Shakespeare- The Humorous Grave
Uploaded by Brainy81 on Dec 06, 2021
The Humorous Grave
Shakespeare, throughout his many works, has often used a fool in his work to give comic relief to an otherwise intense situation; examples of this would include the Porter in Macbeth as well as the Jester in King Lear (Clark). Hamlet is no exception to this unwritten rule, as the first gravedigger is the fools whose scene brings about levity to an otherwise tragic situation (Ramadhana). The gravediggers’ scene, Act V Scene I, plays an instrumental role in Hamlet, as it is a two-fold scene showing not only surface humor but also deep philosophy through the first gravedigger himself whose character is a comedian and a philosopher of future death in the play (Duggan).
The gravediggers begin the scene by allowing the audience to see how common death is in the lives of these two characters, and to begin the scene with comedy to lighten a very dark mood as immediately prior to this scene Ophelia drowned herself (Davidson). Suicide would have been a reason for Ophelia to not receive a Christian burial within the church thus separating her from the deaths of other people and from her own family as she could not be buried in the church graveyard if she committed suicide. The thing that separates the occurrence of death from one person to another in this play is not if each person dies but how each person dies as exemplified in the conversation between the two gravediggers here, “Gravedigger: Is she to be buried in Christian burial, when she willfully seeks her own salvation? Other: I tell thee she is. Therefore make her grave straight…Gravedigger: How can that be unless she drowned herself in her own defense? …Give me leave. Here lies the water; good. Here stands the man; good. If the man go to this water and drown himself, is it…he goes…But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself” (Shakespeare 239). The audience is well aware that water cannot get up and drown a man on its own, but the humor and casualness with which the gravedigger speaks regarding Ophelia’s death shows the reader that death is an everyday occurrence and has become a point of comedy in the lives of the gravediggers (Davidson). This scene serves to show that the first gravedigger serves as comic relief in this heavy tragedy of Ophelia’s death, as the audience imagines the...