Hamlet or Shakespeare’s Anatomy of Death

Abstract

The final act of Hamlet (c. 1600) opens on an uncanny scene in which the young prince is contemplating Yorick’s skull, while he ponders upon the mysteries of life and death. The graveyard scene constitutes ‘an extended interlude’ (Belsey, 37, 1997) in the play with its extensive meditation on mortality. This article offers a critical reassessment of how Shakespeare strips away the characters’ outward persona to expose the reality of the world of death. The play is informed with strong iconographical, philosophical, spiritual and theatrical resonances of death raising the dramaturgical issue of staging death on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Moreover, these echoes and reverberations convey a rather accurate picture of one’s perception and understanding of death in Renaissance England. Much in the same way the anatomist’s ruthless scalpel reveals the secrets of the human body, the playwright’s pen bares the hidden truths of death as it does away with the false representations and appearances of the mundane world, rendering the invisible, visible.