‘The Lady’: an excerpt from Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death (1538)

Creating a brutal comic contrast with the poignant pathos of the scene that immediately precedes it – the poignant news of Ophelia’s death in Act IV Scene 7 – Act V begins with two gravediggers digging what soon turns out to be the young woman’s grave, bantering with mock-serious cynicism about whether she deserves a Christian burial. When the ‘Second Man’ (i.e., the second gravedigger) exits, Hamlet and Horatio enter, and the Gravedigger begins to sing, throwing skulls up and out of the grave. Finding this behaviour inappropriate, Hamlet asks him whose grave he is digging. Circumventing the question, the Gravedigger reveals instead he has been digging graves since ‘King Hamlet overcome Fortinbras’ (V-1, 136), which happened to be the day Hamlet was born. (V-1, 139) The two then briefly discuss Hamlet’s insanity, the Gravedigger appearing to be unaware of who Hamlet is (or making believe that he is?), before the latter turns his attention to a skull that used to belong to Yorick, the king’s jester who was also Hamlet’s caretaker [1], launching into a monologue, which, though it has many points in common with his previous soliloquies, addresses the theme of death with unprecedented emotional detachment, the universal fate that it represents, both for the powerful and the common, emperors and jesters.

Vanitas

Taking place as it does in a cemetery, and involving a comedian of a Gravedigger and the remains of a court jester, the whole of this mostly prose scene offers a perfect example of the Shakespearean grotesque aesthetic (in Victor Hugo’s definition of the term), i.e., the transgression of classical boundaries between high and low material, the light and the grave, life and death, loftiness and vulgarity, comedy and tragedy. The Gravedigger himself – sometimes referred to as a ‘Clown’ in other versions of the play, i.e., not necessarily a comic character, put a character of low extraction, a rustic or a peasant – plays a crucial role in setting this grotesque tone, with his genius for paradoxes, riddles, parodies, and gallows humour. [2] Indeed, his is something of a master class in wit and buffoonery, with his talent for ‘equivocation’ (V-1, 130), i.e., double-entendre and puns (V-1, 127-128, 151-152, 157-164), ‘ethnic’ humour (V-1, 145-146), non sequiturs (V-1, 152-153) and farcesque digressions (V-1, 169)… And though he initially purports to complain about the ‘knave’ (V-1, 129), his gall,  sharp tongue and undeferential tone, Hamlet soon proves to find their carnivalesque brashness endearing, just as he appreciated the ‘infinite jest’ of his dear late Yorick (V-1, 175), and thus wilfully indulges the friendly verbal sparring with the Gravedigger.

With its setting, the morbid contents of the conversations and the abundant gallows humour, the whole scene is also meant to evoke the medieval allegorical motif of the danse macabre, whose earliest example is to be found in Paris’s Cimetière des Innocents (c. 1200), and which was best illustrated in England by Hans Holbein’s forty-one woodcuts known as The Dance of Death (1538) (for more information on the  ‘dance of death’, please see the websites La Mort dans l’Art and The Dance of Death, especially the page dedicated to Holbein’s work), and more generally the medieval theory and practice of the memento mori, which, especially in 17^th century art, still-life painting in particular, was illustrated in the vanities theme [3], i.e., paintings containing symbols of the vanity of life, the certainty of death and the mutability of all things (skulls, fruit – often rotting – bubbles, smoke, watches, musical instruments, butterflies…).

Hamlet’s whole speech in the second half of the excerpt is a particularly rich example of this theme, especially in the way he contrasts the joy and playfulness that characterized Yorick, his ‘jibes,’ ‘gambols,’ his flashes of ‘merriment,’ his sense of ‘mockery’ (V-1, 179-181) and all that remains of him, as well as in the highly misogynistic hyperbole that he uses to evoke the vanity of female coquetry (V-1, 182-184) [4], resorting to a cosmetic metaphor which, as we have seen, is fairly recurrent in his evocation of women…

But Shakespeare’s exploration of this quintessentially Renaissance theme of death as ‘the great leveller,’ is perhaps even more conspicuous in the paradoxical tributes that Hamlet eventually pretends to pay to Alexander and Caesar – two conquerors and emperors, two ‘great men’ of history, whose lot was ultimately no better than the lot of the most common man. One must bear in mind that invoking the specific example of Alexander to evoke death as a great equalizer was an ancient convention, to be found in the classical writings of Lucian or Marcus Aurelius, among others. But again Hamlet does so by means of parody, first by grossly poking fun at the apocryphal legend according to which Alexander was fair and sweet-smelling (V-1, 190), then by resorting to bathos to spoof the ternary rhythm and the cyclical symbolism of Christian burial services, especially the language of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (V-1, 198-201)… And the parody climaxes with the mock-heroic eulogy that Hamlet improvises for Caesar at the very end of the excerpt, a banally perfect quatrain in iambic pentameter, with its pseudo-lyricism, pedestrian rhyming, and banal, mostly monosyllabic language, all of which is used to imagine the most trivial ending for the late Emperor’s ashes. [5]

Finally, one may suggest that, beyond his comical function, the characterization of the Gravedigger as an embodiment of death itself also contributes to elevating the scene to an allegorical dimension. This has to do with the somewhat superhuman agelessness that he is endowed with, his claim that his work began long before the birth of Hamlet, his recurrent allusions to Genesis and Doomsday (in this excerpt and the pages that precede it), and the inescapable fact that he will be the one to bury all the characters in the play: starting with King Hamlet and Yorick’s graves some thirty years before, Ophelia’s own grave which he is currently digging, most likely Polonius’s too, and, shortly enough, Gertrude’s, Laertes’s, Claudius’s, and Hamlet’s.

Gravitas

There is interesting symmetry between this scene and the first one in which Hamlet appears in the play, in Act I Scene 2. While in the latter, at Elsinore’s court, Hamlet is openly prevented from reflecting upon the past, even from reminiscing about his father’s recent death, here, in the graveyard, he can at last be reconciled with the idea of death, the memory of his father, his own youth – through his fond memories of Yorick – and thus his very life.

There is also a striking sense of composure, clarity, serenity, maturity, even gravitas in Hamlet’s speech, especially in the ‘Yorick monologue,’ which stands in sharp contrast with the tension and confusion bordering on rage that emanated from the scenes that preceded his departure to England. Granted, Hamlet initially expresses repulsion at Yorick’s skull and physical decay – emphasized by the ironic sound pattern between the words ‘bore’ and ‘abhorred’ in his evocation of the memory of Yorick holding him on his back, and the graphic evocation of sickness that it inspires him. (V-1, 175-177) But soon his tone turns to mild sarcasm, and the sort of gallows humour that he must have inherited from Yorick himself, most notably when he pokes fun, in a bittersweet preterition, at his late friend’s ‘chapfallen’ – or jaw-dropping head. [6]

What provoked such a change is uncertain, but the symbolism of rebirth, of baptism associated to the sea journey is significant. And part of Hamlet’s newfound composure clearly has to do with the emotional detachment that he appears to have reached with the haunting, vengeful and mythified memory of his father. Indeed, one cannot but read his demythologizing reflections on such warrior-kings as Alexander and Julius Caesar (V-1, 187, 202) as an implicit demythologization of his own warrior-king of a father, whose life, like theirs, he now acknowledges is nothing but dust. Hamlet’s acceptance of death – a strikingly more serene one than in the ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ soliloquy for instance – thus fulfils his coming of age, a process by which he appears to have come of age, and perhaps has learnt to ‘kill the father’. Thus, one may say that this whole cemetery scene paradoxically completes a process of rebirth and self-assertion for Hamlet, which will culminate when he later challenges Laertes and the whole of Ophelia’s funeral procession by proudly stating his royal self: ‘This is I, / Hamlet the Dane’. (V-1, 246-7)

[1] In his novel Tristram Shandy (1759) Laurence Sterne introduced the memorable comic character of the parson Yorick, who is meant to be a descendant of Shakespeare’s character – yet another explanation for why ‘Yorick’ has become such a household name in England.

[2] Well into the 1900s, there was a tradition, especially in the English theatre, that the actor playing the quick-witted Gravedigger also played the verbose Polonius.

[3] The origin of the expression is from Ecclesiastes 1:2: ‘Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity’.

[4] It was a common motif in the tradition of the danse macabre to show  a skull appear beside a woman at her toilet.

[5] Bear in mind that Caesar – one of the very few conquerors of Britain – was not a particularly popular figure in Elizabethan England: here, in other words, Shakespeare clearly had Hamlet play to the groundlings.

[6] From a metadramatic perspective, the image of Hamlet holding a skull in his hand, finding himself face to face with it, is a powerful, proleptic image of his ineluctable death in the play itself.