Hamlet act 5: the rest is... well, you know...

5.1

Gravediggers. The use of clowning grave diggers is such a perfect pinnacle of the jokes/questions regarding death present throughout this play. As they argue about the nature of Ophelia's death and if she's getting special treatment for being a noble. there are a great number of very smart jokes. in fact in many texts they are referred to in the speech prefix not as gravediggers but as clowns. Hamlet comes in to discover the gravediggers singing as they dig a grave and marvels at their lightness considering their work. As if to yes and Hamlet's wonder, the gravedigger then tosses around a skull. Hamlet responds with:

That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once:

AHA! i have found a line which I am going to use on Dan tonight (much of his humor, like the gravedigger's, has a lot to do with technicalities/equivocation):

we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. 

We eventually find out that the skull Hamlet is holding belongs to Yorick. And why am I inclined immediately to like Yorick?:

A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! a' poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.

You'd think I'd be suspect of a guy who would waste whine, but there's something undeniably funny about that image. and who doesn't like a fellow of infinite jest?

 Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

again, so glad to be reading this play during lent, what better way to meditate on "remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return"

The royals enter shortly after this with Ophelia's body. Laertes again kills me with his asking for more church rites for his sister that the priest cannot grant him. Hamlet starts to put the pieces together. If laertes hadn't become so dear to me by this part in the play I would think the stage directions re: both he and hamlet jumping into the grave would be a moment of absurd comedy, but in performance it never occurs to me as anything but horrible and sad. Then Hamlet says the thing that makes me want to hate him the rest of the show:

I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.

No wonder Claudius has to hold Laertes back because i would want to strangle Hamlet for that. or at the least scream: you DICK. if you loved her so much you should have married her. maybe stuck around to look after her once her father died. taken her away with you on your escape. SOMETHING instead of your selfish stupid antics. Unless of course we have a Laertes that really is just a hot head our for revenge, but that choice seems painfully lame to me...

5.2

It is hard to believe with everything that happens in this last scene that it is truly just one scene. (then again, love's labours takes the cake for that...) anyway the scene starts with Hamlet telling Horatio about his journey to england/pirate times. the line that caught me was thsi:

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting,
That would not let me sleep

insomnia insomnia insomnia.

Hamlet admits to setting R&G up for being killed and that they deserve this for their false friendship. (My classmate, Christine Schmidle did beautiful work talking about German Hamlet/the way the whole pirate times went down in that adaptation/translation, etc. He then redeems himself a bit by saying:

But I am very sorry, good Horatio,
That to Laertes I forgot myself;
For, by the image of my cause, I see
The portraiture of his: I'll court his favours.
But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me
Into a towering passion.

Bravo Hamlet. By admitting you were a jerk out of jealousy I am now back on your side... though have not completely forgotten how extreme you were.

Osric comes and provides some much needed comic relief thanks to his flamboyance/ over the top sycophant tendencies.

Osric presents the challenge from Laertes and Hamlet accepts. Horatio tells him not to feel pressured into accepting and Hamlet replies with my favorite speech (did I say another one was? If so I was wrong. this is my favorite. in the whole play.) It's not even necessarily a "speech" it is quite short compared to the soliloquies, but it is... well read for yourself:

Not a whit, we defy augury: there's 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 has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

forget the other line i said I wanted inked on my body, if I was getting a tattoo it would read either There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow or the readiness is all. some people mutter the alcoholics anonymous prayer to help with anxiety- the whole serenity to accept the things i cannot change etc. etc. I mutter that passage. Well, that, and the phrase "what is all this in light of eternity" but I think the two go together, don't you?

After this...everyone dies.

I know that's grossly simplifying but seriously... the body count in this scene... I will always think of my friend meaghan reading this and asking incredulously what's next? is hamlet gunna die? right before he does of course... poor horatio is left to tell the story. if you're lucky. after all he tells the dying Hamlet:

I am more an antique Roman than a Dane:
Here's yet some liquor left.

It is seriously so perfect to read this right after Julius Caesar! anyway, it could be that horatia doesnt listen to his friend, that's a choice. but it seems the much harder choice to go forward without his friend and try to fulfill his dying wish.

Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

and the end of the play answer's Erika's knock knock question posed in act 1: who's there? who's going to rule? Fortinbras. Not a philosopher king but a warrior. 

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

the end. I mean, unless you've cut fortinbras out of your production... then the end was the rest is silence or O, O O or Horatio's line. 

a final slings and arrows clip:

And now we move onto a comedy. Perhaps my favorite comedy. Much Ado About Nothing. (And we continue on the comedy train after that with As You Like It! Perfect timing on that one since sweet lovers love the spring and that season has certainly sprung here in Phoenix!)