hamlet grief essay

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FOR THE LOVE OF THE BARD

Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: A Study of Grief

In my post about Sonnet 18 , I commented that Shakespeare very evidently understood grief.

Nowhere in the canon of Shakespeare’s work is this more evident than in Hamlet. In this play, we see a son struggling with grief for his father and anger at the circumstances of his death. In this one young man’s experience, Shakespeare demonstrates some crucial lessons about grief.

Grief is natural. It is an instinctive immediate reaction to loss. Nobody questions why Hamlet mourns his father, except for those who conspicuously do not mourn the late king.

CLAUDIUS How is it that the clouds still hang on you? GERTRUDE Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not forever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. Hamlet, I.ii

It is those characters who do not feel or express grief who are portrayed as unnatural and heartless: had they been loyal, Gertrude, Claudius, and Polonius should all have been deeply affected by the death of the king and observed strict protocols of mourning as his wife, brother and trusted advisor. Instead, Gertrude marries Claudius, Claudius claims the throne that rightly should have gone to Hamlet, and Polonius switches his service seamlessly to the new regime. It’s all very convenient and it’s all very cold— but that’s how it goes when one is only in it for oneself.

This scene also demonstrates that grief is enduring. Unlike his mother, Hamlet doesn’t just “get over it”. That is not how most of us are designed. While it may change over time, grief is something that never fully goes away. It doesn’t take much to trigger a memory that unleashes a fresh wave of emotion.

HAMLET   O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourn’d longer—married with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules. Within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married—O most wicked speed: to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets, It is not, nor it cannot come to good, But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue. Hamlet I.ii

Grief is existential. Grief makes us question the meaning of life: what’s the point of it all? Why are we here? What am I doing with my life? Is it worth going on? These are natural questions that many of us ask in response to the end of life, although perhaps less eloquently than Hamlet did.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to 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 heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep— To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause; there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d 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? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. Hamlet, III.ii

We often make observations like “life will never be the same” and that is essentially true. Grief often causes us to consider what is important and sort our priorities for life Thinking about the  changes that someone’s death makes in our life can  cause us to consider what we will do with the time, freedoms and opportunities that still lie ahead of us. This can be a time of significant decision making and resolution in response to the unavoidable change in our lives as a result of the death of a loved one.

Grief is pervasive. It affects every part of life, directly influencing motivations and willingness to meet commitments that all of a sudden seem mundane or irrelevant. It can take the joy out of other aspects of life that would otherwise bring joy, such as one’s relationships, achievements and career.  Otherwise important things tend to be put on hold while grief holds the floor.

HAMLET I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor women neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.  Hamlet III.i

It also has flow-on effects in the lives and experiences of others:  when our emotions are most fragile, our relationships with others are proportionally vulnerable simply because of the impact of grief on one’s ability to connect and communicate effectively. The tendency to focus on one’s own self and situation may be a survival instinct in one sense, but it can also have a significant ripple effect among those around us.

Grief is relatable. The fact that we can all understand Hamlet’s feelings and responses show us that it is an integral element of life. Nobody lives forever, no matter how hard they try. That every society and culture has rituals and observances of death and mourning shows that grief is a universal experience: one which we will all encounter at some point in our lives.

From Hamlet , it is evident that there are constructive and destructive ways to deal with grief .

The pursuit of truth and justice, when necessary, is both healthy and appropriate. Questioning our priorities and examining our relationships can be a process of growth and refinement.

About, my brains! Hum—I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim’d their malefactions: For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks, I’ll tent him to the quick. If ’a do blench, I know my course. The spirit that I have seen May be a dev’l, and the dev’l hath power T’ assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds More relative than this—the play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. Hamlet, II. i

The observance and expression of grief is natural and should never be suppressed. The idea that men should not cry is not only unhealthy, it is absolute bunkum.

Grief complicates ones own emotions, affects mental and emotional health, adds pressure to relationships, and restricts one’s ability to ask for help.

It is crucial, then, to take great care to prevent grief leading us into self-destructive thoughts and behaviours.

HAMLET O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! 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! Fie on’t, ah fie! H amlet, I.ii

Thoughts of self-harm and suicide are a definite sign that someone is not coping with their emotions and their circumstances, and that they need trustworthy help and support. 

Sacrificing our relationships with the living in the indulgence of grief for the dead. Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia clearly had devastating consequences for her life, and ultimately caused more grief for those who knew and loved her.

HAMLET I have heard of your paintings, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t, it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are married already (all but one) shall live, the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunn’ry, go. Exit. OPHELIA O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, Th’ expectation and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, Th’ observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down! And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, That suck’d the honey of his music vows, Now see that noble and most sovereign reason Like sweet bells jangled out of time, and harsh; That unmatch’d form and stature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see! Ophelia withdraws. Hamlet III.i

Had Hamlet and Ophelia shared their thoughts and feelings with each other and others instead of internalising everything and shutting them out, things may have ended far more positively for them both.

The Problem of Female Agency in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ #women #Shakespeare #ShakespeareSunday Tweet

Shakespeare demonstrates that grief is life-changing and long term. It is complex and challenging. Through the examples and experiences of the characters in Hamlet , we can consider and evaluate healthy and not-so-healthy ways of dealing with it. While everyone’s circumstances are different, we can each grow in empathy and understanding of the effects of grief on ourselves and other people.

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• > Shakespeare and Emotion

Book contents

• Shakespeare and Emotion
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Text
• Introduction
• Part I Contexts
• Part II Emotions
• Chapter 13 Fear
• Chapter 14 Grief
• Chapter 15 Sympathy
• Chapter 16 Shame
• Chapter 17 Anger
• Chapter 18 Pride
• Chapter 19 Happiness
• Chapter 20 Love
• Chapter 21 Nostalgia
• Chapter 22 Wonder
• Chapter 23 Confusion
• Bibliography

Chapter 14 - Grief

from Part II - Emotions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2020

Grief permeates all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and many of his comedies and histories too, but none is so resolutely focused on what it means to feel loss as Hamlet. From the personal loss of a father, to the social loss of a king, to an existential loss of meaning and place in the world, Hamlet explores what happens when one’s sense of life and individuality collapses into something rote and mechanical. This chapter investigates how Hamlet the play, and Hamlet the character, exceed early modern conventions concerning grief in an effort to turn a harrowingly ‘common’ emotion into something much more ‘particular’. By moving away from established understandings of grief, Shakespeare’s play explores how this devastating passion might create new worlds of meaning and, in doing so, help set ‘out of joint’ ones ‘right’. At the same time, the chapter examines how an over-investment in the idiosyncratic nature of grief undermines and even callously contributes to other tragedies in the play, including Ophelia’s death and Denmark’s crumbling political order. Ultimately, the play dramatises both the difficulty and urgency of balancing the ‘particular’ and the ‘common’ when it comes to grief, even as it leaves the possibility of their coexistence unresolved.

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• By Erin Sullivan
• Edited by Katharine A. Craik , Oxford Brookes University
• Book: Shakespeare and Emotion
• Online publication: 01 October 2020
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108235952.017

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Critic’s Notebook

This Above All: My Undying Obsession With ‘Hamlet’

For one critic, every encounter with this Shakespeare play deepens her understanding of its insights into grief, family and gender.

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By Maya Phillips

A few weeks ago two friends and I were talking about our obsessions. One had been sleepless all week, playing the new Zelda video game with few breaks. The other revealed that she was deep into Taylor Swift. I said I had so many fandoms that I didn’t know if I could name a favorite.

My Swiftie friend quickly set me straight. “We already know your main fandom,” she said. “Hamlet.”

It’s true. If you look at my bookshelves, the art on my walls, even the art on my skin, you’ll find anime references and mythological figures, lines from Eliot and Chekhov and illustrations from Borges and Gorey stories. But none of these interests enjoys a prominence as great as the one afforded “Hamlet” in my home — and on my body, where the majority of my tattoos, by far, are inspired by the play.

My friends know well that I’ve seen numerous productions of the work, recite Hamlet’s monologues to myself, even put Kenneth Branagh or Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” on in the background as I clean my apartment. For me, the text’s themes — about death, duality, gender, family — deepen each time I read, see or hear “Hamlet,” and as I grow older, new insights are revealed about the characters and the language.

I first read “Hamlet” in high school, as an artsy poetry-writing teenager who found death a fascinating, albeit abstract, concept. I imagined the young prince — witty, privileged yet tortured, and forever trapped in his own head — as kin. He was less a lofty figure of English literature than the emo kid I crushed on, abandoning his math homework to read Dante’s “Inferno” as angsty pop punk played in the background.

When I watched Michael Almereyda’s 2000 “Hamlet” film soon after, it did little to disabuse me of this notion. Taking place in New York City, with Ethan Hawke playing a hipster film student who’s heir to the “Denmark Corporation,” this “Hamlet” was contemporary, rife with irony. Watching Hamlet offer the great existential query of “to be or not to be” while strolling the “action movie” aisles of a Blockbuster store, I learned that even tragedy can contain a hearty dose of comedy.

When I reread the play for a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies a few years later, I became fixated on one line in particular: “The rest is silence.” With these four words, Hamlet’s last ones in the play, the prince is acknowledging his final breath, but also perhaps breaking the fourth wall, announcing the end of the play like Prospero at the end of “The Tempest.” Or maybe Hamlet is offering us the line in consolation: After five acts of musing on death, he can assure us that death is simple, and it’s quiet. This line is now tattooed on my right arm.

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How Grief’s Alchemy Turned “Hamnet” into “Hamlet”

Jeannette Cooperman

Cover image from Hamnet , by Maggie O’Farrell

Over wine, my book club raved about the quiet spell Hamnet cast, the grace and tenderness of its language. We read aloud our favorite Maggie O’Farrell’s lines: “The fireplace, which is filled only with ashes, held in the fragile shape of the log they once were…” “Time runs only one way.” “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.” We marked Agnes’s reason for falling in love with William Shakespeare: “You had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.” Above all, we were grateful: Somehow O’Farrell evokes the most wrenching grief of all, a parent losing a child, in a way that takes you by the hand, keeps you from wanting to slam the book shut and find a comedy on Netflix.

Because we had just come through the worst of the pandemic, we were riveted when she traced the bubonic plague that killed Shakespeare’s son to a single flea, stowed away with an African monkey on a ship where it leaped from cats to rats and sailors and laid itself to rest in a box of Murano glass beads that was bound for Stratford, where the Shakespeares’ daughter would open it. She was the frail one you expected to die. We had held our breath as her eleven-year-old brother lay down next to her, desperate to save her, only to die in her stead. All this while the life of the household moved on, oblivious, the adults occupied with everyday chores. This is why we prize deathbed goodbyes, I suspect. First because we want that last chance to exchange love, but also because it is so much worse to be absent, busying ourselves with the mundane while someone we love is dying. In retrospect, these trivial preoccupations will seem grotesque. How can you return to routine with full ease, now that you know its sweet reassurance can coincide with tragedy?

We talked our way to the end of the novel, sympathizing with Will Shakespeare’s wife, furious at him for going off to write his plays while their son died and she grieved. What a relief, when she saw the play he had written—in the novel, it is Hamlet —and understood that her husband’s grief was as sharp as her own…

And there I tripped. It was all wrong. How could Shakespeare have cherished his young son and then written him up as a neurotic (our term) introvert paralyzed by conflicting emotions and a love for his mother that later scholars would see as lust? Hamlet may be Shakespeare’s greatest play, but its title character is far from heroic. He winds up dead in large part because his own melodramatic scheming has run amok— no!

O’Farrell avoids naming Shakespeare in her novel, calling him “the tutor” when Agnes (Anne Hathaway to us) falls in love with him. This lets us avoid all the pompous scholarly baggage and know him as a young man driven by his love of language and theater, his gifts of wit and knowledge. We fall in love along with Agnes, roll our eyes at his stumbles but root for them both. I could not fathom Hamlet as Agnes did, as a proof of loss so deep he could speak it no other way.

Granted, we would excuse any slip, gratified by O’Farrell’s coup. She changed the angle. You see someone differently when the fame is stripped away and you can peer into their home life, into the hearts of those who have chosen to love them. More than that, though, she showed us how extraordinary Agnes was, put her on public record, made us love her free and independent spirit, taught us about life and grief and love through her courage. Most of what matters in life begins, is made possible, at home, a fact western culture has tended to forget.

Still. Hamlet? I went home and opened my laptop, moved through links. “Aha!” I exclaimed, loud enough to wake both husband and dog. Shakespeare did not write Hamlet right after his son’s death, as the novel suggests. Instead, he wrote romps and romcoms:  The Merry Wives of Windsor ,  Much Ado About Nothing ,  As You Like It— alongside Henry IV, Henry V , and Julius Caesar .

Besides, “writing a play about Hamlet, in or around 1600, may not have been Shakespeare’s own idea,” Stephen Greenblatt notes in The New York Review of Books. Not only had the story of the Danish prince already been staged in England, but that playwright was now dead, the plot was a crowd-pleaser, and a new version promised revenue for the company.

Triumphant, I emailed the book club. This made me feel much better. Illiterate about such things, I had assumed that Shakespeare invented Hamlet from whole cloth, and the idea that his first imaginative act after his son’s death would be that play had floored me.

After I hit send, though, I stared, unfocused, at the screen. How could a writer as accomplished and intelligent as Maggie O’Farrell have gotten something so wrong? Hamnet won righteous praise last year: the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize, a place on fifteen Best Books of 2020 lists. I searched further and found plenty of scholars connecting Hamnet’s death with Hamlet, the four-year delay notwithstanding.  

He could have pushed aside the grief, I mused, distracting himself with wit’s swordplay until time dulled the pain bearable. And when his next plot presented itself, how could he not make the connection? Hamnet, Hamlet—a single letter of the alphabet is far too flimsy to keep us from our memories.

The luck is that, by 1600, Shakespeare was ready artistically as well as emotionally. After writing what Greenblatt describes as rather wooden monologues in Richard III, Shakespeare went inward, nailing the complexity of Richard II’s thoughts in lines that did not simply assert and contradict, playing at confession, but instead turned the character’s mind inside out with psychological subtlety. After Hamnet’s death came the reprieve of the comedies, but then, in 1599, Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, letting most of the play linger on the suspended state between dreaming up a terrible deed and acting it out.

And then came Hamlet , offering him a character who could spend the entire play suspended, trapped by the workings of his own mind. Hamnet had been dead for four years, and Shakespeare had just received word that his father was close to death.

A fresh, hard loss wakes all the old grief you have put to sleep. But enough time had passed to make art possible, and he knew, now, how to go inward.

Hamlet freed its author’s “preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled,” Greenblatt writes. The text showed us his pain and “his refusal of easy consolations.”

Sadness works on you. In art, that process is telescoped: Shakespeare skipped Hamlet’s entire childhood so we could watch him confront his father’s death as a young man. Hamnet brings the production of Hamlet forward four years so Agnes can take the measure of her husband’s unspoken grief. But O’Farrell is making the same connection Shakespeare made, when his still vivid grief infused another man’s story—and gave us one of the finest plays ever written.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here .

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Hamlet’s Not Depressed. He’s Grieving.

I had a hard time sleeping right after my mother died. The nights were long and had their share of what C.S. Lewis, in his memoir A Grief Observed , calls “mad, midnight … entreaties spoken into the empty air.” One of the things I did was read. I read lots of books about death and loss. But one said more to me about grieving than any other: Hamlet. I’m not alone in this. A colleague recently told me that after his mother died he listened over and over to a tape recording he’d made of the Kenneth Branagh film version.

I had always thought of Hamlet’s melancholy as existential. I saw his sense that “the world is out of joint” as vague and philosophical. He’s a depressive, self-obsessed young man who can’t stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But reading the play after my mother’s death, I felt differently. Hamlet’s moodiness and irascibility suddenly seemed deeply connected to the fact that his father has just died, and he doesn’t know how to handle it. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the world, trying to figure out where the walls are while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed. I can relate. When Hamlet comes onstage he is greeted by his uncle with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” It reminded me of the friend who said, 14 days after my mother died, “Hope you’re doing well.” No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey.

Hamlet is the best description of grief I’ve read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief, Shakespeare understands, is a social experience. It’s not just that Hamlet is sad; it’s that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. And Shakespeare doesn’t flinch from that truth. He captures the way that people act as if sadness is bizarre when it is all too explainable. Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is “common.” His uncle Claudius chides him to put aside his “unmanly grief.” It’s not just guilty people who act this way. Some are eager to get past the obvious rawness in your eyes or voice; why should they step into the flat shadows of your “sterile promontory”? Even if they wanted to, how could they? And this tension between your private sadness and the busy old world is a huge part of what I feel as I grieve—and felt most intensely in the first weeks of loss. Even if, as a friend helpfully pointed out, my mother wasn’t murdered.

I am also moved by how much in Hamlet is about slippage—the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer. To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it’s also to feel, quite powerfully, that you’re not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief—that to do so would be taboo somehow. Hamlet is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

Strangely, Hamlet somehow made me feel it was OK that I, too, had “lost all my mirth.” My colleague put it better: “ Hamlet is the grief-slacker’s Bible, a knowing book that understands what you’re going through and doesn’t ask for much in return,” he wrote to me. Maybe that’s because the entire play is as drenched in grief as it is in blood. There is Ophelia’s grief at Hamlet’s angry withdrawal from her. There is Laertes’ grief that Polonius and Ophelia die. There is Gertrude and Claudius’ grief, which is as fake as the flowers in a funeral home. Everyone is sad and messed up. If only the court had just let Hamlet feel bad about his dad , you start to feel, things in Denmark might not have disintegrated so quickly!

Hamlet also captures one of the aspects of grief I find it most difficult to speak about—the profound sense of ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. After my mother died, I felt that abruptly, amid the chaos that is daily life, I had arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Everything seemed exhausting. Nothing seemed important. C.S. Lewis has a great passage about the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. At one point during that first month, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. Hamlet’s soliloquy captures that numb exhaustion, and now I read it as a true expression of grief:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, 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!

Those adjectives felt apt. And so, even, does the pained wish—in my case, thankfully fleeting—that one might melt away. Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicideality (or suicidal thinking and behaviors) than the depressed. For many, that risk is quite acute. For others of us, this passage captures how passive a form those thoughts can take. Hamlet is less searching for death actively than he is wishing powerfully for the pain just to go away. And it is, to be honest, strangely comforting to see my own worst thoughts mirrored back at me—perhaps because I do not feel likely to go as far into them as Hamlet does. (So far, I have not accidentally killed anyone with a dagger, for example.)

The way Hamlet speaks conveys his grief as much as what he says. He talks in run-on sentences to Ophelia. He slips between like things without distinguishing fully between them—”to die, to sleep” and “to sleep, perchance to dream.” He resorts to puns because puns free him from the terrible logic of normalcy, which has nothing to do with grief and cannot fully admit its darkness.

And Hamlet’s madness, too, makes new sense. He goes mad because madness is the only method that makes sense in a world tyrannized by false logic. If no one can tell whether he is mad, it is because he cannot tell either. Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It’s like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes. No wonder Hamlet said, “… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Grief can also make you feel, like Hamlet, strangely flat. Nor is it ennobling, as Hamlet drives home. It makes you at once vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive.

Like Hamlet, I, too, find it difficult to remember that my own “change in disposition” is connected to a distinct event. Most of the time, I just feel that I see the world more accurately than I used to. (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”) Pessimists, after all, are said to have a more realistic view of themselves in the world than optimists.

The other piece of writing I have been drawn to is a poem by George Herbert called “The Flower.” It opens:

How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;        To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.                    Grief melts away                    Like snow in May,        As if there were no such cold thing.

       Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone        Quite under ground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown;                    Where they together                    All the hard weather,        Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

Quite underground, I keep house unknown : It does seem the right image of wintry grief. I look forward to the moment when I can say the first sentence of the second stanza and feel its wonder as my own.

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Grief and Hamlet

2020, Shakespeare and Emotion

Grief punctuates all of Shakespeare's tragedies, and many of his comedies and histories too, but none is so resolutely focused on what it means to feel loss as Hamlet. From the personal loss of a father, to the social loss of a king, to an existential loss of meaning and place in the world, Hamlet explores what happens when one's sense of individuality and vitality collapses into something rote and mechanical...

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This paper re-evaluates moral and masculine constructs within Shakespeare's Hamlet. The moral and the masculine become conflated into hegemonic law, which Hamlet comes to challenge, giving him the appearance of madness as he confronts the Same while giving the audience the perspective of the Other.

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L’image de la mort est omnipresente dans Hamlet de William Shakespeare. La mort est envisagée comme crime, suicide, infection, poison, maladie. Cet article essaie de surprendre et de commenter tos ces aspects.

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The researcher explains the tragic of the play represented with Hamlet's father death. The most familiar image of the play is the young prince contemplating how he will revenge., the overriding theme being how people react to death. Though every version has the basic central story of Hamlet's revenge for his father's murder, each inevitably presents a more or less subtly different narrative, some omitting whole scenes and even major story threads. All this helps to explain why the play-and its central character-have been subject to an exceptionally wide range of interpretation. The researcher in this paper, will concentrate on one of the tragic situation for the protagonist of the play that father's murder by his mother and uncle.

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This paper looks closely at death as a thematic concern in Shakespearean tragedy, with a focus on Othello and Hamlet. In both plays, death as a tragic ending brings the stories of heroes who are led up constantly to fall and yield to the force of circumstances that have been created and plotted. The calamities in Shakespeare"s tragedies are not accidental. They proceed mainly from actions which beget others until this series of interconnected acts leads to a catastrophe. These acts are predominantly of great importance to the tragic ending. As the tragedy advances towards its "denouement", one would notice that the catastrophe follows inextricably from certain actions whose main source is a flaw in the hero"s character. Such is the case with both Othello and Hamlet. This paper attempts to offer a critical reading and a discussion of Shakespeare"s tragedy.

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This essay explores the mutual implication of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Freudian psychoanalysis as works of mourning. More particularly, it takes up how both the play and a series of Freud's writings — from early letters to Fliess to the Interpretation of Dreams to “Mourning and Melancholia” to Beyond the Pleasure Principle — themselves explore mourning as the almost impossible burden of a son trying to shed the authority of the dead but still potent father. In that sense, mourning has less to do with grief as traditionally conceived than with ambivalence, even hostility, toward the dead. It is an emotive experience that, in repressed form, manifests first as identification with the dead. The essay thus documents the complex “working-through” by which, in response to their fathers' deaths, two “tardy sons” finally arrive at a place of self-identification, a site from which they refuse the burden of living out — of repeating — the existence of the one who came before. Seen from this vantage, Shakespeare (through his tragic hero) and Freud both offer existential meditations on the need to originate our own lives even as they concede that, at the place of the origin, our lives are at once our own and not our own.

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Act 3, scene 1.

After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report their failure to find the cause of Hamlet’s madness, Polonius places Ophelia where he and Claudius may secretly observe a meeting between her and Hamlet. Hamlet is at first courteous to Ophelia, but suddenly he turns on her: he denies having loved her, asks where her father is, attacks womankind, and tells her she should enter a nunnery. After Hamlet exits, Claudius decides that Hamlet’s erratic behavior is not caused by love and announces a plan to send Hamlet on an embassy to England. Polonius persuades Claudius to take no action until Gertrude talks with Hamlet after the play, which is scheduled for that evening.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet — Madness In Shakespeares Hamlet

Madness in Shakespeares Hamlet

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Hamlet, is one of the most celebrated works in English literature, and the character of Hamlet himself is often considered one of the most complex and enigmatic figures in all of drama. The play revolves around the central [...]

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The Shapes of Grief

Witnessing the unbearable.

Joumana Medlej, Still from WAKE . Via X

. . . but how, what would the world be with us fully in it . . .

— dionne brand , The Blue Clerk

On May 14, 2022, Roberta A. Drury, Margus D. Morrison, Andre Mackniel, Aaron Salter Jr., Geraldine Talley, Celestine Chaney, Heyward Patterson, Katherine “Kat” Massey, Pearl Young, and Ruth Whitfield were murdered at a Tops Friendly Market in the East Side of Buffalo, New York.

Before and After Again , an exhibition currently on view at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, presents those women, men, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, friends, children, aunts, cousins, uncles, daughters, sons, a deacon, a community activist, gardeners, people working, meeting, out buying groceries, and those who survive them, as people in their lives. Before and After Again shows people in relation and in community. Living. People loved and mourned. The artists and writers who curated the exhibition—Julia Bottoms, Tiffany Gaines, and Jillian Hanesworth—say that part of their chal­lenge in presenting it was to “celebrate the vibrancy of extraordi­nary lives in the presence of a wound that will never heal.” The curators are clear that this exhibition is meant to function as a gath­ering place and not as a memorial.

At the annual literary festival NGC Bocas Lit Fest in April 2024 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the writer Edwidge Danticat is in conver­sation with Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw. Someone in the audience asks a question about grief, which is really a question about life and more specifically a question about a writing life during grief.

In Danticat’s memoir, Brother, I’m Dying (2007), which is about the deaths and lives of her father and her uncle while she was preg­nant with her first child, she reflects,

I write these things now, some as I witnessed them and today remember them, others from official documents as well as the borrowed recollections of family members. But the gist of them was told to me over the years, in part by my uncle Joseph, in part by my father. Some were told offhand, quickly. Others, in greater detail. What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time.

“I am writing this,” she continues, “only because they can’t.”

Danticat writes with such precision and clarity about death and grief. The work is moving, and it is scrubbed of the sentimental and the maudlin.

I am always rereading Brother, I’m Dying when I’m on an airplane.

There is something about the plane, its untethering space, between times and places, that allows me to meet so readily the many gifts of the book—among them language and memory.

In the exhibition materials for Before and After Again, Jillian Hanesworth says, “Once we stop thinking about art as something that we’re infusing into the situation to help us and instead we think about art as a living, breathing part of us, we understand that we’re just being given this water, this air.”

Danticat writes in her New Yorker essay “ The Haiti that Still Dreams ,” “Art is how we dream.”

It is my sighs that give it away to myself. When I catch myself sigh­ing, I remember that after my mother died, I sighed for years—it was a part of mourning that I had not known to anticipate. What I am experiencing now, what I think many of us are experiencing, is a kind of distributed mourning. R. calls it ambient genocide.

I know that some call this feeling around climate catastrophe “climate grief.” Kate Zambreno writes about grief as ecological, as “concerning both the individual and the collective, the human and the nonhuman.”

Craft tells us to modu­late our words. Craft tells us that if “we” do it well enough, “they” will listen. Craft tells us to be silent about genocide.

When the climate is everything and the catastrophe everywhere and also somewhere(s) very specific, there is also climate rage.

At Bocas, Danticat tells us that when she was writing Brother, I’m Dying , she looked forward to returning to it each day because in the pages of that book she got to visit with her father and her uncle. To spend time with them.

I know that grief is a vessel, a conduit for relation, but I am nevertheless startled into a new understanding when I hear that. Danticat expands what I understand grief to be and to make. She enlarges its shapes. Names it as connective tissue.

I feel, now, that I know differently the pain but also the possible joys of staying in the company of a loved and missed one through the work of remembering on the page, in the mind, in the world.

Language is one way we make and sustain relation. Words are one way we begin the work of unmaking and changing the shape of the world.

“Words are to be taken seriously,” Toni Cade Bambara insists. “Words set things in motion.”

That is the power of the iterative.

In December, Protean published “ Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide ” by the Palestinian American writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi. Tbakhi names “Craft” as “the network of sani­tizing influences exerted on writing in the English language” by the professional contexts through which it circulates and acquires prestige, including universities and publishing houses: “the influ­ences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguis­tic priorities of the state and of empire.” He continues:

Above all, Craft is the result of market forces; it is therefore the result of imperial forces, as the two are so inextricably bound up together as to be one and the same. The Craft which is taught in Western institutions, taken up and reproduced by Western publishers, literary institutions, and awards bodies, is a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe. If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, then Craft is the process by which our own real liberatory tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced.

Craft tells us that the market matters. Craft tells us to modu­late our words. Craft tells us that if “we” do it well enough, “they” will listen. Craft tells us to be silent about genocide. To be silent about genocides, about antiblackness and white supremacy. “Craft,” Tbakhi continues, “is a machine for regulation, estrangement, sanitization.”

But Tbakhi also notes, “Anticolonial writers in the U.S. and across the globe have long modeled alternative crafts which reject these priorities and continue to do so in this present moment.” Instead of Craft, I think about work. The work that we, writers, are doing now as we try to attend to the violent world and also to what might be in excess of it.

What are the words and the forms with which to do and say and make what we need to live in, now? Not only in some future time but now. What is our work to be? isn’t a grand question. It is a simple question. The question at the base of our writing.

Writers who try to do this work are told that our words don’t mat­ter. When we demand a ceasefire and an end to occupation, we are told that those words are meaningless, that they do not prompt action, and that they cause tremendous injury (as in, to demand a ceasefire or to demand that the genocide in Gaza end is to cause injury and not to demand the cessation of injury). To name a per­son, institution, state, or a set of acts as racist or anti-Palestinian or antiblack is to cause injury. It is not the racism that injures, it is not the bullets and bombs that injure, it is the words that seek to name the injury—that name a murderous structure like apartheid or settler colonialism—that cause injury.

Meaning is in crisis. And we are embroiled, everywhere, in contests over meaning—which are also contests of power, contests over living. And dying.

When Anne Boyer resigned as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine in November 2023, she wrote on her Substack,

Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

I can’t write about poetry amidst the “reasonable” tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.

This past academic year, as I prepared for class, I kept wondering how we were supposed to do our work and what that work should be. I wondered how the students in the class were supposed to do their work, even when the work that we were doing was relevant to what we are living through and trying to witness and to interrupt. We adjusted. We talked. We held space. We read. They were pres­ent. They showed up, and together we did our work.

In a three-hour seminar that I led at another university, I asked a group of students and faculty to read Steffani Jemison’s “ On the Stroke, the Glyph, and the Mark .” It’s a piece of writing that I both like and admire—her objects of inquiry, her sense making, and how she builds the essay through thinking and wondering.

Jemison’s first sentence is: “I have made a mark, and I do not know whether I am drawing or writing.”

Jemison is not talking about Craft.

She is talking about work. She is writing about writing/drawing/thinking/escape.

What is the work of composition, of mark making? What should our marks mark? Hold? Move toward?

What I'm working on…🧵 •WAKE• Indigo on washi. 25x??cm With 31,500 killed you-know-where so far, I was struggling with number blindness. When numbers become so large they lose all meaning, how do you remain awake to the scale of the slaughter & the personhood of the victims? pic.twitter.com/qwgN9PxQ58 — Joumana Medlej 🦋 (@joumajnouna) March 17, 2024

The artist Joumana Medlej likewise moves between writing and drawing, perhaps also thinking of escape. She is making a mark in lieu of a name, in lieu of many proper names. She is making a mark for every murdered Palestinian. On March 17, 2024, she posted on X: “With 31,500 killed you-know-where so far, I was struggling with number blindness. When numbers become so large they lose all meaning, how do you remain awake to the scale of the slaughter & the personhood of the victims?”

From the artist Torkwase Dyson, I have learned (again and again) that the practice of mark making is a practice of navigation.

We should rid our writing of the domestication of atrocity, rid our writing of the tense that insists on the innocence of its perpetrators, the exonerative tense of phrases like “lives were lost” and “a stray bullet found its way into the van” and “children died.” We should rid our writing of this dreadful innocence. We should refuse the logic that produces a phrase like “human animals” and a “four-year-old young lady.”

Driving through the neighborhood where we are staying in Salvador in the state of Bahia in Brazil, we keep encountering a particularly long and steep hill. Our friend tells us that it is called Ladeira da Preguiça —the Steep Hill of Laziness.

Slave owners, those who claimed to own other people, named it that. This hill that they did not walk and that they made enslaved people walk up and down carrying heavy goods that they them­selves would not carry.

The slaveowners in Brazil, like everywhere black (and black­ened) people were enslaved (in Brazil that was until 1888), main­tained that the people they literally worked to death were lazy.

And that steep hill that they were forced to ascend and descend, hour after hour and day after day, was named Lazy Hill. They were named lazy. This is devastating language, brutal language.

This is language that undoes.

The descriptions of a prison in El Salvador. The description of a small boat that drifted across the Atlantic to Tobago. The plans to recolonize Haiti. The warnings that twenty-five million people in Sudan are at imminent risk of famine. The descriptions of massa­cres that Israel has carried out against Palestinians. The wide-open, shocked eyes of the Palestinian man abducted by the IDF. The descriptions of the Greek coast guard throwing people into the sea.

What must we, as writers, animate and set into motion in place of such language?

In “The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture,” Renee Gladman writes,

For all my writing life I have been fascinated with notions of origin and passage, though rarely in terms of ancestry—since I don’t know where I’m from. I don’t know the languages or landscapes that preceded the incursion of English and what is now the United States into my lineage. Yet, the violence of that erasure—all the inheritances interrupted—is as foundational to my relationship to language and subjectivity as is grammar. . . . I open my mouth in my own life and I want to distort, rearrange, mispronounce the available vocabulary.

Mispronouncing can rearrange language and open it up; distor­tion might be a way-making tool that undoes available vocabularies.

And a sentence can also be a space for living through an occupa­tion or preoccupation with the line, with grammars and imagination.

“Encampments are not only zones of demands & refusals, but also processes of communing, making decisions together, enacting sol­idarity as a verb, embodying autonomous & collective liberation. They are themselves zones of imagination, of connection, of pre­figuring life & new worlds.”

This is Harsha Walia writing about the student encampments on campuses in the United States and Canada and France and the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

This is a vocabulary and a practice of our possible living.

As I write this, the university where I teach has sent in riot police to disband an encampment that has been established for less than twenty-four hours. All the universities calling in riot police think that they know the future. They don’t really know what they are making. They know what they want, but they do not know what they are incubating.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “ In the Middle of Fighting for Freedom We Found Ourselves Free ” is a preface to June Jordan’s remem­brance of Audre Lorde, her sister in struggle. Gumbs is channeling Jordan’s clarity about her and our perilous times. She writes, “The students are teaching us that, though we cannot undo the incalcu­lable loss of genocidal violence, it is not too late. It is exactly the time to be braver together in service of a livable future. It is time for what June Jordan calls . . . ‘words that death cannot spell or delete.’”

After the Israeli bombing of Rafah on May 26, 2024, the hundredth or thousandth massacre in Palestine in seventy-six years, Jennine K writes on X, “The flour massacre, the tents massacre, the hospital massacre, the refugee camp massacre, the ‘safe corridor’ massacre, the endless massacres, in homes, on the streets, in tents, on foot—eight months of massacre after massacre after massacre.” The poet Ladan Osman writes , “Who or what will cool the eyes of those who witnessed and recorded this carnage, saying: People of the world, look at this?”

Terrible acts. Unbearable. Who is called on to be a continual witness to the unbearable, to survive and carry it?

What survives of those who survive this, eight months and counting of constant terror?

Each time I write that the genocide being carried out by Israel against Palestinians is unbearable, I name a position or positions. I name distance, because the Palestinians who are living this, those who are somehow surviving this, are bearing the unbearable, are being made to bear the unbearable over and over and over again. Their witnessing is a refusal to be silent in the face of genocide. More than that—they are necessary utterances in the midst of devastation.

In April 2024, I read that since October 2023, Israel has dropped over seventy thousand tons of bombs on Gaza.

Who can survive this? What survives of those who survive this, eight months and counting of constant terror? Those who move to what they are told is a “safe zone,” only for that zone to be bombed?

Thousands of people, likely tens of thousands of people bur­ied, alive and dead, under the rubble. I read in The Guardian that people report walking though the destroyed streets and having to bear hearing people calling for help and being unable to help them.

Selma Dabbagh writes in the London Review of Book s, “According to the UN, it could take up to three years to remove the bodies from the 37 million tonnes of rubble in Gaza, which is also contam­inated by unexploded ordnance, up to ten per cent of which, they estimate, ‘doesn’t function as designed.’”

Unbearable.

Unbearable, and entire populations are being forced to bear it anyway.

At the end of May 2024, as we are on our way to the airport in Salvador, L. tells us that there are more than three million people living in the favelas of Salvador. He says that a majority of the black people in Salvador live in one of the many favelas and that it is less expensive to live there than in other neighborhoods or in social housing.

L. also tells us that 260,000 people disappeared during the most intense period of Covid. L. does not know where they went.

How do more than a quarter of a million people go missing?

These are economies of scale. Economies of value.

During the same trip to Salvador and on our drive from Salvador to Cachoeira, another friend, G., an architect and professor, tells us that the government moved many people to social housing, but they did so with little thought to how people were assigned to a place. They gave little consideration to the distances that people were being moved or to the infrastructure or lack of it. G. tells us that these moves broke up communities and families. She also tells us that, except for the people on the ground floor, no one in social housing had access to back gardens.

No possibility of extending space horizontally or vertically. That possibility to move up or out is one of the infrastructures of life in Brazil.

G. tells us about the laje, “a flat concrete roof.” These kinds of roofs are considered by some to be incomplete. In the vocabulary of city officials, these structures are unfinished, an eyesore. But in another vocabulary of those who live in them, the laje is the space of the possible.

They are not incomplete; they are a future promise. It is an architecture that reaches upwards, that gestures toward plans. It is an architecture against the foreclosure of possibility.

On June 5, 2024, Omar Hamad, a pharmacist, writer, and film critic from Gaza, writes the following on X: “Describing last night as a harsh night is inaccurate. Out of sheer fear, our hearts reached our throats, as if we wanted to vomit them out. The bombing didn’t cease for a single moment. I don’t know how the sun rose upon us again.”

Not harsh. Something else. Some other word. Some other force of terror.

Each day I come to know even more clearly and urgently that we must commit to the fight for meaning. Not to concede the words, concepts, terms that we need to think and imagine and make livable lives.

This is some of what is required of our writing, some of what our writing can do, some of what our writing is for, in the face of all of this.

Writing in Pictures

Garth greenwell, louise glück’s late style, you might also like, palestinian solidarity, then and now, fady joudah, new perspectives, enduring writing.

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