Introduction
In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, death is a central and omnipresent theme. Shakespeare gives an end to the starring role in the script. Death is first portrayed after the ghost of Hamlet’s father visits him (Shakespeare 1.1 p.55-56). The ghost appears to reveal to his son that his brother killed him and that he should seek revenge. The spirit is a potent symbol of death (Boyce, ghost 23). The scene sets precedence for the whole play where death, suicide, revenge, and murder are blatantly displayed. Claudius had killed Hamlet’s father to gain the throne by marrying Queen Gertrude. In retaliation, Hamlet set out to kill Claudius. His plot results in the deaths of multiple characters; Queen Gertrude (his mother), Ophelia (his bride), Polonius (his future father-in-law), Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Claudius, and Hamlet himself.
In trying to process the events after his father’s death, Hamlet is seen questioning his mortality. In Act 1, Scene 2, Hamlet says, “O, that this too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself to dew” (Shakespeare 1.2 p.33). Soon after his father’s death, his mother got married to Claudius. Hamlet saw Queen Gertrude’s actions to remarry so quickly as a betrayal towards his father. In Act 1, Marcellus says, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Shakespeare 1.4 p.99). The words are a foreshadowing of the death to come.
The inevitability of death is further strengthened in the play through suicide. When Hamlet is still in the dark about the actual events leading to his father’s death, he seeks to elude the “whips and scorns of time.” Hamlet is depressed about Gertrude’s quick remarriage and contemplates committing suicide. Hamlet questions the morality of committing suicide and decides against it, “whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep -no more- and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Shakespeare 3.1 p.65-71)
Fear of Death
Hamlet’s fear of death and the uncertainty behind suicide and death keep him from committing suicide. “But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of” (Shakespeare 3.1 p.86-90). Regardless of his fear of death, his father demands vengeance. Death in the play is seen to revolve around betrayal and revenge. Hamlet’s revenge sets the scene for the theme of death in the rest of the act.
In act 3, stage 4, Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius in an attempt to kill Claudius. As a result, in act 4 scene 7, Ophelia drowns herself after a decline in her mental state due to her father’s death. In a sense, it can be said that Hamlet betrayed his bride by killing her father, which caused her suicide. Laertes, Polonius’s son, learns of his fathers’ death and seeks to avenge him by killing hamlet.In truth, Hamlet, in his attempt for vengeance, becomes the protagonist for death despite fearing death earlier in the play.
To Be or not to Be
Hamlet reverberates his consciousness of death; “to be or not to be” (Shakespeare 3.1 p.83). Hamlet, through these words, raises the issue of life and death. He is asking whether death may be preferable to life. He seeks to reinforce that death is not to be feared; death is part of life (Boyce, Hamlet 2). The play climaxes with the death of multiple characters, which solidifies death as everybody’s fate. Shakespeare, through Hamlet’s dramatic irony and his dialogue, brings forward the conflicts of humanity (as a result of Hamlet’s attempt of revenge), and the inevitability of death through the death of Denmark’s royal family and that of the whole country.
