Hamlet

Hamlet grapples with the inevitability and the mystery of death. Death’s complex interweaving of what is certain and what can’t be known is at the heart of the play’s concerns. In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet lays the point out neatly: If it weren’t for the chance of suffering in the afterlife, people would choose to end suffering in this life—to end it all and rest.

The afterlife, of course, rises up and walks in the form of Hamlet’s dead father. The ghost suggests that there is indeed an afterlife, and not necessarily a restful one; his stories of Purgatorial flames are anything but peaceful. Hamlet’s agonizing doubt over this apparition’s veracity plays back into his general difficulty. Though he knows what he saw, he can’t be sure that he interpreted it correctly.

Hamlet is perpetually troubled by the ambiguities and untruths around him, but he takes a grotesque and conflicted pleasure in images of decay. He envisions his father’s tomb opening like jaws to belch his corpse out and Polonius’s body being devoured by worms, and he spends some quality time chatting with the stinking skull of the exhumed Yorick. He does not, however, view the tragic corpse of