Welcome to Act 5 of Hamlet. Act 4 ended with the report of the death of Ophelia.
Act 5 opens with her funeral, although we don't immediately know that that's what
it is. In fact what it opens up with are two grave diggers coming out and digging
a grave. This is some more gallows humor. It lightens things up for a little while,
if you can call jokes about skulls and death light. And it also is another place
where the physical structure of the Globe is very helpful, because they can
simply open up the large double trapdoor, what was called the grave trap. We saw it
come into play with the Ghost at the beginning of this play, and at the end of
this play we get to see it being used as a grave. And so these two grave diggers--
they're listed as clowns in your text. "Clown" doesn't mean clown like a Ringling
Brothers kind of clown. "Clown" just means a rustic kind of person-- a simple sort of
person--and yet on the other hand these guys are making a lot of jokes. And one
of the main things they want to know is why is it that this woman is getting
buried when she's an apparent suicide? That doesn't seem right. Suicides were
not given full burials. They, in fact, until very late into the 19th century in
England, were buried at a crossroads, sometimes with a stake in their hearts;
and that sounds very cruel and scary, but the theory was that suicides were most
likely to come back as ghosts, and that if you buried them at the crossroads,
they'd get confused and wouldn't know their way back, and the stake in
their heart was to nail them down. Those of you who are familiar with Dracula
will see the resemblance in that right away. And so they start to argue about
whether or not this is a suicide and if it counts. "Is she to be buried in
Christian burial when she willfully seeks her own salvation?" "I tell you she
is: therefore make her grave straight. The crowner hath sat on
her, and finds it Christian burial." "How can that be unless she drowned herself
in her own defense?" "It must be se offendendo" --which means
must have been that she killed herself-- "it cannot be else, for here lies the
point. If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act has three
branches: it is, to act, to do, and to perform," --that's wrong, of course--
"argal [ergo] she drowned herself wittingly." "Nay, hear you, Goodman Delver--" "Give me leave.
Here lies the water. Good. There stands the man. Good. If the man go to this water
and drown himself, it is, will he nill he, he goes-- mark you
that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself:
argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life. "But is
this law?" "Marry, is't: crowner's quest law." "Will you have the truth of it? If this
had not been a gentlewoman, she had not she should have been buried out o'
Christian burial." "Why, there thou sayest" and the more pity that great folk should
have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves, more than their even
Christian." Life's just so unfair. If you've got connections, you can even kill
yourself without any consequences. Alright? And then we start to get up into
a bunch of jokes things like Adam must have been a gentleman, how
could he have been a gentleman, you know. "He was the first that ever bore arms....
What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scriptures? The
Scriptures say, 'Adam digged.' Could he dig without arms?" Ok, terrible joke. "I'll put
another question to thee." More terrible jokes to come. "If thou answerest me not to
the purpose, confess thyself--" "Go to." "What is he that builds stronger than either
the mason, the shipwright or the carpenter?" "The gallows maker; for that
outlives a thousand tenants." "I like thy wit well, in good faith. The
gallows does well; but how does it well? It does well to those that do ill now
thou dost ill to say the gallows is built stronger than the church: argal,
the gallows may do well to thee. To it, again." "Who builds stronger than
a mason, a shipwright, or a carpenter?" "Ay, tell me that, and unyoke." "Marry, now I can
tell!" "To't. "Mass, I cannot tell. "Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your
dull ass will not mend his pace with beating, and when you are asked this
question next, say, 'a grave maker.' Ohhhhhh. "The houses that he makes last till doomsday. Now,
get thee in, and fetch me a sup of liquor." So this is another sort of a joke.
Grave makers: it's a joke that has to do with their profession; and
he says "the houses that he makes last till doomsday." And then he
starts to dig a little bit more, and he's whistling while he works, so to speak,
he's singing and in the in the text it says, "throws up a skull." Now, of course, he doesn't throw up a skull; he throws up
a shovel full of earth with the skull in it. And one of the things people want to
know is, why is it that all these skulls are coming out of the grave. Well, if
you've gone to see a churchyard: see, nowadays, we bury people in huge
cemeteries with lots and lots of space, but in England or in other small
countries, what you have is a churchyard that gets very full very quickly. So what
do you do? Well, when you need to bury somebody again, what you do is you wait
about, oh, eight, nine, or ten years, until the soft bits are all gone, and then you just dig
up the skeleton, stack them in what's called a charnel house, and put a new
tenant in, and that is what they're doing for Ophelia. They're going to put her body
in the grave, and that means they need to clear out the previous occupants and so
all of these skulls are coming up. Hamlet comes in and says "gosh." "Has he no feeling
of his business? He sings in grave making," and Horatio says, well, it's his job: he's
used to it. And then Hamlet starts to philosophize about the skulls. "That skull
had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the nave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jawbone, that did the first murder." And he starts to speculate: may
he was a politician. Maybe he was a lady. Maybe it was the skull of a lawyer-- which
you know, just as in Jurassic Park, lawyers have never been popular, so that
seems reasonable. At this point, though, the skull is just a
theoretical skull: it's not a skull that belongs to anybody Hamlet knows, and
that's about to change for Hamlet. It's all abstract to the gravedigger. Skulls
are pretty much everyday business. Then Hamlet starts to ask him a bunch of
questions about grave making. "Whose grave is this, sirrah?" "Mine, sir." "I think it be
thine indeed, for thou liest in it." "You lie out on't, sir, and therefore tis not
yours : for my part, I do not lie in it, yet t'is mine." "What man dost thou dig it for?"
"For no man, sir." "For what woman, then?" "For none, neither." "Who is to be buried in it?"
"One that was a woman, sir, but rest her soul, she's dead." More jokes, and then
Hamlet starts to say, "when was it that you--how long have you been doing this, in
fact? And the gravedigger says "I have been doing this as long as when on the day
that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras." "When was that" "That was the
same day young Hamlet was born." So that's how we know that Hamlet's thirty years
old. He was born on the day that this gravedigger took up his first job, [thirty years ago].
And he also talks about Hamlet's having been off to England. You'll notice
he doesn't recognize Hamlet. He's never personally seen him before, but he's
heard tell that he's crazy and he's been sent to England. Why send him to England?
Well, either he'll get better, or, he says, no one will notice: everybody in England
is crazy anyway. And then Hamlet starts to ask about bodies: "How long will a man
lie in the earth ere he rot?" "Faith, if he be not rotten before he die--as we have
many pocky corpses that will scarce hold the laying-in--it will last you some
eight year, nine year: a tanner will last you nine year": tanners, because they've tanned
their hide very effectively. And then he pulls up another skull. "Here's a skull
now hath lain in the earth three and twenty years." "Whose was it?"
"A whoreson mad fellow's was it. Whose do you think it was?" "Nay, I know not." "A
pestilence on him for a mad rogue! he poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head
once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester." " This?" "E'en
that." "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio." Now, most of the time when you hear this,
it's done as [melodramatically] :"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio," but that's not it. It's "oh, my
gosh. This is a skull I know. This was my playmate. I remember him from when I was
a child." It's scary, because death starts to take on a very personal look when you
see it this way. "Not now one to mock your own grinning? quite chopfallen? Now get
you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this
favour must she come; make her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing."
"What's that, my lord?" "Dost thou think Alexander looked in the earth thus?" "Even so."
"And smelt so?" That's another thing about the reality of death. You can
philosophize about it all you want, but actually dead people look terrible, and
they smell bad, as the gravedigger is happy to tell you. We've moved from the
abstract personification of death to the concrete death and then it doesn't get
more concrete than Ophelia's death. He's wondering when the cortege-- the funeral
cortege of Ophelia--comes in with Laertes. Why is it that this is not a proper
funeral? It doesn't have all of the things that a normal funeral
would have, and that's because they think Ophelia might have killed herself.
In fact, she wouldn't have gotten a regular funeral in a churchyard at all
if Claudius hadn't stepped in and forced it. Laertes is very upset by this and he
thinks she should have a regular funeral, and then Gertrude steps forward and
throws flowers into her grave. "Sweets to the sweet!
farewell! / I hope thou should'st have been my Hamlet's wife./
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid, /And not have strewed thy grave."
Think about that next time somebody gives you a piece of chocolate and says
"sweets to the sweet." And then Laertes jumps into her
grave. There's all of these theatrics when he says, "bury me alive in the grave,"
and Hamlet jumps out and says, "you know, I'm just as sorry as you." "What is he
whose grief /Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow / Conjures the wandering
stars and makes them stand, / Like wonder wounded hearers? This is I,/ Hamlet the Dane."
"The devil take thy soul!" "Thou pray'st not well./ I prithee, take thy fingers from my
throat." So what's happened is the body's gone into the grave,
Laertes has jumped into the grave; Hamlet has jumped into the grave; and
now they're having a fist fight in Ophelia's grave. Not very dignified. And Hamlet
insists: "I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their
quantity of love, /Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her? Woo't sigh? Woo't weep?
woo't fast? woo't tear thyself? /Woo't drink up eisel? eat a crocodile? I'll do
it. So we're going to have the "who loved her more" competition. Kind of would have
been nice if he would have told her Ophelia that he loved her before she died,
but that's the way things go. He does feel bad, though, about going against
Laertes in this way, and in a moment or two, we're going to see that he
recognizes the parallel between himself and Laertes.
We're stuck with Hamlet having come back. This is a big
disappointment to Claudius. And Hamlet in the next scene explains this to Horatio.
Now, I should mention that in Act Four, there is a scene that was in Quarto One
that was omitted. Horatio gets a letter from Hamlet saying, "we were attacked by
pirates, I got taken by the pirates, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern went on to
England, and so that's why I'm here. And Horatio, in this omitted scene, goes
to Gertrude and says, "I heard from your son, and he's okay,"
and Gertrude says, "oh, thank goodness. I can't stand the King anymore. I'm just
humoring him." Now that's gone, and the question is, when that clarifies Gertrude's
feelings so much, why did Shakespeare leave it out? Why is it there in that
one text that we never perform, and why is it gone?-- and I'll leave that decision
to you, but it's an interesting sidelight on Gertrude's character. Hamlet has to
explain how it is that he wound up back in Denmark and what happened to R and G,
and what happened was that Hamlet opened up the sealed orders from Claudius, which
was in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's bag, and it said, "have Hamlet killed." Hamlet
rewrote the order and resealed it up with his father's seal ring, which is of
course the Kings' seal ring, saying, "execute the bearers immediately," and puts
it back into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's bag, so that when
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern get to England, they're going to be handing over
their own death warrant, only they don't know it .I mentioned that it's a bad idea
to swim with the sharks, and that's exactly what happens to them. Horatio
seems very distressed: "So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't, " and Hamlet says, "why, man, they did make love to this employment;/ They are not
near my conscience." So Hamlet's become a politician in some ways; much less like
Horatio than he once was. And he points out, "look, this is a struggle between me
and Claudius, and, you know, it's my death struggle, in essence.
Osric comes in, and he's ostentatiously taking his hat off in front of Hamlet on
He's Claudius's tool. The only reason you would take your hat off like this would
be in the presence of the king, so this is a kind of an overly sugary type of
flattery. That's why Hamlet keeps telling him, "no,
put your bonnet back on your head," and he wants to see how much he can get Osric
to play up to him. He did the same sort of thing with Polonius .You know: "Well, gee
whiz, yeah it is kind of hot!" "On the other hand, it's kind of cold." "Well, it's hot." yes
it's hot and cold at the same time. I don't know how it's hot and cold at the
same time, but you said so, so you must be right.
So that's part of the thing. Osric comes in to tell about Claudius's proposition
and the proposition is that he and Laertes will have this duel. It's not a
real duel; it's only meant to be a fencing match. It's only meant to be an
exhibition, or a sort of competition-- more like a gentlemanly
boxing tournament-- but instead what of course is going to happen is that this
is going to lead to Hamlet's death. Hamlet says he's not going to lose to
Horatio. He's got no problem with it, because he's been "in continual practice"
ever since Laertes went back to France,
but he still has a bad feeling about this.
"If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither
and say you are not fit." "Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special providence
in the fall of a sparrow. 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. The readiness is all. Since no man
has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be." Hamlet has reached
a sense of peace. Remember he was trying to think, "When am I going to get my revenge? what
am I going to do? what's going to happen?" and now he's saying, "I leave my
disposition up to God, in essence. I am just ready to have what
is supposed to happen, happen:" and so it that statement of his,
"the readiness is all," is really everything. Now Hamlet publicly
apologizes to Laertes. He says "I really never intended to hurt you or your
family; I'm really sorry," and Laertes is forced to shake his hand and pretend that
everything is ok, because of course he's going to murder him in a minute, but it's
an "accident." Hamlet is making this almost like a joke: "I'll be your foil, Laertes." He's
making a reference to the swords that they're using. Remember that Laertes is going to use a sword which has no "button" on the end,
which is what they call "unbated": it's a sharp sword, and he's going to actually
kill Hamlet that way. And they're kind of looking at the swords that Osric
offers them, almost like you take golf clubs out of a caddy's bag; and the
proposition is supposed to be that it's three hits. It's two hits out of three--
normal fencing match--and that if Hamlet gives the first or second hit, he's
supposed to get this cup which has a pearl in it. Now of course, it's not a
pearl cup: it's a cup with poison in it. This is Claudius's idea. I mentioned this
is over planned? This is a mistake. So Hamlet does get the first hit, and
Osric is there as the judge, and it seems to be going reasonably well. In
fact, Gertrude is very proud of her son, and she says, "he'll win! he's really good!"
and then Hamlet doesn't drink. He says he's not ready. Instead,
Gertrude reaches over and takes that poisoned cup.
"Gertrude, do not drink." "I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me." "It is the poisoned
cup. It is too late." It's enough to say--
but he can't Claudius can't--bring himself to say
"don't drink it because it's poisoned," or to knock it out of her hand. So the
question is how much does he really love his wife? He says that he loves her, but
not so much that he would endanger himself by confessing that he was
planning to poison Hamlet. Not going to do that.
Laertes actually seems to stab Hamlet when he's not looking:--"Have at you now!"
and he wounds Hamlet. And then the stage direction says, "then in scuffling, they
change rapiers." That's an extraordinary thing. They both have to somehow
accidentally drop their swords and switch it around so that now Hamlet has
got the pointy poisoned one and then he nicks Laertes. Question: when is it
correct to seek revenge? Hamlet has to wait until he publicly accuses the king
or Laertes publicly accuses the king, and his own death is imminent, and the entire
Danish Court can see this." "How is it, Laertes?" "Why, as a woodcock to mine own
springe, Osric; /I am justly killed with mine own treachery." "How does the Queen?"
"She swoons to see them bleed." "No, no, the drink, the drink--
O my dear Hamlet-- The drink, the drink! I am poisoned." And so Gertrude goes out first.
"O, villainy? Ho, let the door be lock'd:/ Treachery! Seek it out." Something's wrong,
and Laertes confesses. "It is here, Hamlet. Hamlet, thou art slain;/ No medicine in the
world can do thee good;/ In thee there is not half an hour of life; /The treacherous
instrument is in thy hand,/ Unbated and envenom'd. /Lo, here I lie,/ Never to rise again;
thy mother's poison'd /I can no more. the king, the king's to blame." Ok. Here I am.
I've got a murder instrument in my hand. I'm gonna die. The guilt is established.
Everyone can see now. "The readiness is all." Now I'm ready. "The point envenom'd too?
then venom, to thy work!" and he kills Claudius. Now Claudius says that he's
just hurt. He's almost like a cockroach; he takes a lot of killing: you know, stomp
stomp stomp stomp stomp. And so Hamlet takes the rest of the
poison and pours it down Claudius's throat. "Here, thou incestuous, murderous,
damned Dane, /Drink off this potion. Is thy union here? /Follow my mother." And
Laertes says, "well it's only just: he put the poison there himself," and asks for
Hamlet to forgive him. Hamlet of course forgives him because as
he said earlier, "I can see his cause in my own." We are so similar. We have both
lost our fathers in this terrible way." And then he says, "I am dead, Horatio. You
that look pale and tremble at this chance,/ That are but mutes or audience to
this act today but time as this fell sergeant death /is strict in his arrest--
oh, I could tell you--/But let it be. Horatio, I am dead;/
Thou livest: report me and my cause aright /To the unsatisfied.
So Horatio's job is to live. "You must tell my story. I won't be able to do it,"
and Horatio agrees "in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story."
And then we hear that Fortinbras is here, and so are the ambassadors from England,
and he's not going to hear any of this stuff, but he, as his only kingly act,
gives the throne over to Fortinbras. Fortinbras will now be the king of
Denmark, thus ending his own revenge story of his father against Hamlet's. "So
tell him with the occurrents, more and less /Which have solicited. The rest is
silence." For Hamlet it is, but not for us, because Horatio says, "I can tell you."
Fortinbras walks in and says, "What happened here?" Good question: a lot of
bodies on this stage. The ambassadors from England say, "well, we did execute
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, just like we were told to. Who are we supposed to
give our report to?" Who are we supposed to give our report to: everybody's dead. and
Horatio says, I will tell it. "So shall you hear / Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,/
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,/ Of deaths put on by cunning
and forced cause, / and in this upshot purposes mistook / Fall'n on the
inventors heads: all this can I /Truly deliver." And Fortinbras says, "put him on
the stage with the bodies. Let him tell his story." What we have seen, then, is
Horatio's story: it's Horatio's story of Hamlet. Horatio, as this play ends, is
about to tell the very play that we have just seen.
Hamlet then ends with Fortinbras taking the throne. Whether what's rotten in
Denmark has been fully expunged is is up to you to decide, but there certainly
seems to be a sense in which Hamlet has fulfilled his mission; he has set the
time that was out of joint right. And so even
though everyone's dead, this can be a very satisfying play.
There's not a lot more closure that can happen. There's just about as
many dead bodies as there were major characters. [not relevant]
I'd like you to begin reading
the first three acts of Othello. We're going to be doing
another tragedy, but with a very different flavor; and until then, I'll be
saying goodbye: get reading your Shakespeare.
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