Name: Vipul Singh Instructors Name: Mrs. Alka Singh Course Name: B.A. LLB. (hons.

), 2nd semester Roll No. 155 Date:8th April,2012 Title: A research paper on The Grave Digger Scene of Hamlet

Why this scene of hamlet? (1) It intensifies the effect of tragedy. In this sense, the effect is paradoxical. Its humour provides a catastrophe that is to follow. It is the calm before the storm. Simultaneously, the eerie atmosphere of the play adds to the aura of the tragedy. (2) The scene would definitely get a laugh from the uneducated groundlings who would enjoy a relief to the long and tension-prevailing play. (3) Shakespeare was not only a composer but was an actor and shareholder in the Company and the Globe. So what was to happen to the comedians, the actors of his company who played the lighter comic parts when a play such as Hamlet or Macbeth was o the board? They could not be left without some small share in the proceedings, and this accounts for the grave-digger's scene.

A source of comic relief At the outset, we visualize two clowns conversing regarding the imminent burial of a lady whose death has taken place, as per them , under doubtful circumstances. They debate whether or not whether she deserves a proper burial in the course of the same remains indifferent on the matter. In the course they use ironical words like' salvation' when he means 'damnation' and uses the word'se offendendo' instead of 'se defendedo'. The amusement is provided by Shakespearean irony and the grave diggers' illiteracy and ignorance. Humorously, the grave digger is also addressed as Goodman Dever. We also witness a parody of a contemporary case concerned with the death of James Hales. Shakespeare parodies the same when he says that the act has three branches-to act, to do and to perform. The grave-digger then assumes that the lady in question committed suicide. It brings us to the burning question whether Ophelia committed suicide or not.

Ques.What is the plot of the scene? From what point of view the scene was written? Was the scene trying to give information, to explain something technical to convince the reader of a beliefs validity by dramatizing it in action?
The last time we saw Hamlet he was saying, "O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth! (4.4.65-66). Since then Ophelia has died, the King and Laertes have plotted Hamlet's death, and Hamlet has sent letters to the King announcing his sudden return to Denmark. Given all this build-up, we could expect climatic confrontation between Hamlet and the King. Instead, we get gravediggers. In a scene that adds nothing to the plot, but offers generous helpings of comedy and philosophy, the gravediggers are clowns. In Shakespeare's plays a "clown" doesn't have a red nose and floppy shoes, but he is funny. He's a hick, an ignoramus, a fool who thinks he's wise. These clowns

discuss the most profound issues in their clownish way, starting with the opening line of the scene, "Is she to be buried in Christian burial that willfully seeks her own salvation?" (5.1.12). It's a laugh line. Instead of "salvation," he should have said "destruction." The Second Clown's reply is also a laugh line. He says "the crowner hath sat on her, and finds it Christian burial" (5.1.4-5). First of all, instead of "coroner," the clown says "crowner," which did mean "coroner" a hundred years before. This suggests that the clown thinks of the coroner as a guy who hands out crowns, like a judge at an archery contest. Second, a coroner, like a judge or jury, "sits," but he sits in judgment, not on the corpse. By this time, it must have occurred to us that these two clowns are digging Ophelia's grave. It's been less than two minutes since we heard the beautifully elegiac description of Ophelia's death, and now the gravediggers are busily at work, digging, and trying to figure out whether or not Ophelia committed suicide. First Clown offers the idea that it wasn't suicide if she drowned herself in self-defense. As though proving his point, he offers a fragment of fractured Latin: "It must be "se offendendo "; it cannot be else" (5.1.9). If the clown knew what he was talking about, he would have said "se defendendo," but his blunder is no more absurd than his idea. To kill someone is "se offendendo," an offense, unless it is "se defendendo," in self-defense, but how do you defend yourself against an offense committed by yourself in defense of yourself? If the actors playing the clowns are any good, we're laughing. Are we supposed to think while we're laughing? Because if we think about the clowns' absurdities, we might realize that when we're not laughing, their absurdities are not so absurd. In fact, we think that the most common reason for suicide is that people "can't stand it anymore." They commit suicide because they are in unremitting pain, physical or psychological. So they docommit suicide in self-defense. Hamlet said so much when he asked why anyone would put up with the insults of life, "When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin? (3.1.75-76). The clowns then reflect that if Ophelia had not been a gentlewoman she would not have had a Christian burial, and this leads First Clown to assert that the first gentlemen were "gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers" (5.1.30).His clownish reasoning is that they "bore arms." To "bear arms" is the sign of a gentleman, and it means that you have an officially registered coat of arms, such as Shakespeare got for his family when he had enough money. But the clown's idea is that

all the diggers--"gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers"--must have had arms, or they couldn't have done any digging. First Clown then follows this up with another joke, a riddle that asks "What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?" (5.1.41-42). Before the gravedigger answers his own riddle, Hamlet and Horatio enter and observe him. As they watch, the gravedigger triumphantly gives his answer: it is the "gravemaker" that builds strongest of all, because "the houses that he makes last till doomsday" (5.1.59). Then he sends his partner away for some liquor, and continues to dig. As he digs, he sings a song about how love was sweet when he was young, but now that he is old, everything has changed. Hamlet asks Horatio, "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making? (5.1.65-66). Horatio sensibly replies that the gravedigger has gotten used to it. Up to this point in the play, Hamlet has been unable to get used to the idea of his father's death, but in the following moments of the scene, Hamlet seems to adopt the gravedigger's viewpoint. Nowadays, it's illegal to commingle human remains, but Shakespeare's day made more economical use of graveyard space, so as the gravedigger digs, he shovels up a skull. Hamlet comments, "That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once" (5.1.75). This comment is the first of many that Hamlet makes in the same vein. He mockingly speculates that the skull could have belonged to a politician who thought he could outsmart God, or to a courtier, who thought he could flatter a man out of a horse. Now there's just the skull, being knocked around by the gravedigger's spade. Hamlet says, "Here's fine revolution, and we had the trick to see't" (5.1.9091). "Revolution" means "change," "and" means "if," and "trick" means "knack" or "ability." So Hamlet is saying that this change from life to death a good thing to keep in mind, if only we could keep it in mind. Meanwhile, the gravedigger shovels up another skull, and sings a morbidly jolly gravedigging song, about a "pickaxe," a "spade," and a "pit of clay" (5.1.96). Hamlet speculates that the second skull could have belonged to a lawyer, and he makes a series of punning comments about lawyers. (Have lawyers ever gotten any respect?) The general point of the jokes is that no matter how many legal documents you have, your whole estate will eventually be just six feet of dirt.

Then Hamlet decides--for no apparent reason other than just because--that he will speak to the gravedigger. He steps forward, asks the gravedigger whose grave it is, and meets his match in mockery. The gravedigger's answer to Hamlet's question is "Mine, sir" (5.1.119). This begins a quickwitted exchange between Hamlet and the clown, and the clown has the punchline. In answer to Hamlet's questions, the clown claims that the grave is not for a man, and not for a woman, either; when Hamlet finally asks who is to be buried in the grave, the clown answers: "One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul, she's dead" (5.1.135-136). So Hamlet never does learn that this is Ophelia's grave, and we're laughing at the way the gravedigger mocks death. Next, Hamlet asks the gravedigger how long he's been on the job. The clown replies that he started the day that King Hamlet defeated King Fortinbras, which was the same day that Hamlet was born. He adds that the Hamlet he's talking about is the one who has gone mad and been sent to England. In England, he'll either "recover his wits," or not. If not, it won't matter, because everyone in England is mad. Hamlet then asks how Hamlet went mad, and the gravedigger gives him a nonsense answer, "e'en with losing his wits." Hamlet asks again, saying "upon what ground?" "Ground" means "cause," but the gravedigger turns the question away with a pun, saying, "Why, here in Denmark: I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years" (5.1.161162). (Thus, amidst the jokes, we learn that Hamlet is thirty years old. However, it's hard to see why this information is offered, and in such a roundabout, casual way. Shakespeare doesn't specify ages very often, and when he does so in other plays, it's easy to see why. Juliet's youth is an important element in her character, and Lear's age is equally important to his story. But thirty is neither very young nor very old, and if the fact that Hamlet is thirty is important, why weren't we told earlier?) Hamlet's next question is "How long will a man lie i' the earth ere he rot?" (5.1.163). Finally, one of his questions receives a straight answer: eight or nine years. Unless the man is rotten before he dies. On the other hand, a leather tanner will last longer, because then he'll be tanned himself, and keep out the water. And speaking of lying in the earth here's a skull, says the gravedigger,

that's been in the grave for twenty-three years. At this moment, this meandering conversation suddenly takes a poignant turn. The skull is Yorick's. "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy" (5.1.185-186),says Hamlet. Yorick was his father's jester, a man with the knack of making people laugh, a man who had given Hamlet, then a child of six or seven, a "thousand" piggy-back rides. This precious memory collides with the skull in Hamlet's hand, and he feels his throat tighten. He says, "my gorge rises at it" (5.1.188), but instead of crying, he starts bantering with Yorick's skull. He asks Yorick where his "flashes of merriment" are, and accuses him of being "quite chop-fallen" (5.1.193). Your chops are your lower cheeks, your jaw, and if you are "chop-fallen," you have a long face because you're sad. Yorick the jester isn't jesting now. He's chop-fallen. In fact, his chops have fallen completely off. In short, Hamlet has just made a terrible pun at Yorick's expense. Hamlet tells Yorick's skull to go to a fine woman's dressing room and tell her that no matter how much make-up she uses, she'll be only a skull soon enough. Then he asks Horatio if Alexander the Great, after he was dead, looked like this skull. Horatio says that he must have, and Hamlet dismisses the skull, saying, "And smelt so? pah!" (5.1.200). At this point the editorial stage directions usually say that Hamlet "puts down the skull," but the "pah" makes it feel like he just tosses it aside. But he doesn't forget it. Yorick's skull has reminded him that we must all come to this, and he launches into a flight of fancy about how the clay of Alexander or great Caesar could be used as a cork for a beer-barrel or caulk to fix a hole in a wall. As Hamlet ruminating on the future uses of human dust, another corpse comes onto the scene. Hamlet sees a funeral procession conducted with"maimed rites" (5.1.219). The impression of "maimed rites" is nearly impossible to reproduce on the modern stage. That is, we have rich funerals and poor ones, but not different procedures that indicate who the deceased was and how he/she died. Because we lack these customs, we cannot see what Hamlet (and Shakespeare's audience) does. Luckily, Hamlet explains the significance of what he sees. The deceased was "of some estate," of the upper class, but not royal. And the deceased was a suicide. Hamlet and Horatio step out of sight--though not out of the audience's sight--to watch. Presumably, they would want to know why a suicide is being buried in sanctified ground.

In the funeral procession, the first person we hear is Laertes, asking the priest"What ceremony else? (5.1.223). Hamlet recognizes him, and points him out to Horatio as "a very noble youth." In a few minutes, Hamlet's opinion will change drastically. Laertes is angry that Ophelia's rites are "maimed," and wants more to be done for his sister. The priest doesn't answer, Laertes repeats the question, and we find that the priest isn't too happy either. He says that Ophelia's death was "doubtful," and "but that great command o'ersways the order, / She should in ground unsanctified have lodged" (5.1.228-229). That is, if he had had his way, the regular procedure ("order") for a suicide would have been followed, and Ophelia would have been buried in unsanctified ground, and rocks thrown on her grave. But, because of a "great command" (presumably the King's), Ophelia has flowers. She has her "virgin crants" (a garland), and flowers to be scattered over her corpse, her "maiden strewments" (5.1.233).Laertes asks again if nothing more is to be done, and the priest replies that to do more would be an insult to "peace-parted" souls. This makes Laertes very angry. He declares that violets will grow from Ophelia's grave, while the priest can go to hell. He says, "I tell thee, churlish priest, / A ministering angel shall my sister be, / When thou liest howling" (5.1.240-242). Only now does Hamlet realize whose grave this is. Meanwhile, Ophelia's corpse has been lowered into the grave, and the Queen steps forward to strew flowers, saying "Sweets to the sweet: farewell! / I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife" (5.1.243-244). This is certainly not what Laertes wants to hear, and he curses Hamlet, then leaps into Ophelia's grave, saying"Hold off the earth awhile, / Till I have caught her once more in mine arms" (5.1.249250). With Ophelia's body in his arms he asks that the earth be piled on the both of them until a mountain covers the "quick and the dead." Laertes' actions and words enrage Hamlet, and he rushes out from his hiding-place to leap into the grave, too. The fact that Laertes has just cursed him doesn't seem to matter to Hamlet. What matters, as he explains to Horatio in the next scene, is that "the bravery of his grief did put me / Into a towering passion" (5.2.79-80). "Bravery" means "showiness." Hamlet doesn't accuse Laertes of outright hypocrisy, but of being melodramatic. Of course, Hamlet is almost certainly right about Laertes. If Hamlet hadn't rushed out to join Laertes in the grave, it doesn't seem likely

that Laertes would have actually stayed in there while the gravedigger shoveled dirt onto him. Still, why should it matter so much to Hamlet? Hamlet's first words melodramatically mock Laertes' melodramatic grief:"What is he whose grief / Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow / Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand / Like wonder-wounded hearers?" (5.1.254-257). Once Hamlet is in the grave, Laertes grapples with him, but apparently not with deadly intent, because Hamlet takes four lines to tell him to get his fingers off his throat. Horatio and others intervene to separate the two, and they come out of the grave. (Just how grotesque have these few moments been? There are at least four feet in that grave with Ophelia's body. Does she get stepped on?) Hamlet declares that he loved Ophelia, saying, "Forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / Make up my sum" (5.1.269-271).He then asks Laertes what he'll do for Ophelia. Will he fight? Starve himself? Eat a crocodile? If Laertes will do it, Hamlet will too. The motivation for this furious mockery now seems to be that Laertes' grief is an affront to Hamlet's, as though Laertes were putting on a show of grief in order to demonstrate that Hamlet has no grief for Ophelia. Hamlet says to Laertes, "Dost thou come here to whine? To outface me with leaping in her grave?" (5.2.277-278). And just before he exits, Hamlet asks Laertes, perhaps without mockery, "Hear you, sir; / What is the reason that you use me thus? / I loved you ever" (5.1.288-290). The notion that Laertes is trying to outdo Hamlet in grief seems highly illogical, but perhaps it indicates that Hamlet has doubts or guilt about the depth of his feeling for Ophelia. Both the King and Queen try to calm Laertes by saying that Hamlet is mad, but as soon as Hamlet is gone, the King takes the opportunity to reassure Laertes that they will soon put their plot against Hamlet into motion. Thus, as far as the plot of the play is concerned, the only thing that happens in the whole scene is that the threat to Hamlet's life is intensified. It seems that a major purpose of the scene must be to show the development of Hamlet's character. But development in what direction? He banters about death with the gravedigger, with Yorick's skull, and with Horatio, then flashes into anger at Laertes' grief over Ophelia. And there's no soliloquy to explain it all.

Ques. What is the significance of the scene?

The Significance of the Grave-diggers Scene in Hamlet WHY this scene? (1) It intensifies the effect of tragedy. In this sense, the effect is paradoxical. Its humour provides a catastrophe that is to follow. It is the calm before the storm. Simultaneously, the eerie atmosphere of the play adds to the aura of the tragedy. (2) The scene would definitely get a laugh from the uneducated groundlings who would enjoy a relief to the long and tension-prevailing play. (3) Shakespeare was not only a composer but was an actor and shareholder in the Company and the Globe. So what was to happen to the comedians, the actors of his company who played the lighter comic parts when a play such as Hamlet or Macbeth was o the board? They could not be left without some small share in the proceedings, and this accounts for the grave-diggers scene. A Source Of Comic Relief At the outset, we visualize two clowns conversing regarding the imminent burial of a lady whose death has taken place, as per them , under doubtful circumstances. They debate whether or not whether she deserves a proper burial in the course of the same remains indifferent on the matter. In the course they use ironical words like salvation when he means damnation and uses the wordse offendendo instead of se defendedo. The amusement is provided by Shakespearean irony and the grave diggers illiteracy and ignorance. Humorously, the grave digger is also addressed as Goodman Dever. We also witness a parody of a contemporary case concerned with the death of James Hales. Shakespeare parodies the same when he says that the act has three branches-to act, to do and to perform. The grave-digger then assumes that the lady in question committed suicide. It brings us to the burning question whether Ophelia committed suicide or not.

Ques. What is the genre or the general field of the scene and how does the scene fits into it?
Death is tragic, painful, somber, grotesque. But who ever knew that death could even be laughed at. In William Shakespeare tragedy Hamlet; grave diggers scene is one place where seriousness, intermingles with the comic element...and the end product? One of the greatest works of literature is born.

The occasional admission of comic ingredient in a tragedy to make it light, humorous is one of the most interesting forms of tragedy. This intrusion of the comic into the tragic mode is called comic relief. Though Aristotle in his Poetics does not make allowance for the dilution series action, English drama fortunately is replete with instances to show how comedy and tragedy occurred frequently in mystery, miracle and morality plays.

Conclusion:
No surprise, this final Act of Hamlet is as mysterious, ambiguous, and controversial as those that precede it. The play begins rather straightforwardly, if ironically, as a revenge tragedy Old Hamlets ghost spurs his son to revenge and it would seem that Act Five, like the Act Fives of all major revenge tragedies preceding Hamlet, should fulfill this initial plotline. Indeed, in Act Five Hamlet kills Claudius finally. But he does so in such a roundabout, half-cocked, off-hand way, we wonder whether this really counts as revenge. The death of Claudius certainly lacks the poetic justice that vengeance seems to require. What on earth is Shakespeare trying to do with this strange play why doesnt he give it a proper ending? Many of the earliest extant critics of the play, those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, found the strange and abrupt manner of Hamlets revenge to be as puzzling as we might. These critics often found fault with the plays lack of moral meaning. After all, if Claudius was wrong to kill his brother and marry his brothers wife (and surely he was), shouldnt the lethal correction of these crimes feel more satisfying, more right, than it does in this play? Samuel Johnson, writing in 1765, voices critical dissatisfaction quite clearly: The poet is accused of having shown little regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability. The apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it; and the gratification which would arise from the destruction of an usurper and a murderer, is abated by the untimely death of Ophelia. In other words, Johnson charges that the ending of Hamlet is both unjust and improbable. The earlier part of the play, including the role of the ghost in giving the death of Claudius a moral shape, seems to have been forgotten. Hamlet seems to bring the drama to a close almost accidentally, and Johnson accuses Shakespeare on these grounds of dramatic clumsiness and moral ineptitude.

Later critics have been much less quick to fault Shakespeares dramatic instincts. Indeed, some of them have found the ending of Hamlet to signal a shift to a higher, more self-aware theater, a purposeful rejection of the simple morality of revenge in favor of a richer, deeper investigation of the nature of performance itself. The critic Harold Bloom, for instance, has written at length about Act Five as Hamlets rejection of his own dramatic role. He seems to have grown bored with his own play, in other words, and shrugs off its generic requirements. Bloom writes: Any Fortinbras or Laertes could chop Claudius down; Hamlet knows he deserves the prime role in a cosmological drama, which Shakespeare was not quite ready to compose. In this view, Hamlets final Act transcends the play itself. The plot, the action, has only been an occasion for Hamlets own tremendously powerful self-exploration, and the culmination of the requirements of "revenge tragedy" appropriately occurs almost despite the play itself. Shakespeares abandonment of the central focus on revenge, then, perhaps amounts to his finally agreeing with his protagonist, so to speak. Hamlet has been, from the very first moments of the play, reluctant to carry out the absurd and generic task that is his as a character in a revenge tragedy The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right! Shakespeare has purposefully miscast his hero and given us a character whose accomplishments are intellectual and verbal, not violent and physical. By the final Act, it seems as though the playwright has finally given up trying to tie his hero down to conventions. Hamlet has forced Hamlet off the rails, taken it from a simple and predictable genre play to something inscrutable, massively significant, and, for lack of a better term, post-theatrical. Meanwhile, in between the two major events of Act Five (the burial of Ophelia and the duel between Hamlet and Laertes), Shakespeare includes several very famous setpieces. The range of Hamlets verbal and philosophical variety becomes clear as he goes from trading macabre jokes with the gravedigger, to his moving rumination on the dead court jester, Yorick, to his declaration of love for Ophelia and his attendant mockery of Laertes over-the-top mourning display, to a scathing parody of Osrics ludicrous courtly mannerisms. As noted before, Hamlets mind seems to work as an intense magnifying glass of sorts. He looks at one subject say, the gravediggers macabre humor and scrutinizes it to exhaustion before turning to another say, the nature of mortality as occasioned by the discovery of Yoricks skull and treating it with a

similar thoroughness. The variety of his curiosity is matched by depth of penetration. He is both wide-ranging and profound truly a Renaissance mind. In this final Act, Hamlet seems no longer to curse this tendency of his to become distracted by thought in favor of action, as he does for instance in his soliloquies on Hecuba and on Fortinbras army, but to celebrate it. He says to Horatio, for instance, when his friend seems concerned that he is walking into the trap set by Claudius and Laertes, [W]e defy augury. [...] 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. Hamlet rejects augury that is, he rejects any predictive phenomena, or any futureoriented thinking at all. In a way, he rejects the ghosts order to fulfill a set goal. (By the way, we might ask what Hamlet means by it in the above sentence. Does it refer to his plan to kill Claudius? If I will kill him now, so be it. Does it rather refer to death itself? If I am to die now, so be it. Or is it a placeholder for anything, any event?) At any rate, Hamlet has achieved a point of philosophical quietus, an acceptance of the world with all of its flaws and absurdities, which he has made not with a bare bodkin but with his own mental powers. His gaze is focused on some spiritual realm beyond the pettiness of Danish political intrigue. Of the four deaths that occur in the final scene of the play, only one Hamlets is planned. The other three are, if not senseless, at least spontaneous and chaotic. The entire gory episode seems to be a playing-out of Hamlets new understanding of the world death strikes randomly, senselessly, absurdly. The only meaning that matters must be made out of apparent meaninglessness. Hamlets dying words, in fact, are a plea to his friend, Horatio, to help the court audience sort out the carnage that they have seen: [I]n this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story. Hamlet emphasizes that significance comes only in retrospect, with storytelling, with sense making, not in prospective action. His death thus demonstrates the value of introspection over action, and the triumph of thought over fate, against the uncertainty and confusion of death. With the arrival of Fortinbras, the tone shifts dramatically in the other direction. Fortinbras, whose own barely-limned plot is extremely similar to Hamlet's (his identically-named father dead, his rise in Norway impeded by his uncle, etc.), in nonetheless Hamlet's opposite. He is a man of action, a man like Laertes, or Old Hamlet. As Hamlet predicts, he hardly wastes a

moment in declaring his intention to take the throne of Denmark for his own. And, as a final irony, Fortinbras misunderstands the dead prince, and gives him a soldiers funeral. Though we know very little of him, it seems that Fortinbras is the anti-Hamlet a man who can only understand others in light of his own simple and straight-forward mind. Hamlet, because he was a prince, was probably a soldier, so he is given a soldiers burial. In an exact opposite way, Hamlet finds a universe of variety within his own mind; he explores the world from many perspectives, searches many questions, revolves all but resolves nothing. Fortinbras arrival marks the end of the true reign of Hamlet, not Claudius petty and incompetent rule, but Hamlets regime of the mind and the possibilities of subjectivity.

Bibliography
Hamlet Study Guide Summary and Analysis of Act 5 GradeSaver.html The World of English Literature Hamlet The Grave Digger Scene.html www.shvoong.com Books www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/section14.rhtml thecutestliterature.blogspot.com/2005/.../hamlet-grave-digger-scene