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William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts Shakespearean Criticism: The Last Mystery - William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts The Last Mystery - William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts ©2010 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. Please see copyright information at the end of this document. The Last Mystery William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts As I finished this book, I was visited by a friend of pragmatic temperament. "Yes, I suppose so," he said on hearing of my admiration for the scene between Hamlet and the gravedigger. "But I don't have the slightest idea what it means." What defeats my pragmatic friend, I think, is that the graveyard scene offers nothing but meaning. With respect to the battle between Hamlet and Claudius, it accomplishes nothing. Hamlet does not form a plan. He does not happen on useful information. Shakespeare, grandly at his leisure, finds time to bring Hamlet and Horatio, eventually the entire Danish court and the mortal remains of Ophelia, to the local graveyard—only the second scene in the play (the first is 4.2, its local unspecified) set outside Elsinore Castle. Two months or so before the play begins, Hamlet returned from Wittenberg to attend his father's funeral, which might have been held on this very ground.1 "Foul deeds will rise,/ Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes" (1.3.257-58). Hamlet is thinking of his father rising from the earth of his grave; when he first sees the ghost, he refers to it as a "dead corse" (I.4.52). Shakespeare reassembles his characters on the graveyard from which the foul deeds rose. It is where they are destined to go, and will go again when their dead bodies are heaped on a stage at the end of the play. The graveyard comes before the beginning, before the end, after the end. This scene does not advance the plot but stretches it out from dust to dust. When I remarked in [an earlier chapter] that 3.4 was the greatest scene in Hamlet, I may have been rash. Planted in the design of the graveyard scene are specific messages for the prince, delivered one after another like tolling bells that summon to his remembrance things past, from his birth to his current embroilments. Like the closet scene, the graveyard scene stamps seals of fated specificity on Hamlet's life. But here the horizons are the largest imaginable. The scene casts the life of the hero, all the lives of all the characters, tragedy itself, in the broadest and most reductive perspective. It completes the ideal-making self-education of the prince, countering the wish that opens his first soliloquy with hard fact: instead of melting, thawing, and resolving into a dew, his flesh, all flesh, will leak into the waters, dusts, and dirts of mother earth. Here as elsewhere, the Shakespearean drama of splitting requires concepts that level and plot devices that reunite, such as the bed-tricks of All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. The graveyard scene in Hamlet, into which all its characters and motives and themes are funneled, envelops the play in a powerful spirit of counter-splitting. "For this whole world," as Donne observes, "is but an universall church-yard, but our common grave" (Sermons 10:234). The peculiar structure of the revenge plot, in which a determining crime has taken place before the opening of the play, makes Hamlet itself seem like the conclusion of a tragedy already under way. In another structuring of the plot, closer to what we find in The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet might be a character who appears in Act 4 of The Hystorie of Claudius to set the catastrophe in motion. He might appear even later in The Tragicall Hystorie of King Hamblet and Queene Gertrude. (Running parallel to Hamlet is a chronicle history, Fortinbras of Norway, in which the prince does not have a line.) Another way to describe this sense of a tragedy caught up in previous tragedies is "being under a curse." Claudius observes that his rank offense "hath The Last Mystery 1 Shakespearean Criticism: The Last Mystery - William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts the primal eldest curse upon't—/ A brother's murder" (3.3.36-37). Cain is the first murderer, Abel the first corpse. Trying to wean Hamlet of excessive grief, Claudius takes him back to that very body: To reason most absurd, whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried From the first corse till he that died today, "This must be so." (1.2.103-4) In the graveyard scene Shakespeare locates his tragedy in the same inclusive framework of "This must be so" that Claudius places grief. Significantly, it is not Abel who puts in an imaginative appearance, but Cain. There is a message for revengers in Hamlet's graveyard. It is obvious from the first that the gravedigger will make an excellent conversational partner for Hamlet. No one else in the play has been up to it, and the prince has won victory after victory on the battlefields of wit. The fellow may suffer here and there from the dyslexia Shakespeare habitually imposes on the lower orders, but he likes riddles, speaks ironically, and respects a good foil: "I like thy wit well in good faith" (5.1.45). His conversation moves from the questionable ruling on Ophelia's death to privilege itself: Gravediger. And the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even-Christen. Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and gravemakers—they hold up Adam's profession. [He digs.] Other. Was he a gentleman? Gravedigger. A was the first that ever bore arms. Other. Why, he had none. Gravedigger. What, art a heathen? How does thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says Adam digged. Could he dig without arms? I'll put another question to thee. If thou answerest me not to the purpose, confess thyself— (27-39) Like death, the sexton unmakes distinctions. The notion of "even-Christen" ought to abolish the exemptions given to "great folk." Adam bore arms, the sexton bears arms, and uses them as he speaks to dig Ophelia's grave. If Hamlet were around to hear him, he would receive a veiled message about the end of the play, where he will take arms against a sea of troubles in a sword fight. The piece of professional aggrandizement that makes Adam's tilling of the ground into the digging of graves serves as a grinning medieval introduction to Hamlet's forthcoming reflections. For the biblical digging has to do with agriculture, the food we fallen gentlemen labor in order to eat, whereas graves are made for corpses, the food we fallen gentlemen become. The transposition from farmer to grave-maker is of course appropriate inasmuch as Adam, the former gardener, made all our graves. The stage is set in large theological terms for Hamlet to encounter one last time the "rank unweeded garden" of his fallen world. Arriving on the scene, Hamlet is first taken with the rough irreverence of the sexton. "Has this fellow no feeling of his business a sings in grave-making?" But his is not a dainty job. The language throughout this scene has a sharp concussive physicality: "Cudgel thy brains no more," "How the knave jowls it to th' ground," "chapless, knocked about the mazzard with a sexton's spade," "knock him about the sconce with a William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts 2 Shakespearean Criticism: The Last Mystery - William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts dirty shovel." A nineteenth-century edition is eloquent on the second of these examples: "If proof were wanted of the exquisite propriety and force of effect with which Shakespeare uses words, and words of even homely fashion, there could hardly be a more pointed instance than the verb 'jowls' here. What strength it gives to the impression of the head and cheek-bone smiting against the earth! and how it makes the imagination feel the bruise in sympathy!"2 The speaker of these knockabout homely terms is Hamlet himself. He welcomes the impudent digging into his style. A long parade of Adam's progeny must have come to this burial ground. To bury one is to displace another.3 Out of the crowded earth a first skill is thrown up. Again Hamlet observes indignity, the low indifferent to the high: That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to th' ground, as if 'twere Cain's jawbone, that did the first murder. This might be the pate of a fine politician which this ass now o'er-offices, one that would circumvent God, might it not? (74-79) The rough treatment might be justified if it were the skull of Cain, Claudius's great original. Hamlet will imagine many identities for the skulls in this graveyard, but Cain is the first message he gets: fratricides come to this, their transgressions covered like all transgressions in the general sentence of mortality. The killing of a brother is not the primal eldest curse. What is history but God's curse on human sin? Savoring the way he intends to transform Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's plot against him into a plot against them, Hamlet remarks, "O, 'tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet" (3.4.211-12). Those who would circumvent God come always to this most sweet end, buried by God's plot in a plot of earth.
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