Initial reaction:
A particular story comes to mind when Hamlet talks about the skulls and wondering about the occupation and how ironic if one skull would've belonged to a land owner. My brother told me this story of a man who came across new land and the indians told him he can keep as much land as he can walk on. So the man walked for weeks to get his piece of land and unknowingly stopped eating and sleeping. In short, the man ends up dead from trying so hard to obtain this land. The ironic part of the story is that through all the land the man wanted, the only land the man truly needed was a place to bury his body.
Character analysis:
The character the grave digger is a man who buries a hole for Ophilia’s grave. He is also a man who has met Hamlets’ whits as well as his cunning ways in the play bringing a sort of pleasurable and amusing interaction between both characters. The Grave digger is not a main character but is a supporting character Shakespeare uses to bring out the theme of death once more in the play however, this time Shakespere brings out the humorous part of death. The grave digger does this to contrast what we believe death to be a dark thing as something comical this gives a lightheartedness on the play by jokingly talking about the iorony of digging a Christian’s grave who has commited suicide. This is a good contrast to what the reader has been reading latley about suicide and death.
Theme analysis:
In the play “Hamlet,”Shakespeare uses character in order to reveal the irony of death with all humans.
For instance when Hamlet sees the second skull, being thrown out onto the ground in the grave site that Ophilia will become buried in, he questions the occupation of the skull the person once was and finds the irony in their position: “why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?...Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock about the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell him of action of battery.”( 5.1 90-94) Here Shakespere questions the skull of a once powerful lawyer now dead with his skeleton left behind, is now powerless. Showing us that after death we are fragile and we are no longer anything.
Again Hamlet makes another ironic comment on death of the human “ This fellow might be n’s time great buyer of land with his statues his recongnizances..The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box, and must inheritor himself no more.” (Act 5 95-103) What is being said here is that the irony of another man’s position in death the skull could’ve had been a man who was a land owner and in the end the man has gained nothing, and ironically the only land he has in the end is the land to bury his body with. Once again Shakespeare shows us the irony of death that when we exit out of this world we have nothing.
Moreover Shakespeare uses the dead human body being no longer anything as Shakespeare makes the grave digger say that the person whom he is digging the body for is niether a man nor woman but was once a woman showing that we are nothing after we die. Also they use Alexander the great who is very infamous warrior looks the same as the old jester that played with Hamlet they both died and are reduced to nothingness in the end and no matter how great or small the person was, they all die the same and become equal. Shakespeare shows this when he makes Hamlet question if Alexander the Great looked like the jester Yorick when he we buried and by Horatio agreeing that they look and smell the same.
