C. Tsai 1
Caressa Tsai
Mr. Ahumada
ENG 4U1-06
20 April 2012
Hamlet and the Gravediggers
In many of his works, Shakespeare makes use of his minor characters to both catalyze his
plots and reveal fundamental truths about humanity. Although they seem to provide only comic
relief, the lower class characters often also spark realizations in the major characters. Whether it
be Juliet’s nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Margaret in Much Ado About Nothing, or Emilia in
Othello, Shakespeare’s minor characters profoundly change the progression of his plays through
their interactions with his protagonists. Although the central characters of his plays may have
been born to higher station, it is often shown that they are not necessarily wiser than their
inferiors. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the gravediggers’ scene initiates the beginning of the end of
the play by rousing Hamlet to finally avenge his father’s death. The gravediggers reveal the
harsh but natural inevitability of death, thereby redirecting Hamlet’s ideas about mortality from
the philosophical to the practical by crystallizing the central existential tension of the play - “to
be, or not to be.”
Hamlet philosophizes about and considers suicide more than once in the play. The threat
of suicide being a sin and the idea that what occurs after death is something to be feared is
enough to keep Hamlet constantly wavering between his decision to live or to die. In his first
soliloquy, Hamlet wishes:
“Oh that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
C. Tsai 2
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!”
(1.2.129-134)
It is evident that he would rather die than suffer the unnatural state of his world with his “unclefather” and “aunt-mother”, but cannot because suicide is a sin. However, as the play develops,
Hamlet continues to hesitate to take action against Claudius and avenge his father, and his
thoughts of suicide persist. By Act 3, it is the fear of the unknown that stays his hand, as he says
in his “to be or not to be” soliloquy, he has a “dread of something after death, the undiscover’d
country, from whose bourn no traveller returns” (3.1.78-80). Act 5 opens with a discussion of
suicide by the two gravediggers, as they wonder why Ophelia is having a Christian burial,
because they think that her death by drowning must have been “se offendendo […] she drowned
herself wittingly” (5.1.8-11). Elizabethans considered suicide as an offense to oneself and to
God. Through Hamlet’s interaction with the gravediggers, it becomes apparent that regardless of
the actions during life, death is a certainty – and therefore any attempt to hasten death by ending
life to avoid actions and their consequences is both immoral and unnatural. Hamlet’s world is an
existential one – his life seems hopelessly full of absurdity and disorder – however a seemingly
meaningless life is reason to create meaning through decisive action rather than to escape
through the irreversible act of suicide. The scene with the gravediggers reinforces that suicide
robs life of its potential for meaning and is an unnatural path to a natural end.
Hamlet and its protagonist are preoccupied by death, both natural and unnatural. The play
is preceded and its plot launched by the death – later revealed to be murder – of the King, and the
enigma of death runs through the entirety of the play, fascinating Hamlet to the point of
C. Tsai 3
obsession. As the play progresses, it is evident that he holds great interest in death, particularly in
the physicality of it, shown through how he speaks about the expected decay of the human body
after death. When Claudius asks Hamlet where Polonius is, he responds with: “At supper […]
where ‘a is eaten. A certain convocation of political worms are e’en at him” (4.3.17-20), and
later, in the graveyard scene, he asks the gravedigger: “How long will a man lie i’th’ earth ere he
rot?” (5.1.150). Both quotes are examples of his interest in what happens to a body after death,
explained by his unsurprising innate fear of death. Up until the scene with the gravediggers,
Hamlet’s experience with death is only in the unnatural sense – his father is murdered by his
uncle, he sees his dead father’s ghost, he contemplates killing himself, he plots to murder
Claudius but murders Polonius instead, and he orchestrates the murders of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. However, after seeing the casualness with which the gravediggers regard the
source of their profession, as he says to Horatio, “Has this fellow no feeling of his business ‘a
sings in grave-making?” (5.1.62-63) and coming face to face with a tangible harbinger of death
in Yorick’s skull, Hamlet realizes that death itself is inevitable and natural, and his preoccupation
with the physical aspect of death becomes a revelation about the commonness of death to all of
humanity. After the scene with the gravediggers, he understands that death is inescapable and
happens to everyone – it is the great equalizer. The differentiator then, is in how life is lived,
defined through thought, deed, and the legacy one leaves behind.
Given their surroundings, it is ironic that the gravediggers and Hamlet spend more time
discussing the many walks of life in this scene than at any other point during the play. Along
with revealing truths about death and suicide to Hamlet, the gravedigger scene also brings him to
a number of understandings about life and its meaning. After they talk about suicide, the
gravediggers’ banter turns to riddles and wordplay that allude to notions of permanence. Hamlet
C. Tsai 4
initially bemoans the fate of the dead, complaining how their deeds are ultimately impermanent,
from the silver-tongued politician to the regal courtier to the wealthy lawyer, but realizes that
while the vessel that is the body may decay, the accomplishments and work of a person last long
after they take their last breath, as their legacy. This is already known to the gravediggers, who
say that “the gallows-maker [is known] for that frame [he builds] outlives a thousand tenants”
(5.1.40-41) and that “the houses [a gravemaker] makes lasts till doomsday” (5.1.55-56). They,
unlike Hamlet, already understand that the accomplishments of a person give their life meaning
and last even after they die. Upon taking up Yorick’s skull, Hamlet is thrust back into the
innocence of childhood, and is reminded of the fact that both men who do great things in their
lives, and men who shy away from taking action, die. He speaks of the bodies of great men also
decaying:
“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to
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.”
(5.1.192-198)
In this quote, Hamlet comes to the understanding that because all men die, the separation
between great men like Alexander and Julius Caeser and himself are the actions that they take
when they are alive. Hamlet realizes that by not acting to avenge his father, the man responsible
for his father’s death will eventually die, allowing a bad deed to go unpunished. This reality of
death shocks Hamlet into accepting that life is only given meaning through action, one of the
most existential principles of the play – “to be” must become “to do”. His previous inability to
C. Tsai 5
take action is best noted by Tanner in Prefaces to Shakespeare, as he says, “In this polluted and
poisoned atmosphere, Hamlet finds it very difficult to know, to decide, how to act […] A
traditional avenger would have no problem. As we are reminded by the reactions and behaviour
of Laertes when he returns to Denmark and finds that his father has been murdered. Nothing
makes him hesitate and he has to be almost forcibly restrained from starting the killing
immediately” (Tanner 498). In the play, Laertes’ behaviour upon hearing of his father’s death is
quite contrary to Hamlet’s, and it is only after his interaction with the gravediggers that Hamlet
is able to act similarly. Upon realizing that Ophelia committed suicide, Hamlet unabashedly
leaps into the grave, grapples with Laertes, and proclaims his love. This Hamlet that decisively
declares, “I lov’d Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make
up my sum” (5.1.255-257) is far from the Hamlet that passed up the chance to avenge his father
just because it would be unfair “to take him in the purging of his soul when he is fit and seasoned
for his passage” (3.3.85-86). Hamlet’s transformation after his scene with the gravediggers is
further shown in his conversation with Horatio afterwards, in which he says, “The interim is
mine. And a man’s life’s no more than to say ‘one’” (5.2.73-74). These comments demonstrate
that Hamlet accepted the harsh reality of death and was shocked into realizing the importance of
taking action and that his essence – as either a great man or not – is only determined through the
choices and actions he makes, which pushes him to finally take action against Claudius.
On the surface, the major tension of Hamlet is whether or not Hamlet will kill Claudius
and take revenge for his father’s murder. Until his scene with the gravediggers, he acts in a
cowardly manner, rationalizing away any responsibility to his father, mother, love, and country
as the prince of Denmark. In both seeing and speaking to the gravediggers, Hamlet comes face to
face with death, and, in all of its finality, the “undiscovered country” becomes more of a reality
C. Tsai 6
to him. He realizes that although he can delay killing Claudius through excuses, time is finite and
he cannot delay his or Claudius’ natural deaths. It is for this reason that the scene with the
gravediggers can be argued to be the climax of the play, because of its radical effects on
Hamlet’s hesitation. Through understanding that suicide is an unnatural means of avoiding one’s
potential, realizing that death is natural, and learning that a person’s life and their greatness is
determined through the actions they take, Hamlet is finally forced to action. The scene with the
gravediggers is the start of the complete resolution of everything unnatural in Hamlet. Something
was “rotten” in Hamlet’s Denmark – the most natural occurrences of life were turned upside
down until the bloody end – to the point where Hamlet was blinded to the natural order of life
and death. Because of the gravediggers, who do not have Hamlet’s luxuries of overthinking and
delaying, he realizes, as an existentialist would, that action is the logical response to mortality in
that no one has the choice to escape death, but everyone has the choice of how to live life.