Hamlet (Vol. 44) | Richard Hillman (essay date 1986)
Richard Hillman (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: "Hamlet and Death: A Recasting of the Play Within the Player," in Essays in Literature, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Fall, 1986, pp. 201-18.
[In the following essay, Hillman explores the relationship between loss of meaning in life and death, and maintains that Hamlet is plagued by a "suicidal fatalism" which conflicts with his avowed goal of revenge.]
In writing of Hamlet's spiritual isolation and agony, G. Wilson Knight used a phrase which rings resoundingly true: the "knowledge of death."1 It is a potently catalytic phrase, crystallizing the elusive and Protean melancholy through which Hamlet relates to the world around him. But it is also only a starting point. On the one hand, human experience comprehends infinite ways and degrees of knowing; on the other, death ultimately lies outside that experience: it can only be known indirectly, through imagination. We need then to focus on...
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