Eugène Delacroix: Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard (1839, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France)
Act V, Scene 1 (Hamlet, with Horatio).
Hamlet and Mortality. It's not the first time the twain do meet, of course: The Prince has contemplated – and despite all misgivings about the rotten state of affairs in Denmark quickly dismissed – suicide in his very first major soliloquy. Then there was that encounter with his father's Ghost, which not only confirmed his worst fears about the cause of Denmark's present woes but also forcefully brought home the idea that there might indeed be something after death too horrible to even think about: Purgatory. Beset by the idea "what if," Hamlet has subsequently weighed the imponderabilities of life and death in "To be, or not to be." In a quick succession of events after the "play within the play," he has first let slip a golden opportunity to kill Claudius, wrongly concluding that – since his uncle was kneeling in purported prayer – he would merely be rewarding him by sending his soul straight to Heaven, instead to the hell where it belongs; then he himself has committed murder, by killing Polonius; and finally, he has taken leave of Claudius by reminding him that all earthly existence, no matter how great in apparel, is subject to utter decay. While away from Denmark, he has thereafter sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to present death in England. And even in this very scene, he has already reflected on man's inevitable reduction to a pile of bones; on the terminality of all that which makes us more than matter – our minds, our nature and character, our skills, our position in society and our way of life; in short, all our intangible qualities and insignia – until matter is, indeed, the only thing that does remain of us.
But even those last reflections have been of a merely abstract nature – they haven't touched Hamlet personally. Thus, suddenly being brought face to face with the skull of his father's old court jester Yorick, a man whom, in life, the young Prince had loved and revered, is a clarion call of an entirely different kind. Now it's suddenly no longer just about worms, Kings, and beggars; nor about politicians, courtiers, and lawyers whose earthly remains are rudely and without the slightes consequence disturbed by the Gravemaker's/ First Clown's digging. Now it's finally personal. Now it's finally about Hamlet himself – and he is horrified.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him,
Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He
hath borne 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 kiss'd 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 chap- fall'n? 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.
Yorick's qualities as a man: they were those which are most cherished in court jesters: wit, imagination, a good voice; and a kind heart, which he showed not just to his fellow men in general but also to the Prince in particular. And yet: all that is gone without a trace, and worse, even Yorick's entire body – limbs, face, unique features – completely annihilated, as if none of it had ever even existed. All that remains is an inanimate, ill-smelling skull; and even that is still subject to further decay. And if this is what happened to Yorick ...
Prithee, Horatio,
tell me one thing.
What's that, my lord?
Dost thou think Alexander look'd o' this fashion i' th' earth?
E'en so.
And smelt so? Pah!
E'en so, my lord.
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not
imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it
stopping a bunghole?
'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty
enough, and likelihood to lead it;
... it is what happens to everybody. It is what will happen to Hamlet. It is even what happened to the greatest men in history; for death is, indeed, the Great Equaliser, just as Hamlet has reminded Claudius not so long ago. (And here again, as in the express references to classic mythology in other parts of the play, in particular in the "Pyrrhus and Hecuba monologue," I don't believe the reference to the great leaders of a long bygone age has anything to do with distancing – rather, it's the expression of an absolute truth; a shocking, horrifying truth that even the passage of an infinite amount of time will not be able to change.)
as thus: Alexander died,
Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is
earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam (whereto he
was converted) might they not stop a beer barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t' expel the winter's flaw!
And oh, to what an endless amount of base functions even the greatest of men may indeed be reduced. For when all is said and done, are we really more than matter? Horatio seems to think so: to him – the man of reason, the man of the mind – Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are, I think, more than mere humans; to him, their names stand for intangible values such as fame, glory, and leadership in statecraft, and it is in these values that they live on, long after their bodies' last little particles of earthly matter have been transformed to dust. For why else would he protest (and for once, rather impulsively, I imagine) at Hamlet's insistence on the reduction of their physical remains to utter nothingness? But the Prince is thinking of Genesis 3:19, the same bible passage alluded to by the First Clown's reference to Adam earlier, which in full reads: "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return." And Hamlet is not contemplating the fate of the soul; or a different and nobler fate of the soul, such as that promised elsewhere in the bible, e.g., in Ecclesiastes 12:7 – "then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it." Rather, his words imply that as a man's body decays, so, too, with it will his soul, until his very existence is annihilated – a fate that simply cannot be made up for by those intangible values so cherished by Horatio. This, then, becomes the counterpart to Hamlet's encounter with his father's Ghost, and to his contemplations in "To be, or not to be": the idea that death is – at least ultimately – neither Purgatory nor sleep (not even nightmare-ridden sleep), nor an unknown and unknowable state which "puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of"; but simply and plainly the abject horror of complete eradication; or at best, the body's transformation into an inanimate thing whose only quality of merit is its mere functionality. And as he has come back to finally confront Claudius for good, I think Hamlet is saying this with a clear premonition that he himself may be facing this fate sooner rather than later ...
Copyright 2002 – 2009: Ulrike Böhm, all rights reserved.
