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Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries From Genuinely Interested Students 3.15.97: Top | Help
I may be wrong, but I'm not so sure that the Gravedigger was (as LunarCaustic suggests) necessarily turning over a mass grave. He might have been displacing Yorick's personal grave for Ophelia's personal grave. (How else does he know it's Yorick?) Mind you, he does take out two skulls. We never find out who that other guy is.I think there's some insight into contemporary attitudes to burial in the dialogue between the Priest and Laertes. (Act 5, Scene 2.) Laertes wants more of a funeral for his sister, but the Priest replies that "her death was doubtful" (i.e. suicidal), and "But that great command o'ersways the order, she should in ground unsanctified have lodg'd" etc. -- meaning that Claudius and/or Gertrude ordered up more of a proper burial for her; otherwise she would have been dumped in with the peasants. It just reconfirms what Hamlet says at the beginning: that "the Everlasting" had "fix'd his canon 'gainst self-slaughter."
Posted by John Lazarus on March 30, 1997 at 12:29:15
In Reply to "Burial rites and Hamlet" posted by Tami on March 29, 1997 at 19:16:59
Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries From Genuinely Interested Students 3.15.97: Top | Help