Hamlet's Grief

Author(s): Arthur Kirsch

Source: ELH , Spring, 1981, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 17-36
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2873010

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to ELH

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
HAMLET'S GRIEF

BY ARTHUR KIRSCH

Hamlet is a tragedy perhaps most often, and justly, admired for its
intellectual energy. Hamlet's mind comprehends a universe of
ideas, and he astonishes us with the copiousness and eloquence
and luminousness of his thoughts. But I think we should re-
member, as Hamlet is compelled to remember, that behind these
thoughts, and usually their occasion, is a continuous and tremen-
dous experience of pain and suffering. We are accustomed to
thinking of the other major tragedies, Lear and Othello especially,
as plays whose greatest genius lies in the depiction of the deepest
movements of human feeling. I think we should attend to such
movements in Hamlet as well. As Hamlet himself tells us, it is his
heart which he unpacks with words, it is against what he calls the
"heart-ache" (III.1.62)1 of human existence that he protests in his
most famous soliloquy (and this is the first use of the term in that
sense the OED records), and there are few plays in the canon in
which the word "heart" itself is more prominent.
Hamlet is a revenge play, and judging by the prodigious num-
ber of performances, parodies, and editions of The Spanish Tragedy
alone, the genre enjoyed an extraordinary popularity on the
Elizabethan stage. Part of the reason for that popularity is the theat-
rical power of the revenge motif itself. The quest for vengeance
satisfies an audience's most primitive wishes for intrigue and vio-
lence. "The Tragic Auditory," as Charles Lamb once remarked,
"wants blood,"2 and the revenge motif provides it in abundance.
Equally important, it gives significant shape to the plot and sus-
tained energy to the action.3 But if vengeance composes the plot of
the revenge play, grief composes its essential emotional content, its
substance. There is a character in Marlowe's Jew of Malta who,
finding the body of his son killed in a duel, cries out in his loss that
he wishes his son had been murdered so that he could avenge his
death.4 It is a casual line, but it suggests a deep connection between
anger and sorrow in the revenge play genre itself which both Kyd
and Shakespeare draw upon profoundly. At the end of The Spanish
Tragedy the ghost of Andrea says, "Ay, now my hopes have end in

17

ELH Vol. 48 Pp. 17-36

0013-8304/81/0481-017 $01.00 ? 1981 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
their effects, / When blood and sorrow finish my desires,"5 and it
was unquestionably Kyd's brilliance in representing the elemental
power of sorrow, as well as of blood, that enabled the revenge genre
to establish so large a claim on the Elizabethan theatrical imagina-
tion. The speeches in which Hieronimo gives voice to his grief,
including the famous, "Oh eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with
tears; / Oh life! no life, but lively form of death,"6 were parodied for
decades after their first performance, so great was their impact, and
the moving figure of an old man maddened with grief over the loss
of his son was a major part of Shakespeare's theatrical inheritance.
In Shakespeare's play it is Hamlet himself who talks explicitly of
sorrow and blood, relating them directly to the ghost as well as each
other in the scene in his mother's bedchamber in which the ghost
appears for the last time. "Look you," he tells his mother, who
characteristically cannot see the ghost,

how pale he glares.

His form and cause conjoin'd, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable.-Do not look upon me
Lest with this piteous action you convert
My stern effects; then what I have to do
Will want true colour-tears perchance for blood.
(III.4.125)

These lines suggest synapses between grief and vengeance which

help make the whole relation between the plot and emotional con-
tent of Hamlet intelligible, but of more immediate importance to an
understanding of the play is Hamlet's own emphasis in this speech,
his focus on his grief and the profound impact which the ghost has
upon it.
The note of grief is sounded by Hamlet in his first words in the
play, before he ever sees the ghost, in his opening dialogue with
the King and his mother. The Queen says to him:

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,

And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know'st 'tis common-all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
(I.2.68)

Hamlet answers, "Ay, madam, it is common." "If it be, / Why seems

it so particular with thee?" she says; and he responds,

18 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems.
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These, indeed, seem;
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show-
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

Though Hamlet's use of the conventional Elizabethan forms of

mourning expresses his hostility to an unfeeling court, he is at the
same time speaking deeply of an experience which everyone who
has lost someone close to him must recognize. He is speaking of the
early stages of grief, of its shock, of its inner and still hidden sense
of loss, and trying to describe what is not fully describable-the
literally inexpressible wound whose immediate consequence is the
dislocation, if not transvaluation, of our customary perceptions and
feelings and attachments to life. It is no accident that this speech
sets in motion Hamlet's preoccupation with seeming and being,
including the whole train of images of acting which is crystallized
in the play within the play. The peculiar centripetal pull of anger
and sorrow which the speech depicts remains as the central under-
current of that preoccupation, most notably in Hamlet's later sol-
iloquy about the player's imitation of Hecuba's grief:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have?
(11.2.544)

Hamlet then goes on to rebuke himself for his own inaction, but the
player's imitation of grief nonetheless moves him internally, as
nothing else can, in fact to take action, as he conceives of the idea of
staging a play to test both the ghost and the conscience of the King.

Arthur Kirsch 19

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 After Hamlet finishes answering his mother in the earlier court
scene, the King offers his own consolation for Hamlet's grief:
'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father;
But you must know your father lost a father;
That father lost lost his; and the survivor bound,
In filial obligation, for some term
To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd;
For what we know must be, and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd; whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died to-day,
'This must be so'.
(I.2.87)

There is much in this consolation of philosophy which is spiritually

and psychologically sound, and to which every human being must
eventually accommodate himself, but it comes at the wrong time,
from the wrong person, and in its essential belittlement of the
heartache of grief, it comes with the wrong inflection. It is a dis-
piriting irony of scholarship on this play that so many psychoana-
lytic and theological critics should essentially take such words,
from such a King, as a text for their own indictments of Hamlet's
behavior. What a person who is grieving needs, of course, is not the
consolation of words, even words which are true, but sympathy-
and this Hamlet does not receive, not from the court, not from his
uncle, and more important, not from his own mother, to whom his
grief over his father's death is alien and unwelcome.
After the King and Queen leave the stage, it is to his mother's lack
of sympathy not only for him but for her dead husband that Hamlet
turns in particular pain:

0, that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! 0 God! God!

20 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! Ah, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead! Nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on; and yet, within a month-
Let me not think on't. Frailty, thy name is woman!-
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears-why she, even she-
0 God! a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourn'd longer-married with my uncle,
My father's brother; but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. 0, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
(1.2.129)

This is an exceptionally suggestive speech and the first of many

which seem to invite Oedipal interpretations of the play. About
these I do not propose to speak directly, except to remark that the
source of Hamlet's so-called Oedipal anxiety is real and present, it
is not an archaic and repressed fantasy. Hamlet does perhaps pro-
test too much, in this soliloquy and elsewhere, about his father's
superiority to his uncle (and to himself), and throughout the play he
is clearly preoccupied with his mother's sexual appetite; but these
ambivalences and preoccupations, whatever their unconscious
roots, are elicited by a situation, palpable and external to him, in
which they are acted out. The Oedipal configurations of Hamlet's
predicament, in other words, inhabit the whole world of the play,
they are not simply a function of his characterization, even though
they resonate with it profoundly. There is every reason, in reality,
for a son to be troubled and decomposed by the appetite of a mother
who betrays his father's memory by her incestuous marriage,7
within a month, to his brother, and murderer, and there is surely

Arthur Kirsch 21

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
more than reason for a son to be obsessed for a time with a father
who literally returns from the grave to haunt him. But in any case, I
think that at least early in the play, if not also later, such Oedipal
echoes cannot be disentangled from Hamlet's grief, and Shakes-
peare's purpose in arousing them is not to call Hamlet's character to
judgment, but to expand our understanding of the nature and inten-
sity of his suffering. For all of these resonant events come upon
Hamlet while he has still not even begun to assimilate the loss of a
living father, while he is still freshly mourning, seemingly alone in
Denmark, for the death of a King, and their major psychic impact
and importance, I think, is that they protract and vastly dilate the
process of his grief.
Freud called this process the work of mourning and described it
in his essay, "Mourning and Melancholia," in a way which seems to
me exceptionally germane to this play. Almost all of Freud's ideas
can also be found in some form in the vast Renaissance literature on
melancholy, but I think Freud's discussion best suggests the
coherence they had in Shakespeare's imagination.8 The major
preoccupation of the essay is, in fact, the pathology of melancholy,
or what we would now more commonly call depression, but in the
course of his discussion Freud finds unusually suggestive analogies
and distinctions between mourning and melancholy. He points out,
to begin with, that except in one respect, the characteristics of nor-
mal grief and of pathological depression are the same, and that the
two states can easily be confused-as they are, I think, endemically,
in interpretations of Hamlet's character. "The distinguishing men-
tal features of melancholia," Freud writes,

are a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the

outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activ-
ity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that
finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culmi-
nates in a delusional expectation of punishment. This picture
becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with
one exception, the same traits are met with in grief. The fall in
self-esteem is absent in grief; but otherwise the features are the
same. Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of a loved
person, contains the same feeling of pain, loss of interest in the
outside world-in so far as it does not recall the dead one-loss of
capacity to adopt any new object of love, which would mean a
replacing of the one mourned, the same turning from every ac-
tive effort that is not connected with thoughts of the dead. It is
easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription in the ego is

22 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 the expression of an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which
leaves nothing over for other purposes or interests.

Freud remarks that "though grief involves grave departures from

the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a
morbid condition and hand the mourner over to medical treatment.
We rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be overcome, and
we look upon any interference with it as inadvisable or even
harmful."9
The process by which grief is overcome, the work of mourning,
Freud describes as a struggle-the struggle between the instinctive
human disposition to remain libidinally bound to the dead person
and the necessity to acknowledge the clear reality of his loss. "The
task," Freud writes,

is now carried through bit by bit, under great expense of time and
cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the lost ob-
ject is continued in the mind. Each single one of the memories
and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and
hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it ac-
complished. Why this process of carrying out the behest of reality
bit by bit, which is in the nature of a compromise, should be so
extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of
mental economics. It is worth noting that this pain seems natural
to us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is
completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.10

Freud's wonderment at the pain of grief must seem odd to most of

us, and I think it may be a function of his general incapacity
throughout his writing, including Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to
deal adequately with death itself. The issue is important because it
is related to an astonishing lapse in the argument of "Mourning and
Melancholia," which is critical to an understanding of Hamlet, and
which might have helped Freud himself account for the extraordi-
nary pain of grief in terms of his own conception of mental eco-
nomics. For what Freud leaves out in his consideration of mourning
is its normal but enormously disturbing component of protest and
anger-initially anger at being wounded and abandoned, but fun-
damentally a protest, both conscious and unconscious, against the
inescapably mortal condition of human life.
Freud finds such anger in abundance in depression, and with his
analysis of that state I would not presume to quarrel. The salient
points of his argument are that in depression there is "an uncon-
scious loss of a love-object, in contradistinction to mourning, in

Arthur Kirsch 23

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
which there is nothing unconscious about the loss," and that there
is a fall of self-esteem and a consistent cadence of self-reproach
which is also not found in mourning. The key to an understanding
of this condition, Freud continues, is the perception that the self-
criticism of depression is really anger turned inwards, "that the
self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have
been shifted on to the patient's own ego." The "complaints" of
depressed people, he remarks, "are really 'plaints' in the legal
sense of the word ... everything derogatory that they say of them-
selves relates at bottom to someone else. . . ." All the actions of a
depressed person, Freud concludes, "proceed from an attitude of
revolt, a mental constellation which by a certain process has be-
come transformed into melancholic contrition."'1 Freud's explana-
tion of the dynamics of this process is involved and technical, but
there are two major points which emerge clearly and which are
highly relevant to Hamlet. The first is that there is, in a depressed
person, "an identification of the ego with the abandoned object."
"The shadow of the object," he says, "falls upon the ego," so that
the ego can "henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty
like an object, like the forsaken object. In this way the loss of the
object becomes transformed into a loss in the ego. .. ."12 The sec-
ond point which Freud stresses is that because there is an ambiva-
lent relation to the lost object to begin with, the regressive move-
ment towards identification is also accompanied by a regressive
movement towards sadism, a movement whose logical culmination
is suicide, the killing in the self of the lost object with whom the
depressed person has so thoroughly identified. Freud adds that in
only one other situation in human life is the ego so overwhelmed by
the object, and that is in the state of intense love.
With these analogies and distinctions in mind, let us now return
to the opening scene at court. As I have already suggested, in his
first speech to his mother, "Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not
seems," Hamlet speaks from the very heart of grief of the super-
vening reality of his loss and of its inward wound, and I think the
accent of normal, if intense, grief remains dominant in his sub-
sequent soliloquy as well. It is true that in that soliloquy his mind
turns to thoughts of "self-slaughter," but those thoughts not-
withstanding, the emphasis of the speech is not one of self-
reproach. It is not himself, but the uses of the world which Hamlet
finds "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," and his mother's frailty
suggests a rankness and grossness in nature itself. The "plaints"

24 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
against his mother which occupy the majority of this speech are
conscious and both his anger and ambivalence towards her fully
justified. Even on the face of it, her hasty remarriage makes a mock-
ery of his father's memory that intensifies the real pain and loneli-
ness of his loss; and if he also feels his own ego threatened, and if
there is a deeper cadence of grief in his words, it is because he is
already beginning to sense that the shadow of a crime "with the
primal eldest curse upon't" (III.3.37) has fallen upon him, a crime
which is not delusional and not his, and which eventually inflicts a
punishment upon him which tries his spirit and destroys his life.
The last lines of Hamlet's soliloquy are:

It is not, nor it cannot come to good.

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.

These lines show Hamlet's prescience, not his disease, and the
instant he completes them, Horatio, Marcellus and Barnardo enter
to tell him of the apparition of his dead father, the ghost which is
haunting the kingdom and which has been a part of our own con-
sciousness from the very outset of the play.
Hamlet's subsequent meeting with the ghost of his father is, it
seems to me, both the structural and psychic nexus of the play. The
scene is so familiar to us that the extraordinary nature of its impact
on Hamlet can be overlooked, even in the theater. The whole scene
deserves quotation, but I will concentrate upon only the last part of
it. The scene begins with Hamlet expressing pity for the ghost and
the ghost insisting that he attend to a more "serious" purpose:
Ghost. List, list, 0, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love-
Ham. 0 God!
Ghost. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
(I.5.22)

The ghost then confirms to Hamlet's prophetic soul that "The ser-
pent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears his crown," and he
proceeds to describe both Gertrude's remarriage and his own mur-
der in his orchard in terms that seem deliberately to evoke echoes
of the serpent in the garden of Eden. The ghost ends his recital
saying:

0, horrible! 0, horrible! most horrible!

If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.

Arthur Kirsch 25

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 But, howsomever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind, not let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once.
The glowworm shows the matin to be near,
And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me. [Exit.]
(1.5.80)
Hamlet's answering speech, as the ghost exits, is profound, and it
predicates the state of his mind and feeling until the beginning of
the last act of the play:

o all you host of heaven! 0 earth! What else?

And shall I couple hell? 0, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
o most pernicious woman!
o villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables-meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. [Writing.]
So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word:
It is 'Adieu, adieu! Remember me'.
I have sworn't.

This is a crucial and dreadful vow for many reasons, but the most
important, as I think Freud places us in a position to understand, is
that the ghost's injunction to remember him, an injunction which
Shakespeare's commitment to the whole force of the revenge genre
never really permits either us or Hamlet to question, brutally inten-
sifies Hamlet's mourning and makes him incorporate in its work
what we would normally regard as the pathology of depression. For
as we have seen, the essence of the work of mourning is the internal
process by which the ego heals its wound, differentiates itself from
the object, and slowly, bit by bit, cuts its libidinal ties with the one
who has died. Yet this is precisely what the ghost forbids, and

26 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
forbids, moreover, with a lack of sympathy for Hamlet's grief which
is even more pronounced than the Queen's. He instead tells Ham-
let that if ever he loved his father, he should remember him; he
tells Hamlet of Gertrude's incestuous remarriage in a way which
makes her desire, if not the libido itself, seem inseparable from
murder and death; and finally he tells Hamlet to kill. Drawing upon
and crystallizing the deepest energies of the revenge play genre,
the ghost thus enjoins Hamlet to identify with him in his sorrow
and to give murderous purpose to his anger. He consciously com-
pels in Hamlet, in other words, the regressive movement towards
identification and sadism which together usually constitute the un-
conscious dynamics of depression. It is only after this scene that
Hamlet feels punished with what he later calls "a sore distraction"
(V.2.222) and that he begins to reproach himself for his own nature
and to meditate on suicide. The ghost, moreover, not only compels
this process in Hamlet, like much of the world of the play, he
incarnates it. The effect of his appearance and behest to Hamlet is
to literalize Hamlet's subsequent movement toward the realm of
death which he inhabits, and away from all of the libidinal ties
which nourish life and make it desirable, away from "all trivial fond
records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past." As C. S.
Lewis insisted long ago, the ghost leads Hamlet into a spiritual and
psychic region which seems poised between the living and the
dead.'3 It is significant that Hamlet is subsequently described in
images that suggest the ghost's countenance14 and significant too,
as we shall see later, that Hamlet's own appearance and state of
mind change, at the beginning of Act V, at the moment when it is
possible to say that he has finally come to terms with the ghost and
with his father's death and has completed the work of mourning.
I think Shakespeare intends us always to retain a sense of inten-
sified mourning rather than of disease in Hamlet, partly because
Hamlet is always conscious of the manic roles he plays and is al-
ways lucid with Horatio, but also because his thoughts and feelings
turn outward as well as inward and his behavior is finally a symbi-
otic response to the actually diseased world of the play. And though
that diseased world, poisoned at the root by a truly guilty King,
eventually represents an overwhelming tangle of guilt, its main
emphasis, both for Hamlet and for us, is the experience of grief. The
essential focus of the action as well as the source of its consistent
pulsations of feeling, the pulsations which continuously charge
both Hamlet's sorrow and his anger (and in which the whole issue

Arthutr Kirsch 27

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
of delay is subsumed) is the actuality of conscious, not unconscious
loss. For in addition to the death of his father in this play, Hamlet
suffers the loss amounting to death of all those persons, except
Horatio, whom he has most loved and who have most animated and
given meaning to his life. He loses his mother, he loses Ophelia,
and he loses his friends; and we can have no question that these
losses are real and inescapable.
The loss of his mother is the most intense and the hardest to
discuss. One should perhaps leave her to heaven as the ghost says,
but even he cannot follow that advice. As I have already suggested,
Hamlet is genuinely betrayed by her. She betrays him most di-
rectly, I think, by her lack of sympathy for him. She is clearly sexu-
ally drawn and loyal to her new husband, and she is said to live
almost by Hamlet's looks, but she is essentially inert, oblivious to
the whole realm of human experience through which her son
travels. She seems not to care, and seems particularly not to care
about his grief. Early in the play, when Claudius and others are in
hectic search of the reason for Hamlet's melancholy, she says with
bovine imperturbability, "I doubt it is no other but the main, / His
father's death and our o'erhasty marriage" (II.2.56). That o'erhasty
and incestuous marriage, of course, creates a reservoir of literally
grievous anger in Hamlet. It suggests to him the impermanence
upon which the Player King later insists,15 the impermanence of
human affection as well as of life, and it also, less obviously, com-
pels him to think of the violation of the union which gave him
his own life and being. It is very difficult, in any circumstance, to
think precisely upon our parents- and their relationship without
causing deep tremors in our selves, and for Hamlet the cir-
cumstances are extraordinary. In addition marriage itself has a sac-
ramental meaning to him which has been largely lost to modern
sensibility. Like the ghost, Hamlet always speaks reverently of the
sanctity of marital vows, and the one occasion on which he mocks
marriage is in fact an attack upon Claudius's presumption to have
replaced his father. As he is leaving for England, Hamlet addresses
Claudius and says, "Farewell, dear Mother." Claudius says, "Thy
loving father, Hamlet," and Hamlet answers, "My mother: father
and mother is man and wife; man and wife is one flesh; and so, my
mother" (IV.3.49). Behind the Scriptural image in this ferocious
attack upon Claudius, it seems to me, is both Hamlet's memory of
his father's true marriage with his mother, a memory which has an
almost pre-lapsarian resonance, and a visualization of the concupis-

28 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
cence through which his mother has defiled that sacrament and
made Claudius's guilt a part of her own being. This same adulter-
ated image of matrimony, I think, lies behind his intense re-
proaches both against himself and Ophelia in the speech in which
he urges Ophelia to go to a nunnery:
Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sin-
ners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of
such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am
very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my
beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give
them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I
do crawling between earth and heaven?
(111.1.121)

Some of Hamlet's anger against Ophelia spills over, as it does in

this speech, from his rage against his mother, but Ophelia herself
gives him cause. I don't think there is any reason to doubt her own
word, at the beginning of the play, that Hamlet has importuned her
"with love / In honourable fashion. . . And hath given countenance
to his speech ... With almost all the holy vows of heaven" (I.3.110);
and there is certainly no reason to question his own passionate
declaration at the end of the play, over her grave, that he loved her
deeply.

I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers

Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.
(V. 1.262)

Both Hamlet's grief and his task constrain him from realizing this
love, but Ophelia's own behavior clearly intensifies his frustration
and anguish. By keeping the worldly and disbelieving advice of her
brother and father as "watchman" to her "heart" (I.3.46), she denies
the heart's affection not only in Hamlet but in herself; and both
denials add immeasurably to Hamlet's sense of loneliness and
loss-and anger. Her rejection of him echoes his mother's incon-
stancy and denies him the possibility even of imagining the experi-
ence of loving and being loved by a woman at a time when he
obviously needs such love most profoundly; and her rejection of
her own heart reminds him of the evil court whose shadow, he
accurately senses, has fallen upon her and directly threatens him.
Most of Hamlet's speeches to Ophelia condense all of these feel-
ings. They are spoken from a sense of suppressed as well as re-
jected love, for the ligaments between him and Ophelia are very

Arthur Kirsch 29

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
deep in the play. It is she who first reports on his melancholy
transformation, "with a look so piteous in purport / As if he had
been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors" (II.1.82); it is she who
remains most acutely conscious of the nobility of mind and form
which has, she says, been "blasted with ecstasy" (III.1.160); and it
is she, after Hamlet has gone to England, who most painfully takes
up his role and absorbs his grief to the point of real madness and
suicide.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are less close to Hamlet's heart,
and because they are such unequivocal sponges of the King, he can
release his anger against them without any ambivalence, but at
least initially they too amplify both his and our sense of the in-
creasing emptiness of his world. We are so accustomed to treating
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as vaguely comic twins that we can
forget the great warmth with which Hamlet first welcomes them to
Denmark and the urgency and openness of his plea for the continu-
ation of their friendship. "I will not sort you with the rest of my
servants," he tells them,

for, to speak to you like an honest man, I am most dread-

fully attended. But, in the beaten way of friendship, what
make you at Elsinore?
Ros. To visit you, my lord; no other occasion.
Ham. Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I thank
you; and sure, dear friends, my thanks are too dear a half-
penny. Were you not sent for? Is it you own inclining? Is it
a free visitation? Come, come, deal justly with me. Come,
come; nay, speak.
Guil. What should we say, my lord?
Ham. Why any thing. But to th' purpose: you were sent for; and
there is a kind of confession in your looks, which your
modesties have not craft enough to colour; I know the
good King and Queen have sent for you.
Ros. To what end, my lord?
Ham. That you must teach me. But let me conjure you by the
rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of our youth,
by the obligation of our ever-preserved love, and by what
more dear a better proposer can charge you withal, be
even and direct with me, whether you were sent for or no?
(II.2.266)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of course, cannot be direct with

him, and Hamlet cuts his losses with them quite quickly and even-
tually quite savagely. But it is perhaps no accident that immediately
following this exchange, when he must be fully realizing the extent

30 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
to which, except for Horatio, he is now utterly alone in Denmark
with his grief and his task, he gives that grief a voice which includes
in its deep sadness and its sympathetic imagination a conspectus of
Renaissance thought about the human condition. "I have of late,"
he tells his former friends,

-but wherefore I know not-lost all my mirth, forgone all cus-

tom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposi-
tion that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile prom-
ontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this magestical roof fretted with golden
fire-why, it appeareth no other thing to me than a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and
moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an
angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence
of dust?
(II.2.295)

"In grief," Freud remarks in "Mourning and Melancholia," "the

world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego it-
self."16 I think it should now be evident that during most of the
action of Hamlet we cannot make this distinction. For the first four
acts of the play, the world in which Hamlet must exist and act is
characterized in all its parts not merely as diseased, but specifically
for Hamlet, as one which actually is being emptied of all the human
relationships which nourish the ego and give it purpose and vital-
ity. It is a world which is essentially defined-generically, psychi-
cally, spiritually-by a ghost whose very countenance, "more in
sorrow than in anger" (I.2.231), binds Hamlet to a course of grief
which is deeper and wider than any in our literature. It is a world of
mourning.
At the beginning of Act V, when Hamlet returns from England,
that world seems to change, and Hamlet with it. Neither the
countenance of the ghost nor his tormented and tormenting spirit
seem any longer to be present in the play, and Hamlet begins to
alter in state of mind as he already has in his dress. He stands in the
graveyard which visually epitomizes the play's preoccupation with
death, a scene which the clowns insistently associate with Adam's
sin and Hamlet himself with Cain's, and he contemplates the
"chap-fall'n" skull of the man who carried him on his back when he
was a small child. His mood, like the scene, is essentially sombre,
but though there is a suggestion by Horatio that he is still consid-

Arthur Kirsch 31

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ering death "too curiously" (V.1.200), there is no longer the sense
that he and his world are conflated in the convulsive activity of
grief. That activity seems to be drawing to a close, and his own
sense of differentiation is decisively crystallized when, in a scene
reminiscent of the one in which he reacts to the imitation of
Hecuba's grief, he responds to Laertes's enactment of a grief which
seems a parody of his own:

What is he whose grief

Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wand'ring stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers. This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
(V. 1.248)

It is an especially painful but inescapable paradox of Hamlet's

tragedy that the final ending of his grief and the liberation of his self
would be co-extensive with the apprehension of his own death.
After agreeing to the duel with Laertes that he is confident of win-
ning, he nevertheless tells Horatio, "But thou wouldst not think
how ill all's here about my heart; but it is no matter" (V.2.203); and
when Horatio urges him to postpone the duel, he says, in the fa-
mous speech which signifies, if it does not explain, the decisive
change of his spirit:

Not a whit, we defy augury: there is a special providence in the

fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come,
it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come-the readiness is
all. Since no man owes of aught he leaves, what is't to leave
betimes? Let be.
(V.2.211)

The theological import of these lines, with their luminous refer-

ence to Matthew, has long been recognized, but the particular em-
phasis upon death also suggests a psychological coordinate. For it
seems to me that what makes Hamlet's acceptance of Providence
finally intelligible and credible to us emotionally, what confirms
the truth of it to our own experience, is our sense, as well as his, that
the great anguish and struggle of his grief is over, and that he has
completed the work of mourning. He speaks to Horatio quietly,
almost serenely, with the unexultant calm which characterizes the
end of the long, inner struggle of grief. He has looked at the face of
death in his father's ghost, he has endured death and loss in all the
human beings he has loved, and he now accepts those losses as an
inevitable part of his own condition. He recognizes and accepts his

32 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
own death. "The readiness is all" suggests the crystallization of his
awareness of the larger dimension of time which has enveloped his
tragedy from the start, including the revenge drama of Fortinbras's
grievances on the outskirts of the action and that of the appalling
griefs of Polonius's family deep inside it,17 but the line also most
specifically states what is perhaps the last and most difficult task of
mourning, his own readiness to die.
The ending of Hamlet's mourning is finally mysterious in the
play, as the end of mourning usually is in actual life, but it is made
at least partially explicable by the very transfusion of energy be-
tween him and the other characters that constitutes his grief to
begin with. Early in the play he seems to absorb into himself the
whole body of the world's sorrow and protest, as later in the play he
seems to expel it. The ghost, I think, he partly exorcises and partly
incorporates. He increasingly gives expression to much of its venge-
ful anger-most definitively, perhaps, when he uses his father's
signet to hoist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on their own petar-
but at the same time he thereby eventually frees himself to inter-
nalize the "radiance" of his father's memory rather than the ghost's
shadow of it.18 His mother herself cannot really be transformed, but
he makes her feel the force of his grief even if she cannot under-
stand it, and in the closet scene at least, he succeeds in transferring
some of the pain in his own heart to hers. To Claudius he transfers a
good deal more. By means of the play within the play, including his
own interpolated lines on mutability, Hamlet at once acts out the
deep anger and sorrow of his grief and transmits the fever of their
energy to the guilty King in whose blood he thereafter rages "like
the hectic" (IV.3.66).19 But perhaps most important, not so much in
effecting Hamlet's recovery as in representing its inner dynamics
and persuading us of its authenticity, are the transformations which
Ophelia and Laertes undergo during the period Hamlet himself is
offstage on his voyage to England. Ophelia, as we have seen, drains
off Hamlet's incipient madness and suicidal imaginings into her
own "weeping brook" (IV.7.176) of grief, and she begins to do so
precisely at the moment Hamlet leaves the stage for England. She
enters "distracted" (IV.5.21), singing songs which signify not only
the consuming pain of the loss of her own father but also the self-
destructive sexual repression which has afflicted Hamlet as well as
her. At almost the same moment, Laertes enters the stage, and
while Hamlet himself later explicitly sees in Laertes's predicament
an analogue of his own, Laertes's sorrow and anger are quickly

Arthur Kirsch 33

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
corrupted; and his poisonous allegiance with the King simulta-
neously dramatizes the most destructive vengeful energies of grief
and seems to draw those energies away from Hamlet and into him-
self. This whole movement of energy between Hamlet and the
other characters suggests the symbiotic relation between the pro-
tagonist and the secondary characters in the medieval morality
drama as well as the unconscious processes of condensation and
displacement which are represented in dreams, and its result is our
profound sense at the end of the play that Hamlet's self has been
reconstituted as well as recovered. That sense is especially
perspicuous in Act V in Hamlet's own entirely conscious and
generous relation to Laertes, the double who threatens his life but
not his identity, who presents an "image" of his "cause" (V.2.77),
but never of the untainted heroic integrity of his grief.
Hamlet's generosity to Laertes at the end of the play is especially
significant, I think, because it brings to the surface the underlying
inflection of charity which makes Hamlet's whole experience of
grief so humane and so remote from the moral or psychological
pathology for which many critics, including Freud himself, indict
him. In the only mention he makes of Hamlet in "Mourning and
Melancholia," Freud remarks that the melancholiac often has ac-
cess to exceptionally deep insights and that his self-criticism can
come

very near to self-knowledge; we only wonder why a man must

become ill before he can discover truth of this kind. For there can
be no doubt that whoever holds and expresses to others such an
opinion of himself-one that Hamlet harboured of himself and
all men-that man is ill, whether he speaks the truth or is more or
less unfair to himself.20

In a footnote Freud cites as evidence of Hamlet's misanthropy and

sickness his criticism of Polonius: "Use every man after his desert,
and who shall 'scape whipping?" (II.2.524). What Freud misses, of
course, and it is to miss much, is not only that Hamlet becomes all
men in his grief, but that he does so in the image of charity which
this very line evokes. For the premise of Hamlet's statement, like
Portia's in The Merchant of Venice, is "That in the course of justice
none of us I Should see salvation," and that therefore "we do pray
for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The
deeds of mercy" (IV.1.194). Hamlet's line, to be sure, does not have
this explicit emphasis, but in its context there is no question that
the motive of his statement is to have Polonius use the players

34 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
kindly and that the ultimate burden of his thought is, like Portia's,
the verse, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who tres-
pass against us." If the great anger and sorrow of Hamlet's grief
make his own experience of these trespasses tragically acute and
painful, the same combination of feelings eventually expands his
capacity to understand, if not forgive, them.
I think this generosity and integrity of grief lie close to the heart
both of Hamlet's mystery and the play's. Hamlet is an immensely
complicated tragedy, and anything one says about it leaves one
haunted by what has not been said. But precisely in a play whose
suggestiveness has no end, it seems to me especially important to
remember what actually happens. Hamlet himself is sometimes
most preoccupied with delay, and with the whole attendant
metaphysical issue of the relation between thought and action, but
as his own experience shows, there is finally no action that can be
commensurate with his grief, not even the killing of a guilty King,
and it is Hamlet's experience of grief, and his recovery from it, to
which we ourselves respond most deeply. He is a young man who
comes home from his university to find his father dead and his
mother remarried to his father's murderer. Subsequently the
woman he loves rejects him, he is betrayed by his friends, and
finally and most painfully, he is betrayed by a mother whose muta-
bility seems to strike at the heart of human affection. In the midst of
these waves of losses, which seem themselves to correspond to the
spasms of grief, he is visited by the ghost of his father, who places
upon him a proof of love and a task of vengeance which he cannot
refuse without denying his own being. The ghost draws upon the
emotional taproot of the revenge play genre and dilates the natural
sorrow and anger of Hamlet's multiple griefs until they include all
human frailty in their protest and sympathy and touch upon the
deepest synapses of grief in our own lives, not only for those who
have died, but for those, like ourselves, who are still alive.

University of Virginia

FOOTNOTES

1 All references to Shakespeare's texts are to Peter Alexander's edition (London,

1951).
2 Cited in Alan S. Downer, The British Drama (New York, 1950), p. 78.
3 I assume throughout this argument that Shakespeare essentially accepts and
draws nourishment from the conventions of the revenge drama and that the ghost
represents Hamlet's tragic predicament rather than a moral issue. Shakespeare
clearly sophisticates Kyd's conception by conflating the ghost of Andrea and the

Arthur Kirsch 35

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
figure of Revenge and by bringing the ghost directly into the world of the play and
into Hamlet's consciousness; but there is never any question, either by Hamlet or by
us, that Hamlet must eventually obey the ghost's injunction to take revenge. In later
dramas like The Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, the ghosts
themselves remind the heroes that revenge belongs to God, but it is hardly an
accident that those plays are neither tragic nor particularly compelling. The whole
issue of the ethos of revenge in Hamlet is discussed quite decisively, it seems to me,
by Helen Gardner in The Business of Criticism (Oxford, 1959), pp. 35-51.
4 Ed. Van Fossen (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1964), III.2.13.
5 Ed. Caimcross (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1967), IV.5.1.
6 Caimcross, 111.2.1.
7 The definition of incest between a man and his brother's wife in the Elizabethan
period was essentially a legal one-the relationship was prohibited by canon and
civil law-but Claudius's actual murder of his brother suggests the deeper psychic
implications of incest as well.
8 For the most illuminating recent discussion of the literary treatment of melan-
choly in Renaissance England, see Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy
(New York, 1971). Lyons's analysis of Hamlet's melancholy (pp. 77-112) is especially
rich, and I found it suggestive for my own argument, though my emphasis and
method are different from hers. The relevance of modern psychoanalytic ideas of
mourning to Hamlet is touched upon by Paul A. Jorgenson, "Hamlet's Therapy,"
HLQ, 27 (1964), 239-58, and is discussed in more depth, though in ways that quickly
become remote from the play, by Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation
of Desire in Hamlet," Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), 11-52.
9 Translated by Joan Riviere, in Freud: General Psychological Theory, ed.
Philip Reiff (New York, 1963), p. 165. Riviere's translation is more eloquent, I think,
than that of the Standard Edition, trans. and ed. James Strachey, XIV (London,
1957), 243-58.
10 Riviere's translation, p. 166.
11 Riviere's translation, pp. 166, 169-70.
12 Riviere's translation, p. 170.
13 "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem," Proceedings of the British Academy, 28
(1942), 138-54.
14 See Lyons, p. 81.
15 What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy.
Where joy most revels grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye....
(III.2.189)
16 Riviere's translation, p. 167.
17 See Northrop Frye, Fools of Time (Toronto, 1967), pp. 38-39.
18 I borrow this formulation, which describes a reversal of the process of identifi-
cation in depression, from Karl Abraham, who does not himself apply it to Hamlet. In
common with many more recent psychoanalytic writers, Abraham argues that an
essential part of the resolution of grief consists of an unambivalent and beneficent
introjection of the loved person into the mourner's own psyche to compensate for the
continuing, conscious sense of loss. See his Selected Papers, ed. Ernest Jones (Lon-
don, 1949), pp. 442 and 438.
19 The therapeutic value of this kind of aggressive transference was accentuated
and made quite explicit by Marston in The Malcontent; see Lyons, pp. 96-97.
20 Riviere's translation, pp. 167-68.

36 Hamlet's Grief

This content downloaded from

138.44.13.206 on Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:14:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms