SEL 24 (1984) ISSN 0039-3657

Accommodating Death:

The Ending of Hamlet

RICHARD FLY

the interim is mine. (Ham. V.ii.73)

The creation of great tragedy is the rarest of literary events in the evolution of civilizations. One reason we have only a handful of true tragedies is that our societies have evolved by nurturing attitudes toward human experience and death that discourage the formation of tragic perspectives. These attitudes can assume a variety of social and religious forms, but underlying them all is a two-fold purpose: to diminish the uniqueness of death by understanding it as merely the common fate of all things in nature, and to deny the apparent finality of death by understanding it as only the passage to another life in eternity. This is quite natural, of course, since all societies need to constitute themselves so as to appear invulnerable to the loss of particular members. Tragedy becomes a possibility when consciousness, without necessarily disputing the validity of such general cultural formulations, nevertheless finds them inadequate to its perceptions of a specific human destiny. And this emergent tragic awareness finds its realization in art when it can display death as not so much a transitive action - a passing over into nature and eternity - as a reflexive onea turning back upon the suffering subject. In this sense tragedies are always subversive in that they obstruct and expose the tendency of cultures to accommodate the death of individual members. At the center of our greatest tragedies stand stubborn, unaccommodating men and women who make us rethink the meaning of death.

At the beginning of our best-known tragedy a great man has suddenly died and his society seeks relief in its customary manner. With one striking exception, the survivors have re-organized themselves around rituals of social continuity and maxims of philosophical consolation. "Thou know'st 'tis common," the wife of the dead king tells her grieving non-participating son, "All that lives must die, / Passing

Richard Fly is the Chairman of the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the author of Shakespeare's Mediated World.

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through nature to eternity" (I.ii. 72-73).1 "Ay, madam, it is common," he replies, but we know by his tone and behavior that Hamlet takes no comfort from the collective and transitive nature of this venerable explanation. He seizes upon the particularity, the reflexive impact of this terrible loss. He feels, and would make others feel, the specific quality and singularity of the old king's death. In his resistance he would slow down the passage of time, the general march of mortality, in order to hold before his society the awesome fact of this one death. Hamlet's impious stubbornness seems willful and arbitrary to the conventional wisdom of the court, merely the response of an understanding simple and unschooled in social realities. But it is his very willingness to think precisely on the event, obstinately to resist the processional uniformity of death, which brings tragedy into being and supplies it with its moral and esthetic validation. Before this longest of Shakespeare's plays is over, eight other people including Hamlet himself will have passed through nature to eternity. Hamlet's opposition insures us from the outset, however, that this general passage through death will be marked by a specificity and articulation of differences so precise and subtle as to leave that world illuminated and ours permanently enriched.

The value of the tragedy Hamlet, I will try to show, resides in its discriminating encounter with the universality of death. The play questions the validity of the traditional non-tragic response to death stated most simply in Gertrude's words of comfort to her son in the initial court scene. But while her vapid commonplaces serve to highlight Hamlet's resistance to such doctrine, they are no match for his iconoclastic wit. So it is not until her theme of "All that lives must die" is taken up by Claudius the king that we hear enunciated an attitude toward death worthy of Hamlet's response. And what an impressive voice that is: sovereign, courteous, patronizing, but impassionedconfidently marshalling the accrued wisdom of culture and the full resources of its language against a seemingly morbid and dangerous obsession. We do well to listen carefully, for I doubt if there exists a more superb expression of society's ability to accommodate individual death:

1 All quotations are taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed.

Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

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'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father,

But you must know your father lost a father,

That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound

In filial obligation for some term

To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief. It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,

A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,

An understanding simple and unschooled. For what we know must be and is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense,

Why should we in our peevish opposition Take it to heart? Fie, 'tis a fault to heaven,

A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,

To reason most absurd, whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, From the first corpse till he that died today, 'This must be so.'

(1. ii. 87 -106)

Full quotation is necessary here because much of the speech's great effectiveness arises from the inclusive range of reference and the rhythmic sweep of expression. The ample verse paragraph moves easily over the weak periods as it gathers momentum and accumulates authority for its oracular declaration, "This must be so." Diction and phrasing remain abstract so as not to permit any color or concreteness to deflect attention from the developing generality. Claudius makes it appear that all aspects of human existence-"heaven," "nature:' "reason:' even "the dead" themselves - speak through his office, and a corresponding exhaustiveness strengthens his anatomy of Hamlet's perversity: "A will most incorrect to heaven, / A heart unfortified, a mind impatient," and so on. His short regimented clauses ("'tis a fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature:') march briskly forward to make their small contributions to a collective structure whose common theme is "death offathers." The king's vision of homogeneous death is masterfully authenticated by his style. He can, for instance, manipulate syntax and vocabulary so as to blur sequence and defeat particularity, as in the rapidly telescoping phrase "your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his," where the recurring words and accelerating tempo make oflife a swift procession towards anonymous death. His panoramic view of history stretches "from the first corpse till he that died today" and finds nothing exceptional in a single death - not the death of Abel (the "first corpse") and not the death of his own brother. In Claudius's world offated oblivion there is

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no occasion for tragic responses, so why should Hamlet in his peevish opposition take it to heart?

We start to answer the question by observing how Claudius's easy assimilation of his brother's death only reflects a disturbing general tendency in his character. Claudius can sing at gravemaking because, like the gravedigger Hamlet meets later on, "custom hath made it in him a property of easiness" (V.i.64). Indeed, both king and gravedigger share not only a common claim on the people of Elsinore but also a similar habit of speech: a predilection for locutions which subsume all individuation and apparent differences within a common leveling idiom. An essential feature of Claudius's royal style, for instance, is its tendency to subordinate all aspects of his world, no matter how diverse, to its imperial grammar. The above speech is only one item on a busy agenda which has occupied him since the scene opened. And looking back over that agenda we can see how the king, speaking from the throne to the assembled court, has managed to enlarge his speech to include and master all the public and private concerns of his rule: the recent death of the former king, the coronation and sudden marriage to his sister-in-law, the threat of invasion by Fortinbras, the diplomatic envoy to Norway, the disposal ofLaertes' travel plans, and even the admonishment of a moody prince. As these several bits of business are taken up by the able king they tend to lose distinction in the expansive sea of his rhetoric, succumbing to a discourse ample enough to suppress even differences as fundamental as "funeral" and "marriage," "delight" and "dole," and "sister" and "queerr," Only when Claudius attempts to draw that solitary figure dressed in mourning into his generalizing idiom does an effective counterforce enter the play. For when Hamlet responds to Claudius's "But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son -" with the aside, "A little more than kin, and less than kind!" (lines 64-65), something offundamental importance occurs, something we realize we have been waiting for during the king's whole performance. Instantly the king's flow of speech is blocked and its insidious neglect of differences exposed by an intellect of remarkable precision and independence. Hamlet focuses attention on Claudius's characteristic merger of "cousin" with "son" - and even refines the terms to the almost identical-sounding "kin" and "kind"at the very moment he explodes the absurdity of the suggested relationship. In the light of that explosion we begin to glimpse the

2 In my analysis of Claudius's style in this scene I am generally indebted to Stephen Booth's excellent essay, "On the value of Hamlet;' in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 137-76. "The excessively lubricated rhetoric by which Claudius makes unnatural connections between moral contraries;' Booth says, "is as gross and sweaty as the incestuous marriage itself' (p. 149).

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treachery of Claudius and the falsity of the ethic of accommodation he represents.

The urge for exact discriminations in Hamlet's "A little more than kin, and less than kind!" is an essential part of his character. The same "more/less" locution that structures his first utterance also structures his last instructions to Horatio concerning his support for Fortinbras:

"So tell him, with th'occurrents, more and less, / Which have solicited - the rest is silence" (V. ii. 346-47). Everywhere in the play Hamlet's intellect is militantly disjunctive, always insisting on the dissimilarity of things. Despite the king's adoptive overtures ("think of us / As of a father"), Hamlet knows Claudius is "my uncle, / My father's brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules" (1.ii.151-53), and the same discriminating precision surfaces in his reminder to Gertrude that "You are the queen, your husband's brother's wife, / And (would it were not so) you are my mother" (III. iv .16-17). Hamlet's obsession with articulating precise shades of difference sometimes takes a bizarre turn, as when he tells his spying school-chums that "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw" (II.ii.369-70). This passion for differences sharply distinguishes him from the king, but what above all makes him Claudius's mighty opposite is his insistence on the unassimilable quality of death. That there could be "mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage" (1. ii .12), that "the funeral baked meats" could "coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (1.ii.180-81), that his widowed mother could throw off her mourning robes and "post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets" (1. ii.156-57) is to him an unspeakable violation of the most fundamental differences. "Sense to ecstasy was never so thralled," he tells his mother, "But it reserved some quantity of choice / To serve in such a difference" (III. iv. 75-77). The incestuous marriage of Claudius and Gertrude - "M y unclefather and aunt-mother" (l1.ii.366) Hamlet calls them with characteristic exactness - has brought into being a state of radical confusion in which all distinctions, even that between the quick and the dead, being and not being, grow increasingly indistinct. This growing obscurity permeates the world of the play, infiltrates for a time even Hamlet's consciousness, and reaches its deepest darkness in the bewildering events and multiple deaths that end the play. Hamlet opposes this condition, and if a degree of clarity returns at the play's conclusion it is his hard-won legacy to the new state.

The tragic conflict takes shape, then, in the second scene when Gertrude's and Claudius's sense of the homogeneity of death is challenged by Hamlet's need to differentiate among its victims and circumstances. An action of great complexity evolves in which the royal couple's view on death suffers severe qualification but is never com-

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pletely discredited. At the play's conclusion death remains both the proof of our insignificance and the revelation of our unique individuality, both Claudius's "common theme" and Hamlet's "special providence." The final two scenes of the play recapitulate this action by once again juxtaposing a general unfocused vision of collective death with an instance of achieved differentiation. I will turn to these two scenes in a moment, but first I want to point out the effect created at the very end ofthe play when the outsider Fortinbras is finally allowed to enter the tragic space of Elsinore, for with him comes our last look at those forces that constitute and delimit the play's tragic vision.

The "warlike noise" of Fortinbras's approaching drum increases in volume as Hamlet's "dying voice" fades into silence. His unexpected entry prolongs for almost fifty lines a dramatic action already satisfactorily terminated by Hamlet's heroic death and Horatio's poignant farewell. The wonderful intimacy and particularity of Hamlet's last moments, the sharp focus on his personal encounter with death, suddenly blurs as Fortinbras crowds the stage with his retinue of soldiers and ambassadors. And just as we know very little (nor care very much) about these new arrivals, so they in turn know little about the personalities who compose the Danish court. Fortinbras's exclamations make it clear that our tragic scene is now being viewed from the alien perspective of a military leader. "0 proud Death," he says,

What feast is toward in thine eternal cell That thou so many princes at a shot

So bloodily hast struck?

(V.ii.353-56)

There is appropriate wonder in Fortinbras's rhetorical question, but that is the extent of his emotional response. We know that these corpses are not destined for some happy Viking feast in Death's eternal cell, nor have they been indiscriminately struck down "at a shot:' With the sound of Hamlet's astonishingly precise expression still fresh in our memory-the echo, for instance, of "Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story" (lines 337 -39) - this sort of talk must appear rather shallow. At any rate, it is certain that a different, less capable sensibility has intruded into the last moments of the play.

I am not suggesting that Shakespeare is vilifying Fortinbras or even undermining his suitability as an order-restoring figure. But he is allowing Fortinbras's flatness of vision and expression to gauge the depth of our accrued knowledge of Hamlet's achievement. Fortinbras can point the contrast so effectively because until now Shakespeare has kept him outside the circle of tragic involvement and immune to

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its intellectual power. He has led his faceless army through the wide expanse of epic space until, caught at last by the centripetal pull of Elsinore's intensities, he arrives at the circumscribed locus of tragedy. But having arrived "so jump upon this bloody question" (line 364), this novice can only arrange for the disposition of the bodies and wonder at the meaning of it all. In his valedictory to Hamlet he draws upon the familiar rituals of his profession:

Let four captains Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage, For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have proved most royal; and for his passage The soldiers' music and the rites of war

Speak loudly for him.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

(V.ii.384-91)

Within Fortinbras's world this is genuine praise, and our response to his tribute to the fallen prince is mostly positive. The formal appropriateness of the pageantry together with the carefully phrased qualifications of the military schemata-Hamlet is "like a soldier" and "likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royal" - reflect an increased awareness of Hamlet's special kind of heroism. Still, we recall Ophelia's praise of Hamlet as "courtier, soldier, and scholar" (III. i.1S1) and remember that Hamlet was not only a soldier, and that his struggle did not really follow the simple contours of warfare. Having listened for five acts to Hamlet's inimitable voice, we know that that marvelously tempered instrument cannot speak in the "soldiers' music" arranged now for his passage. Whereas Horatio had just moments before called for "flights of angels" to sing Hamlet to his rest, now Fortinbras orders an escort of "four captains" and fires off a loud peal of ordnance. As the cannons sound, the play ends again, but now with the dead prince visibly taken up and absorbed into a rather simple paradigm - an attractive paradigm, perhaps, but one not fully responsive to the complex particularity of his tragic fate.

From his first exchange with Claudius until he is carried dead from the stage by Fortinbras's soldiers, Hamlet is subject to various forms of co-optation and diminishment. But he is not the only target of what we soon realize is a relentless force operating generally in the world of Hamlet to erode hierarchies of value and collapse systems of differentiation. In the same manner that Claudius threatens Hamlet's integrity, this negating power pulls against the constructive impulse to discriminate and particularize, seeking to cancel its achievements and dissolve them into a common nullity. The sentinels who open the

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play are strangely confused about the simple rituals of changing the guard, and a similar erosion of differences appears in the hectic military preparations which "make the night joint-laborer with the day" and "does not divide the Sunday from the week" (I.i. 76-78). Ophelia's death is so doubtful that it perplexes her grave diggers and troubles the priest who oversees her "maimed rites:' On all levels oflife distinctions are giving way to confusion, so "disjoint and out of frame" is the state of Denmark. We can feel this corrupting force operating in those frequent lapses of thought that plague Polonius's sage counsels, in the interchangeability and diminished sense of individuality suffered by "those indifferent children of the earth" Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and in the general collapse of standards caused by what Hamlet identifies as "the fatness of these pursy times" (III. iv .154). A rank corruption infects all social spheres of the kingdom, undermining previously established value systems. The once celebrated tragedians of the city, for instance, no longer hold the same estimation they once enjoyed, but have given way to a troop of satirical child actors; once honorable soldiers now slaughter each other over a patch of barren ground not tomb enough to hide the slain; Danish citizens decline into a rabble and storm their castle as if "the world were now but to begin, / Antiquity forgot, custom not known" (IV.v.103-104). Even the gravedigger complains of the "many pocky corpses now-a-day that will scarse hold the lying in" (V. i.155-56). A catastrophic falling away from former greatness into something ugly and worthless becomes a familiar refrain in the play and receives its most explicit statement in Rosencrantz's warning to Claudius:

The cess of majesty Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw What's near it with it, ...

Which when it falls Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boist'rous ruin.

(III.iii.15-22)

Only in Troilus and Cress ida - a play close to Hamlet in several important ways-is this sense of a universal collapse more pronounced. 3 But in that unqualifiedly ironic play there is no central figure like Hamlet to suffer the effects of this degenerative process and, through his heroic opposition, to give it tragic meaning.

3 The emphasis in Hamlet on general decline and decay is now a generally accepted fact. For a fuller survey of this idea seeJohn Holloway, The Story of the Night (Lincoln:

Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 21-36.

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And Hamlet does suffer, for as the Danish court sinks into that engulfing whirlpool of boist'rous ruin envisaged by Rosencrantz it carries Hamlet down with the rest. The main body of the play shows Hamlet, despite his intentions, progressing through a series of increasingly confused actions, from his harsh and unfair attack on Ophelia, to the puzzling ambiguities of the play-within-the-play, to his misinterpretation of Claudius's posture of prayer, to his hysterical behavior in his mother's bedroom - a series which terminates in his blind sword-thrust through the arras at what he hopes is the king but is actually only the unfortunate Polonius. After this disappointment Hamlet declines into a mood of despair in which he no longer believes any distinctions or differences can stand. "Your fat king and your lean beggar:' he says when brought before Claudius, "is but variable services - two dishes, but to one table. That's the end" (IV.iii. 23-25). If life's purpose now seems only to fat ourselves for maggots, then it makes no difference to him whether he pursues his revenge or sails to England. Indeed, so undifferentiated has become his view oflife that he can take his leave of Claudius with the words "Farewell, dear mother:' explaining that "father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh, and so, my mother" (IV.iii.48-51). We may wonder what happened to the man who could tell a hawk from a handsaw, if the wind was southerly.

The sea that Hamlet vanishes into at this point has been the play's symbol for absolute loss since the first act when Horatio warned Hamlet not to let the ghost "tempt you toward the flood, ... / Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff / That beatles o'er his base into the sea" (I .iv .69-71). And it carries a similar meaning of personal annihilation when Hamlet later meditates on whether he should suffer the insults of outrageous fortune or "take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them" (III.i.59-60). Now, as the play moves toward its climax, the sea becomes a recurring sign of general disintegration. After the disastrous killing of Polonius, for instance, the queen informs Claudius that her son is "mad as the sea and wind when both contend / Which is the mightier" (IV.i. 7 -8), causing Claudius to complete his arrangements for the treacherous sea voyage. And while Hamlet grapples with pirates at sea, Laertes returns to Denmark in a rebellious mood -like "the ocean, overpeering of his list" (IV. v. 99)only to discover that Ophelia has succumbed to a watery grave. "Her garments," Gertrude reports, "heavy with their drink, / Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death" (IV. vii.180-82). As Act IV ends, with Hamlet absent and the Danish court in various stages of collapse, it may seem that not only Ophelia but the whole play has been caught in that gravitational pull. Only the surprising news that Hamlet has escaped from the sea and been "set

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naked" back on Denmark keeps open the possibility of effective counter-movement. It is as if Hamlet at sea has reached the nadir of despair and been reborn into a new sense of purpose. Even so, his task will require great resolve, for we know there are more subtle forms of the destructive element awaiting him on his return: in the swampy graveyard, in Laertes' dipped and anointed sword, and in Claudius's poisoned cup. The two magnificent scenes of Act V raise the play to great tragedy by dramatizing what such resolve can accomplish against these overwhelming odds.

In the graveyard Hamlet once again encounters Gertrude's truism that "All that lives must die," but now presented with astonishing immediacy and sensuous impact. The clownish gravedigger is a most formidable spokesman for the vanity and ephemerality of all human endeavor, and as Hamlet watches him working at his venerable trade he experiences in a new way the single irreducible fact of certain oblivion and general dissolution. The gravedigger can mock human pretension because he knows "There is no ancient gentlemen but gard'ners, ditchers, and gravemakers. They hold up Adam's profession" (V.i.17-19). He can ridicule human achievement because with only his spade he "builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter" (line 47). The skulls he so rudely tosses about might be those of politicians, lawyers, courtiers, celebrated beauties, great buyers ofland, or king'sjesters; and with some widening of focus they could even be imagined as those ofImperious Caesar, Alexander the Great, or Cain. But such distinctions are merely superficial and of no consequence to him, for, moving as he does in a continuum of time that stretches from Adam to Doomsday, the gravedigger need acknowledge no differences of rank or achievement. Viewed from the long perspective of the open grave life becomes as pointless and absurd as those tautological syllogisms he so loves to expound. Indeed, his vision is so "absolute" that even the most basic distinctions cannot withstand his scrutiny:

Hamlet: What man dost thou dig it for? Clown: For no man, sir.

Hamlet: What woman then?

Clown: Nor none neither.

Hamlet: Who is to be buried in't?

Clown: One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul, she's dead.

(V.i.121-26)

Differences between "se offendendo" and "se defendendo;' between telling lies and lying in graves, and even between the quick and the dead, undergo a similar semantic dissolution when Goodman Delver

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handles them. The meaning of words becomes so slippery that, as Hamlet exclaims in exasperation, "We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us" (lines 128-29). Even those distinctions that do stand, such as the one which exempts the body of the tanner from swift decomposition, are slight and totally without meaning. Hamlet has escaped from the sea, but his return has brought him to another place of muddy death where the only truth worth knowing is that "your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body" (lines 160-61 ).

Hamlet's response to this place of total negation may seem only an intensification of the despair he felt before his departure for England; but I think some crucial differences are visible now. The sense of meaninglessness that flooded his consciousness and paralyzed his will in Act IV has now become externalized and objectified in his immediate surroundings, allowing him some distance and mastery over this debilitating mood. He now contemplates the gruesome evidence of death's omnipotence not with the hysterical bitterness and nausea of previous scenes but with something close to philosophical detachment. He does not abandon himself to despair, but makes use of his discriminating intellect to take personal possession of the fact of mortality. Like the irrepressible gravedigger who flaunts his humanity even as he labors in the site of death's power," Hamlet is never more obviously a unique and valuable individual than when he is carefully detailing the absurdity of all claims to individuality: "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?" (lines 195-99). The lucidly articulated sequence, the starkly paratactic clauses, the brutal suppression of all qualification give to Hamlet's vision of the undifferentiated kingdom of darkness a compelling inevitability. There is no use arguing against this view. But what he surrenders to death through the rigor and specificity of his logic he somehow reclaims through his uncompromising integrity. The chapfallen skulls Hamlet examines undeniably represent the certain end of all human endeavor, but the voice that acknowledges this truth seems paradoxically to assert its own kind of immortality. It may seem that we are near the core of Shakespeare's tragic vision where an absolute acceptance of universal

4 In this sense it is possible to argue that the Gravedigger is as much a maker of distinctions as a destroyer of them, for he offers Hamlet one model of how to maintain individuality of a sort even in the constant presence of undiscriminating death. The Gravedigger can, for instance, identify Yorick's skull and recall distinguishing things about him, even though he has been dead for many years. His concrete recollections prompt Hamlet to remember Yorick not as a member of a collective (lawyers, courtiers, buyers of land, etc.), but as a lively individual.

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dissolution can exist side by side with a vivid projection of the human form in all its health, power, and singularity." At any rate, Hamlet's demeanor suggests that now he is ready once more to encounter Elsinore. And when Ophelia's funeral procession brings the king and his court into the graveyard it seems exactly right that he should challenge them with a cry of proud self-identification, "This is I, Hamlet the Dane" (line 244).

This ringing declaration of identity marks the point where both Hamlet and the play begin to pull free from increasing anonymity and formlessness. The gravedigger's corrosive vision had come close to dissolving the concrete particulars of the dramatic action. The grave he was preparing, for instance, was for Ophelia, but her unique personality and the complex causes of her death were mostly obscured by the vague hypotheses and generalities of his clownish banter. The gravedigger may have some knowledge of the play's principal figures, Old Hamlet, Old Fortinbras, and "young Hamlet-he that is mad, and sent into England" (line 138), but they are clearly of no concern to him - only further instances of the unfair prerogatives enjoyed by the "great folk" of the world. The very conditions for Aristotelian form, in fact, do not exist in the graveyard, since the only significant form he recognizes is the standard rectangular "pit of clay" he readies for us all, the only valid division of time he acknowledges is the uneventful duration spanning the gap between Adam and Doomsday, and the only distinguishing human quality he sees is a hide grown thick enough to delay rot. Indeed, the graveyard permits the formation of no story but the repetitious cautionary tale of un shun nab Ie death: the gloomy moral of "now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come" (lines 180-82). But when Hamlet challenges the funeral procession the play once

5 In The OpposingSelj(New York: Viking Press, 1955), Lionel Trilling contrasts the tragic worlds of Shakespeare and Kafka and makes the following pertinent observation: "Shakespeare's world, quite as much as Kafka's, is that prison cell which Pascal says the world is, from which daily the inmates are led forth to die; Shakespeare no less than Kafka forces upon us the cruel irrationality of the conditions of human life, the tale told by an idiot, the puerile gods who torture us not for punishment but for sport; and no less than Kafka, Shakespeare is revolted by the fetor of the prison of this world, nothing is more characteristic of him than his imagery of disgust. But in Shakespeare's cell the company is so much better than in Kafka's, the captains and kings and lovers and clowns of Shakespeare are alive and complete before they die . . . . Kafka's knowledge of evil exists without the contradictory knowledge of the self in its health and validity, ... [while 1 Shakespeare's knowledge of evil exists with that contradiction in its fullest possible force" (pp. 38-39).

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again recovers its specificity and momentum, and we begin to anticipate a resolution to the converging lines of action. The open grave ceases to be merely symbolic of undifferentiated, homogeneous death, and becomes instead the destination of a valued person, the fair Ophelia. A new sense of dramatic urgency forces the language away from meditative prose into the heightened rhythms of blank verse as Laertes abandons himself to emotional displays of grief and even Hamlet rises to a "tow'ring passion." And as the long perspective of the graveyard gives way to the immediacy of the dramatic moment, a radically different sense of time appears in the action. "We'll put the matter to the present push:' Claudius advises Laertes as the scene ends, adding "an hour of quiet shortly shall we see" (lines 282, 285). The scattered energies of the play quickly reunite as Claudius and Laertes leave to prepare their deadly assault on Hamlet.

Let us pause briefly here to notice how Shakespeare has scored the final movement of his play. At one moment in Act IV, when disaster seems to be overwhelming Denmark, Claudius inventories his troubles and concludes, "this, I Like to a murd'ring piece, in many places I Gives me superfluous death" (IV. v. 94-96). Polonius murdered, Hamlet deranged and banished to England, the people muddied, Ophelia mad, Laertes rebellious - the kingdom is rushing headlong towards catastrophe. "One woe doth tread upon another's heel:' Gertrude laments, "So fast they follow" (IV.vii.161-63). But with Hamlet's return in Act V this surge of events is once more slowed down, and the resulting change of pace is reflected in the play's scenario. At 296 lines, the graveyard scene is the longest penultimate scene in all Shakespearean tragedy. The tempo of the action slows down to accommodate the gravedigger's panoramic survey of collective death and then suddenly accelerates in response to Laertes' passionate experience of one particular death. But these two extremes - the languid rhythm of eternity and the crescendo of crises - are resolved in the capacious and disciplined mind of the sea-changed Hamlet, whose participation in both dimensions of time serves to regulate the pace and to sustain continuity. At nearly 400 lines, the last scene of Hamlet is the longest final scene in Shakespearean tragedy, and one important aspect of its great effectiveness is the way it is able simultaneously to project a sense of terrible urgency and an impression of leisure. Once again, Hamlet, who is on stage throughout these two long scenes, is the means by which these contrasted dimensions of time are experienced and resolved.

The sense of urgency in the last scene arises directly from Claudius's determination to "put the matter to the present push" and from Laertes' eagerness to be the agent of that purpose. But Hamlet too knows that a showdown with the king is imminent, for news from

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England about the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will reach Claudius at any moment:

Horatio: It must be shortly known to him from England What is the issue of the business there.

Hamlet: It will be short; the interim is mine,

And a man's life's no more than to say "one."

(V.ii.71-74)

Hamlet contemplates no further evasion; events are inexorably closing in on him, and he knows that ifthe king's fitness speaks his answer must be ready. But since a man may kill and be killed in the time it takes to say "one;' there is no reason to hurry. Death is inevitable in any case, whether it be now or yet to come. In the meantime there is "the interim" to possess and structure. There is time to narrate his sea discoveries to Horatio, time to recapitulate his case against the criminal king, and time to make a fulsome apology to Laertes. He is even "at leisure" to tolerate the affectations of the golden-tongued Osric and, finally, to accept the offered diversion of some afternoon swordplay to amuse the court. Hamlet knows that "this fell sergeant, Death, / Is strict in his arrest" (lines 325-26), but he surrenders nothing to this inevitability. Indeed, the magnitude of the concluding scene, its range of action and language, is deeply satisfying precisely because Hamlet has to structure and defend it against a constant pressure to foreclose. Hamlet concurs in the king's desire to have the duel "come to immediate trial" (line 162), but nevertheless continues to frustrate his hope for a quick kill. "I'll play this bout first; set it by awhile" (line 272), he tells Claudius as the king tries with unseemly haste to press upon him the poisoned cup; "I dare not drink yet, madam - by and by" (line 282), he tells his mother as he refuses to share the cup with her; "My lord, I'll hit him now" (line 284), Laertes promises in frustration, after failing three times to touch Hamlet with his poisoned rapier. And even at the moment when death finally overtakes him, he insists that Horatio remain alive to begin that retelling of his story which continues to this present moment. The "interim" Hamlet occupies and defends remains short, but in that brief finitude he shows us how a specific life can be articulated and one particular death transfigured.

So we watch Hamlet in the last minutes of his life once again performing the same retarding function he initiated in the second scene of the play when he opposed the shallow consolations of Gertrude and Claudius: slowing down the passage through nature to eternity, resisting the threatening anonymity of death, and, most importantly, insisting on those discriminations that define a unique and valued existence. That interim of life which Gertrude would dismiss as merely a common legacy, which Laertes would surrender to another's

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will, and which Claudius would murderously foreclose, Hamlet structures so as to contain and reflect the singular quality of his life.6 Consequently, the dominant impression of impending closure in the last scene has to accommodate itself to an equally insistent articulation of the stages of human experience leading towards that closure. And this articulation can become rich and detailed enough to make us almost forget its death-marked context.

What I mean by articulation can be observed not only in the obvious segmentation of the last scene into distinct episodes (Hamlet's dialogues with Horatio, his humoring of Osric, his reception of Laertes, his behavior in the duel, and so on), but also in the way these separate episodes are developed. Hamlet's narration of his sea adventure, for example, is built up and paced by a series of carefully placed topic questions: "You do remember all the circumstances?" (line 2), "But wilt thou hear me how I did proceed?" (line 28), "Wilt thou know th'effect of what I wrote?" (line 36-37), "And is it not to be damned / To let this canker in our nature come / In further evil?" (lines 68-70). His story is long, but even as he urges it forward to its resolution he feels compelled to differentiate the stages of his experience. And even within the brief space of a single utterance Hamlet manages to sustain this same kind of tension between necessary closure and precise articulation. The following passage nicely illustrates the whole procedure:

Up from my cabin, My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark Groped I to find out them, had my desire, Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew To mine own room again, making so bold, My fears forgetting manners, to unseal

Their grand commission; where I found, HoratioAh, royal knavery! - an exact command,

Larded with many several sorts of reasons, Importing Denmark's health, and England's too, With, ho!, such bugs and goblins in my life,

That on the supervise, no leisure bated,

No, not to stay the grinding of the axe,

My head should be struck off.

(V.ii.12-25).

6 The rich complexity and spaciousness of Hamlet's character, as it emerges in contrast to the play's bloody finale, is stressed by Northrop Frye, Fools of Time (Toronto and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1967). Hamlet's mind, he says, "is a complete universe in itself, ranging from hints of a divinity that shapes our ends to a melancholy sense of the unbearable loathsomeness of physical life, and whose

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This magnificent verse sentence is one long breathless utterance of barely controlled outrage. As he had earlier warned Horatio, Hamlet has "words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb" (IV.vi.24-25); yet despite his indignation he is able to hold the shocking revelation of Claudius's treachery in precarious suspension until all the pertinent details of his discovery have taken their place in the developing story. Hamlet drives the periodic syntax forward towards closure even as he makes room within its end-stopped structure for an astonishingly wide range of concrete detail and emotion, some of which are irrelevant to the essential story but all of which are sharply delineated and vividly realized." Consequently, the passage has the quick pulse of heightened living even though it is about death. Or perhaps we should say that the concentration of energy and intellect that can generate such a proliferation of life-enhancing images has been made possible by the looming finality of death. Certainly we feel in the careful arrangement of exhaustive detail, in the sharp discriminations of action and response, the presence of Hamlet's complex personality. Claudius's attempt to collapse the interim Hamlet occupies by having him beheaded "on the supervise, no leisure bated" has been thwarted. Such a speechless fate may be appropriate for those compromised non-entities Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but it cannot be Hamlet's fate.

The exact nature of that fate defies critical definition, yet I will hazard a few final observations. The grammar of the last scene is linear, premeditated, and decidedly periodic; yet, like the passage just examined, ample and flexible enough to admit within its fundamentally end-stopped structure a surprising wealth oflively emotion and detail. The appearance of Osric, for example, is just as unexpected, unnecessary, and delightful as are those phrases like "My sea-gown scarfed about me" or "Ah!, royal knavery!" in the passage above. Urgency and leisure, closure and openness cohere in the dramatic figure of Hamlet to insure that even in this death-oriented action life will retain its particularity and value. Between life and death, in fact, the play achieves a fine discrimination which we must not distort. Hamlet may occasionally brood on death and the afterlife, may even contemplate suicide, but he cannot be called an

actions range from delicate courtesy to shocking brutality. All this magnificent vision of heroic energy is poured out as a sacrifice to a dead father, to a ghost who returns screaming for blood from what is supposed to be a place of purification" (p. 39).

7 For a helpful study of Shakespeare's customary tendency to "maintain a balance between suspense and resolution" in his syntactical structures, see Jonas A. Barish, BenJonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 1-40.

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"ambassador of death" as G. Wilson Knight and others have claimed. 8 He moves into the final phase of his existence as an agent oflife struggling heroically against various forms of ignoble death, and that struggle is not without its victories. He has escaped from the possibility of anonymous death at sea, evaded a summary beheading in a foreign country, and held off the murderous attack of Laertes in the graveyard. And although he knows intuitively that his death is near, there is present in his behavior no enervating acquiescence, no stoic posturing. He dies sword in hand, "benetted round with'villainies" (line 29), his mind concentrated on his immediate enemies and not turned inward on imagined personal failings or outward on some vague supernatural sanction. He is in these final moments, I believe, the most life-affirming of all Shakespeare's tragic protagonists. Unlike Romeo and] uliet, Brutus, Othello, or Antony and Cleopatra, he is not driven finally to self-slaughter; nor like Titus, the two King Richards, Macbeth, Timon, or Coriolanus does he throw himself suicidally into a self-destructive action. He has been "in continual practice" (line 200) when the fencing challenge comes and he obviously expects to win it. In fact, he does so well in the duel that Laertes grows discouraged and Claudius pessimistic - an unexpected demoralization which only makes Hamlet more defiant:

Come for the third, Laertes. You but dally. I pray you pass with your best violence;

I am afeard you make a wanton of me.

(V.ii.286-88)

For a brief moment Hamlet stands in the midst of his enemies, triumphant and seemingly invulnerable. His own unique personality cannot be assimilated into the broader patterns that bring the play to a close. He can glimpse the "divinity" that is shaping his end, the "heaven" that is "ordinant" in human affairs, the "providence" overseeing it all; but that does not diminish his sense of responsibility for

8 See G. Wilson Knight's chapter, "The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet," in The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 1930), pp. 17-46. "Except for the original murder of Hamlet's father;' Knight says, "the Hamlet universe is one of healthy and robust life, good-nature, humor, romantic strength, and welfare: against this background is the figure of Hamlet pale with the consciousness of death. He is the ambassador of death walking amid life" (p. 32). This negative attitude towards Hamlet can be traced through D. G. James, The Dream of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), D. A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), and L. C. Knights, An Approach to Hamlet (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1961).

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his final action." He can observe a cosmic irony working through events to hoist his enemies on their own petards, but that does not lessen the necessity to strike boldly when the arch criminal at last stands exposed before him. He can acknowledge that his life is over, but that too does not relieve him of the need to provide for the "name" that will live behind him and to cast his vote for the new ruler of the state. Such hard-won discriminations must not be lost. A vast shadow of significance seems to envelop these final events, shaking our dispositions with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls, but that overarching aura of meaning cannot displace the primacy of the specific event, the particular moment, the singular inimitable death. That achievement of differentiation in the face of death is what, I think, makes Hamlet our preeminent masterwork of tragedy.

9 Unlike most other Elizabethan revenge plays, Hamlet does not come to rest in ritual or impersonality. For excellent commentary on the crucial differences between the formulaic endings of typical revenge plays of the period and Hamlet, see G. K. Hunter, "The Heroism of Hamlet;' in Hamlet: Stratford- Upon-Avon Studies 5, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), pp. 90-109. In such plays as The Spanish Tragedy, Hunter says, "we have the sense of characters being absorbed into a pattern which acts out their just relationships for them, almost without their volition." But "by vesting Hamlet's heroism in the fullness of his human response, Shakespeare has denied himself the opportunity to use this formula. Hamlet cannot, without loss of his kind of heroism, be absorbed into a framework of meaning outside himself; his personal quest for standards of being cannot be dropped and then replaced by an impersonal action" (pp. 106-107). Hunter's and Booth's essays on Hamlet are fine correctives for the negative response of Knight and his followers.

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