is common, we lose people all of the time. But when we die, we live on forver in memories
“Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.”
Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, tells Hamlet to stop grieving for his father.
“Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off”
Hamlet moving on from obsessing over killing himself
He’s exploring the reasons why people in general don’t commit suicide—which might be one reason he doesn’t use the word “I” or “me” in this whole soliloquy.
“To be or not to be—that is the question”
Hamlet tells Claudius that Polonius is “at supper,” but what he really means is that Polonius is being eaten for supper.
Part of his “antic disposition”
“Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms”
Ophelia’s description after she drowns
“mermaid-like”
We are silenced by death. Replicates how Ghost feels
“That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing
once.”
Hamlet has been obsessed with the physical reality of death since Act 1, and here he finally seems to get the philosophical implications: even Alexander the Great was treated like this?
“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust” (Hamlet)
Ophelia has committed suicide—not cool with Christians, and usually means that you don’t get a proper burial. Luckily, money talks, and Ophelia’s family pulled some strings to get her a religious burial. Hamlet thinks that death affects everyone the same, but maybe it doesn’t: rich people even get to die differently.
Despite Opehlia sinning, she gets a proper burial, like an innocent woman
“If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’ Christian burial.” (Second Clown)
a deeply philosophical acceptance of fate: whatever happens is going to happen when it happens—if not now, then later.
Maybe this is why Hamlet has delayed so long.
“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.” (Hamlet)
