[In the following essay, Gellert maintains that the first half of Act V, scene i of Hamlet, while the prince meditates on Yorick's skull and jests with the gravediggers, serves as an emblematic representation of melancholy as both a disorder and a sign of imaginative thinking.]

It is now increasingly recognized that several of Shakespeare's scenes have iconographic or symbolic significances in addition to, and sometimes more important than, their contributions to the development of action.¹ These scenes establish tableaux that function as condensations or epitomes of central themes of the plays in which they occur. This device, it has been noted, is fairly common in the history plays.² In Richard II, for example, the king's physical descent from the walls of Flint Castle is an elaborate visual rendering of the political, moral, and tragic implications of his situation. The same play also contains one of the most elaborately emblematic scenes in all Shakespeare, the gardener's scene (III, iv, 24 ff.), whose setting and characters embody the metaphoric connection between garden and commonwealth that is verbally established throughout the play. The device extends to comedy and tragedy also, and many examples could be cited. The black hole in which Malvolio is imprisoned in Twelfth Night is “dark as ignorance, though ignorance were as dark as hell” (IV, ii, 44); it is a visual equivalent of the mental state of madness or foolishness that is being depicted.

The graveyard scene in Hamlet provides a kind of emblematic epitome for several of the important themes in the play. The contrast between appearance and reality, for example, is epitomized by the discrepancy between “my lady's painting” and the reality of the skull,³ just as the presence and talk of rotting bodies renders in a different mode the idea of decay and disease, the idea of Denmark as “rotten.”⁴ What has not been noticed is that the subject of melancholy, used throughout the play to define the distance between Hamlet and the other characters, is here also represented in a highly condensed verbal and pictorial form. The general association of graveyards and melancholy would, of course, have been obvious to Shakespeare's audience; the graveyard quite naturally creates the kind of melancholy atmosphere that Hamlet briefly invokes earlier in the play:

'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.

(III, ii, 378-80)⁵

Graves and graveyards were traditionally the subject of melancholy dreams like those described by Nashe in The Terrors of the Night, a work that discussed those qualities of churchyards, their affinity with melancholy and night, that made them the fitting setting for tragedy.

The concept of melancholy in the Renaissance was complex, however, as can be seen even in the multiple references of this scenic tableau, and an important basic duality in it has now been made familiar to us by scholars of the subject.⁶ On the one hand, Galenic medical tradition defined melancholy, the humor whose coldness and dryness were inimical to life, as the most difficult of the temperaments and, at worst, a dangerous disease requiring alleviations and cures. On the other hand, by extension and elaboration of an Aristotelian maxim,⁷ melancholy was considered the temperament of people exceptionally gifted in politics and the arts. Saturn was the planet most closely associated with the melancholy temperament, and it shared in the contradiction that was central to the idea of melancholy. “Children of Saturn” were both blessed and cursed; they could have unusual gifts of contemplation, but these were inextricably bound up with their solitude and their alienation from those around them.⁸ The professions and activities governed by Saturn included the highest and the lowest, extreme wealth as well as extreme poverty, authority and command on the one hand, and lowly services like gravedigging on the other.

If the first part of the graveyard scene is viewed as a kind of Saturnian-melancholy emblem, its center is the figure of the thinker, turning the world over for his own inspection, considering the vanity of all human activity against the perspective provided by the skull that he holds. It is in this kind of pose that personifications of Melancholy, whether male or female, were often portrayed in paintings and engravings, and the picture of Hamlet in the pose of the melancholy thinker, meditating on objects of death and especially on the skull of the court jester, contains the same amalgamation of the medieval “vanity” motif with the more modern one of Melancholia which was often seen in the pictorial arts.⁹ Where the medieval skull, frequently meditated on by saints, had pointed a moral about the shortness of life and the transitoriness of all things, the melancholic meditating on a skull was cultivating and dramatizing his own sensibility as much as pointing to any objective lesson.¹⁰

Examples of personified figures of Melancholy brooding over skulls can be found in the collection in Saturn as well as elsewhere: an engraved portrait of a pensive young nobleman with a skull in his hand, made by Lucas van Leyden in 1519, may well be a representation of this subject.¹¹ The seventeenth-century painting of “Meditation” or “Melancholy” by Domenico Feti is another, more certain example.¹² Here a female figure sits resting her forehead on one hand and looks down at a skull; the objects around her include broken columns, a broken torso of a satyr, some books, an hour glass, and artistic implements; a dog is chained up in the corner. The purpose of the picture is to show the vanity of all the human activity surveyed by the thinking figure. An etching of Melancholy by Benedetto Castiglione¹³ is even more relevant to the scene from Hamlet. In this picture, a female figure sits with a skull and a musical scroll in her lap, with various artistic and musical instruments, emblematic also of distractions from melancholy, around her. Behind her are a cat and a chained dog. The inscription at the top of the etching, “Vbi Inletabilitas ibi Virtus” makes the subject matter very clear. The unhappiness of the melancholic, in fact his incapacity for being cheered up, are the conditions of virtue.

In Hamlet, the tableau in which the central figure is the emblematic one of the melancholy man meditating upon a skull is filled out, visually and verbally, by a group of human figures, animals, occupations and professions traditionally associated with melancholy. The gravediggers represent and talk about most of the professions that were considered to be under the jurisdiction of Saturn; their particular work, gravedigging, was one of the lowly Saturnian and melancholic professions,¹⁴ and the earth in which they dig and of which they sing was the element particularly associated with melancholy and with Saturn. The pick-axe of which the Clown sings (V, i, 91) was occasionally Saturn's instrument,¹⁵ and almost all of the professions mentioned in the Clowns' quibbles were governed by Saturn: the gardeners and ditchers (V, i, 30), the mason, shipwright and carpenter who figure in the riddle about gravemaking (V, i, 41 ff.), the gallows-maker, and the tanners (V, i, 162-8).¹⁶ The lowly activities mentioned by the Clowns provide a counterpoint to Hamlet's meditations, even while they amplify the frame of reference that is central to the whole scene.

While the Clowns discuss and represent the lower Saturnian professions, Hamlet himself speaks of the higher ones: the politician who “would circumvent God” (V, i, 77-9); the lawyer with his cases, tenures and tricks (V, i, 95-8); and the greatest commanders of earthly power: Caesar and Alexander (V, i, 201-10). Melancholics, even when not endowed with the true wisdom that could apprehend the hidden (sometimes occult) reality behind appearances, were thought to have a kind of experiential shrewdness that made them astute politicians, and they had a talent for wielding power.¹⁷ The law, especially with the negative connotations that Hamlet gives it (V, i, 95 ff.), also had a connection with melancholy: extensive litigation was thought to be both a cause and an effect of the melancholy disposition.¹⁸ The only profession mentioned by Hamlet that was not specifically a Saturnian one is the courtier's, and even this figure is presented in his most political aspect, precisely the aspect of courtiership on which Burton was to expatiate in his preface to the Anatomy of Melancholy.¹⁹

The perspective for the activities that are discussed in the graveyard is that of mutability; this was also the particular province of Saturn, who was closely associated with the idea of time.²⁰ The scythe or sickle that he carried was a symbol of the connection, and the story that he devoured his own children was interpreted allegorically to mean that time was the destroyer of what it had created. In addition to his association with time Saturn also represented the sciences of measurement, and often the two went together. Clocks and dials were part of the paraphernalia of Saturn, and the hour glass is prominent on the wall behind Dürer's figure of Melencolia. The measurement of time and the genesis of historical thinking were therefore both attributed to Saturn. As Cartari put it: “de Saturne l'histoire commença d'avoir voix, & d'estre cognue: car sans doubte au paravant que les temps fussent distinguez elle ne povuoit estre sinon muete & incognue.”²¹

The subject of time in its relationship to personal and general history, as well as to death, enters into the songs and dialogue of the scene. The Clown sings a song about the passage of time and the onset of age and of death:

But age, with his stealing steps,
          Hath clawed me in his clutch,
And hath shipped me intil the land,
          As if I had never been such.

(V, i, 71-4)

Hamlet meditates on the vanity of all human activities, because death is the end of them, and he and the Clown discuss in some detail the length of time required for the decomposition of a body.

The idea of historical time has another kind of importance here as well: Hamlet's personal life is now related to the sequence of public events that have been alluded to in the play, and the gravedigger is a measurer in this regard also:

HAM:
How long hast thou been a grave-maker?
1 CLO:
Of all the days i' th' year, I came to't that day our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
HAM:
How long is that since?
1 CLO:
Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that; it was that very day that young Hamlet was born. … I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years.

(V, i, 137-57)

It has been said that Hamlet suffers from a disoriented time sense throughout the first part of the play; one of the many ways in which he is cut off from those around him is that he cannot and does not want to adjust to their time scheme.²² In his first soliloquy, for instance, he seems far more appalled by the speed with which his mother has remarried than by the incestuous nature of her marriage, and he expresses the disproportion between his feelings about time and the actual succession of events in a highly exaggerated form to Ophelia during the play scene (II, ii, 120-30). The dialogue with the grave-maker in which Hamlet is placed objectively in time and in relation to his father is the antithesis of the subjectively dislocated time sense we have seen earlier. Hamlet's age is presented with the same detachment as the information about the length of time it will take a tanner's corpse to rot.

Not only death as the end of all, but especially death by suicide (Ophelia's questionable death by drowning), dominates the conversation in the graveyard, and suicide too was the particular province of Saturn, as well as the special preoccupation of melancholics. The work of the “gallows-maker,” whose craft and product are discussed by the Clowns (V, i, 43-9), was shown in many representations of the children of Saturn,²³ for the gallows were associated not only with criminals (who were Saturnian types) but also with suicide: in at least one picture of the gallows-tree the victim is a suicide stringing up his own rope.²⁴ Death by drowning, Ophelia's particular fate, was claimed by Chaucer's Saturn as part of his prerogative and power.²⁵

The scene in the graveyard consists of two main parts, with the arrival of the funeral procession introducing the second, less emblematic portion. At the very end of this part, however, Hamlet's weary and ironic couplet, after his unhappy confrontation with Laertes, can be seen as reiterating in symbolic terms the negative connotations of melancholy as a disease or evil which have been implicit throughout the play:

Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

(V, i, 285-6)

The dog and the cat were two of the most common animal symbols of melancholy; as we saw, they were both represented in pictures of Melancholy like that of Castiglione, and Shakespeare himself elsewhere mentions the cat in connection with melancholy.²⁶ The meaning of the couplet appears to be that even if Hamlet were to attain the heroic stature of Hercules, he cannot entirely overcome the worst kinds of melancholy around him, the melancholy that is involved in the animal imagery applied to Claudius: “a paddock … a bat, a gib” (III, iv, 190).²⁷ The cat and the dog symbolize the objectively evil state of a world that even the hero's efforts cannot correct. Melancholy in its undesirable sense becomes connected with the metaphoric disease which is central to the play and in which all of the characters are involved. Not only has the disease of melancholy infected Hamlet with grief and a desire for death, but it is also identified with such characters as Claudius, who in a sense is a disease or “canker” (V, ii, 69). Even if Shakespeare's audience did not know that almost all the diseases mentioned in the play were specifically related to melancholy,²⁸ there is an unmistakable metaphoric connection in the very notion of disease.

The graveyard scene has often been regarded as a turning point in the play; Hamlet's disposition after his return from the sea journey can be seen as expressing his release from the disordered thought and behavior (partly associated with melancholy in its unfavorable aspects) which he has exhibited earlier.²⁹ The scene marks a change in the relationship of Hamlet's moods to his situation: whereas earlier his levity was in contrast with the gravity of what was taking place (his behavior during the first encounter with the Ghost, or his jokes about Polonius's corpse are examples), the discrepancy between his situation and his reaction to it has now disappeared. His first remark on entering the graveyard is tantamount to a denial of his own behavior in earlier episodes: “Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings in grave-making?” (V, i, 64). It is now the Clowns who do the fooling, although the verbal quibbling they indulge in, based on their inability or unwillingness to understand what their interlocutor is saying, is not in fact very different from Hamlet's more deliberate quibbling earlier. Yorick's skull, the focus of the early part of the graveyard scene, is the most visible token of Hamlet's abandonment of the comic mode. His meditations about death and the passing of all things include thoughts about the transitoriness of the jokes and antics of the court jester. To the extent that Hamlet himself had been fulfilling the role of jester,³⁰ the scene is a comment, visual and verbal, on the whole “antic disposition.”

Since melancholy was associated not only with disordered behavior but also with contemplative thought, the emblematic treatment accorded it in the graveyard scene is appropriate as a way of confirming the portrait of Hamlet as a thinker, already established in earlier parts of the play by means of thoughtful soliloquies. The iconographic features of the scene, moreover, give an added dimension to the ordering of the imagination that it dramatized at this point—the new consonance between the hero's vision and reality. In conversation with Horatio Hamlet now defends the imaginative faculty that enables him to trace the dust of Alexander stopping a beer-barrel (V, i, 196-206). The imagination, the faculty most closely associated with melancholy, and feared earlier by Hamlet for this reason,³¹ is finally vindicated.

Notes

1. See for instance Alan Downer, “The Life of Our Design: The Function of Imagery in the Poetic Drama,” Hudson Review, II, no. 2 (Summer, 1949), 242-63; R. A. Foakes, “Suggestions for a New Approach to Shakespeare's Imagery,” Shakespeare Survey, V (1952), 81-92; Clifford Lyons, “Stage Imagery in Shakespeare's Plays,” Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (New York, 1962), 261-74; Maurice Charney's treatment of Antony's “elevation,” and other relationships between verbal motifs and visual scenes, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in Drama (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); and Russell Fraser's use of emblems in his study of Lear: Shakespeare's Poetics in Relation to King Lear (London, 1962).

2. Martha Hester Golden, The Iconography of the English History Play (unpublished Columbia dissertation, 1964).

3. This was a common subject in paintings and engravings: Death was depicted as holding a mirror up to a woman, and showing her a skull instead of her own face. See Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven, 1962), 77.

4. Downer, p. 255.

5. See also, for example, the Prologue to Marston's Antonio's Revenge. All quotations from Hamlet are from Peter Alexander's edition (London, 1958).

6. The original seminal study by Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl of the background of Dürer's engraving, Melencolia 1, has now appeared in an expanded and illustrated English version: Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New York, 1964). I shall refer to this work as Saturn. The subject of melancholy in English literature of the Renaissance has been studied by Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, Mich., 1951).

7. Aristotle's Problem XXX, 1, which proposes that men of melancholic temperament are often eminent in philosophy, politics, or the arts, is reprinted and translated in Saturn, pp. 18-29.

8. See Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, Born Under Saturn (New York, 1963), for accounts of the tortured and gifted artists who sometimes consciously associated their temperaments with Saturn.

9. Saturn, pp. 388 ff.

10. Wolfgang Clemen observes that we are given to see from Hamlet's imagery in general, but especially in the graveyard scene (the number of ideas and images that the skull gives rise to) that his sensibility is far superior to that of anybody else in the play. The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 111.

11. See Maria Fossi Todovow, Mostra delle incisione di Luca di Leida (Florence, 1963), p. 27, and the comments to the effect that the subject of this unidentified portrait may well be allegorical (pp. 24, 45).

12. Saturn, Pl. 134. The painting, significantly, as the authors note (pp. 388-9), is known in its several copies by both names.

13. Ibid., Pl. 135. For a brief analysis of another drawing of Melancholy by Castiglione see Richard Bernheimer, “Some Drawings of Benedetto Castiglione,” The Art Bulletin, XXXIII (March, 1951), 47-51, esp. 50 and Fig. 4. The Feti painting dates from around 1614 and the Castiglione etching was influenced by it; there is no question, therefore, of any direct influence on Shakespeare, only of similarity of intention.

14. Saturn, p. 131, gives two quotations from astrological sources about grave-digging as one of the lowly professions over which Saturn presided. Diggers in the earth in general were thought to be Saturnian types. See Pl. 40 for the picture of Saturn himself as a digger.

15. Ibid., p. 204 and Pl. 25.

16. Dürer's Melencolia is surrounded with the appurtenances of carpentry, and stone masonry as well as carpentry are occupations in the big fresco of Saturn's children in the “Solone” of Padua; see Saturn, pp. 307-14, Pls. 32-3, and Guy de Tervarent, Attributs et symboles dans l'art profane 1451-1600: Dictionnaire d'un langage perdu (Geneva, 1958), I, cols. 101, 412. For Saturn as the patron of sea journeys, see Saturn, pp. 130-1, and also p. 204 for “working in leather.” See also p. 190: a description by Guido Bonetti of Saturn's children as leather and parchment workers (cf. the parchments discussed in Hamlet, V, i, 110-3); and note the conjunction of Saturn with other planets as determining the subjects in which workers on parchments would be skilled—juridical, business deeds, etc.

17. “The melancholicke are accounted as most fit to vndertake matters of weightie charge and high attempt.” M. Andreas Laurentius, A Discourse of the Preservation of Sight, tr. Richard Surphlet, London, 1599 (London, Shakespeare Association Facsimile, 1938), p. 85. For rulers born under Saturn, see Greene's Planetomachia in The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, ed. A. B. Grosart (London, 1881-86), V, 46.

18. There is an extended discussion of this subject in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York, 1964), I, 62-5; and see also Nashe's Christs Teares Over Jerusalem in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1958) II, 132.

19. Burton, I, 66.

20. Vincent Cartari, Les images de dieux anciens (Lyons, 1581), pp. 35-6; and see also Erwin Panofsky, “Father Time” in Studies in Iconology (New York, 1962), esp. pp. 73-5.

21. Cartari, pp. 35-6. For the association of Saturn and melancholy with measurement, geometry, etc., see Saturn, Pls. 1, 115, 118, 132 inter alia, and pp. 332-45.

22. Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1927), p. 36.

23. Saturn, Pls. 38, 39, and 42 all contain men on the gallows.

24. Ibid., Pl. 52, Maarten van Heemskerck, “Saturn and his Children.”

25. The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London, 1933), p. 48.

26. “I am as melancholy as a gib cat,” 1 H IV, I, ii, 83. For dogs and cats as melancholy, see the Frontispiece and Argument to the Frontispiece of Burton's Anatomy; for cats, see the “melancholly Pusse” in Peacham's emblem of melancholy: Minerva Britanna: Or a Garden of Heroical Deuises (London, n. d.), p. 126. For dogs as symbols of melancholy (and the possible explanation that their sad faces and their propensity to madness were the reason), see de Tervarent, Attributs, I, cols. 94 and 431, and also Burton, I, 79.

27. Bats, as night creatures, were emblematic of darkness and melancholy, and a bat is the bearer of the title of Dürer's Melencolia. Both the cat and the bat appear in a much later version of melancholy (based, however, on the earlier symbolism), Goya's “Caprichio 43”; see Folke-Nordström, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy (Uppsala, 1962), Pl. 62 and p. 119. Frogs are among Nashe's melancholy night-animals; McKerrow, I, 386.

28. Many diseases were connected with melancholy, including fevers, stomach troubles, jaundice, epilepsy, cancer, etc.; Greene's Planetomachia (Grosart V, 51) has a long list. For the “canker” as a melancholy illness, caused by choler or melancholy adust, see Andrew Boorde, The Breviarie of Health (London, 1587), fol. 24^r. The same was true, for example, of “imposthumes” (Hamlet IV, iv, 27); frenzy or madness were “imposthumes” of the brain (Boorde, fol. 92^v).

29. This sort of approach to the scene is taken, for example, by Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet (Princeton, 1965), p. 82; Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York, 1961), p. 116; S. F. Johnson, “The Regeneration of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly, III (1952), 187-207.

30. Levin, p. 123.

31. For a discussion of the connection between melancholy and the imagination (and citation of a relevant passage from Spenser's Faerie Queene, II, ix, 50-2), see Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York, 1963), pp. 154-61. Hamlet expresses his earlier fears in II, ii, 594-601; and III, ii, 78-82.