The Last Mystery | William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts
The Last Mystery
William Kerrigan, University of Massachusetts
As I finished this book, I was visited by a friend of pragmatic temperament. "Yes, I suppose so," he said on hearing of my admiration for the scene between Hamlet and the gravedigger. "But I don't have the slightest idea what it means." What defeats my pragmatic friend, I think, is that the graveyard scene offers nothing but meaning. With respect to the battle between Hamlet and Claudius, it accomplishes nothing. Hamlet does not form a plan. He does not happen on useful information. Shakespeare, grandly at his leisure, finds time to bring Hamlet and Horatio, eventually the entire Danish court and the mortal remains of Ophelia, to the local graveyard—only the second scene in the play (the first is 4.2, its local unspecified) set outside Elsinore Castle. Two months or so before the play begins, Hamlet returned from Wittenberg to attend his father's funeral, which might have been held on...
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