THEME: Death Flashcards
GERTRUDE (ACT 1 SCENE 2)
“Thou knowest ‘tis common. All that lives must die.”
HAMLET (ACT 1 SCENE 2)- SOLILOQUY
“O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.”
HAMLET (ACT 1 SCENE 4)
“I do not set my life at a pin’s fee.”
HAMLET (ACT 3 SCENE 1)- SOLILOQUY
“To be, or not to be - that is the question;/Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.”
HAMLET (ACT 3 SCENE 1)- SLEEP
“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”
HAMLET (ACT 5 SCENE 1)- ALEXANDER
“Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’th’earth?”
CLAUDIUS (ACT 3 SCENE 3)
“O, my offence is rank; it smells to heaven”- In a soliloquy—the only soliloquy in the play not spoken by Hamlet—Claudius admits murdering his brother, and he describes his guilt in the language of decay. His crime smells bad, like something going off. Throughout Hamlet, moral faults are described in the language of rot, decay and disease. The Ghost’s “foul crimes” must be “purged away” (I.v: purging was a Renaissance medical procedure) and Gertrude sees “black and grievèd spots” (III.iv.) on her soul. This line creates a sense that the decay and sickness which infects everything in Hamlet has a spiritual dimension: the characters are not just doomed to die but doomed to damnation.
HAMLET (ACT 5 SCENE 1) - YORICK
“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio”- Hamlet’s discovery that the skull he is holding belongs to his father’s former fool, Yorick. In a play obsessed with death and decay, the appearance of an actual skull on stage is a climactic moment, and it causes Hamlet to meditate at length on the horror of decomposition: “My gorge rises at it” (V.i.). Hamlet remembers Yorick’s “gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment” (V.i.), which creates an eerie effect: none of Hamlet’s other characters could be described as jolly, but Yorick’s skull is still “grinning”.
CLAUDIUS (ACT 1 SCENE 2)- UNMANLY
“Of impious stubbornness unmanly grief”
GERTRUDE (ACT 1 SCENE 2)- GRIEF
“How is it the clouds still hang?/ nightly colour”
CLUADIUS (ACT 1 SCENE 2)-PARADOX
“Though yet of Hamlet or late brother death/ The memory will be green.”
DEATH IN HAMLET
In the aftermath of his father’s murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and over the course of the play he considers death from a great many perspectives. He ponders both the spiritual aftermath of death, embodied in the ghost, and the physical remainders of the dead, such as by Yorick’s skull and the decaying corpses in the cemetery. Throughout, the idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality, truth, and uncertainty in that death may bring the answers to Hamlet’s deepest questions, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine truth in an ambiguous world. And, since death is both the cause and the consequence of revenge, it is intimately tied to the theme of revenge and justice—Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet initiates Hamlet’s quest for revenge, and Claudius’s death is the end of that quest.
The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as well, as he repeatedly contemplates whether or not suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably painful world. Hamlet’s grief and misery is such that he frequently longs for death to end his suffering, but he fears that if he commits suicide, he will be consigned to eternal suffering in hell because of the Christian religion’s prohibition of suicide. In his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy (III.i), Hamlet philosophically concludes that no one would choose to endure the pain of life if he or she were not afraid of what will come after death, and that it is this fear which causes complex moral considerations to interfere with the capacity for action.
HAMLET (ACT 4 SCENE 3)-WORM
“Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat King and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, one table that’s all.”
HAMLET (ACT 4 SCENE 3)-BEGGAR
“Nothing but to show you how a King may go through the guts of a beggar.”
GRAVEDIGGERS (ACT 5 SCENE 1)
“If she had not been a gentle women she should have been buried out of Christian burial.”
