Denial of Mortality and the Question of Mistaken Grief in Hamlet
“Thou know’st tis common; all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity”
“No man lives, can live, without having some object in view, and making efforts to attain that object. But when object there is none, and hope is entirely fled, anguish often turns man into a monster.”
–Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead
“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
—Kierkegaard
The experience of loss is both a universal and distinctly individual experience. It is one that is wide ranging, as loss takes on a form mirroring the individualism of the griever and manifests itself as what the individual needs to seek what is necessary to achieve some form of consolation. As Sigmund Freud writes in his 1918 work “Mourning and Melancholia,” “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (Freud 243). In literature, grief, mourning, and melancholia have been explored for centuries. From the early development of the English elegy, it is apparent that writing can be used as an attempt to explain the inexplicable and as a form of self expression to fulfill the emptiness that follows a loss. Writing acts as a container for the longing of something that is no longer there. As author Tammy Clewell writes on Peter Sacks’s study on the elegy in “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” “poets and their contemporaries found comfort in fictions that transcend and outlast death” (Clewell 48). Sacks argues that elegies evolved and gained popularity as a response to both an emotional and psychological loss. By replacing that loss with a piece of writing that embodies the emotions attached to the lost object or person, the writer is releasing their attachment to what is gone and finding some sense of consolation in the work that takes the place of it.
Sacks writes in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats: “What we might call a healthy work of mourning, … requires a withdrawal of affection from the lost object and a subsequent reattachment of affection to some substitute for that object” (Sacks 6). In John Milton’s 1637 pastoral elegy Lycidas, written in response to the death of his close friend, a grief of individual loss as well as a loss of self is explored and articulated. Milton attempts to replace the affection of his lost friend with the reattachment of affection to his writing. Milton writes in lines 18-21:
So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favor my destin’d Urn,
And as he passes turn
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud! (Milton, lines 18-21)
In these lines there is a change in his previous articulation of the loss of his friend that inspires Milton to bring up his own death and his hope that a “gentle Muse” will attend to him as his friend was attended to at the time of his death. Milton is attempting to create a piece of poetry that would serve as a lingering transcendence of both his friend’s death as well as his own future death. For Milton, the elegy functions as his vehicle for expressing the fears of his own death as evoked by the loss of his loved one. While he has memorialized the loss of his friend and expressed the intangible fear of his own mortality, as Sacks suggests via Freud’s work on mourning, “‘No matter what fills the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else’” (Sacks 7). The apparent mourning for the loss of a loved person evokes Milton’s acknowledgement of his own inevitable death, suggesting a loss of an abstraction—that abstraction being the event of his own death, something that is intangible and unknowable. Yet following any loss there remains a particular detachment as the replaced object will never be the original; what becomes known can never return to the realm of things unknown.
As grief functions as a springboard for the inward turn towards a self-realization of the inevitability of death, it is often the case that the loss of a person or object is accompanied by an individual mourning the realization of their own mortality. The suggestion provided by Clewell that writing could provide both an outlet to memorialize those gone as well as a way of securing a legacy for the author extends beyond her suggestion of this occurring in poetry, and arguably includes all forms of written expression. Similar to Lycidas being a response to Milton’s personal loss of his close friend, William Shakespeare’s later career including Hamlet is arguably his own articulation of grief following the experience of multiple deaths including his father and his son, Hamnet.
Stephen Greenblatt explores the similarities between the death of Shakespeare’s own son, Hamnet, and his writing of Hamlet in the “Speaking with the Dead” chapter from his 2004 biography, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare: “the act of writing his own son’s name over and over again … may well have reopened a deep wound, a wound that had never properly healed” (Greenblatt, 311). If Hamlet is Shakespeare’s theatrical attempt at an elegiac response to the loss of his son, it also functions as a confessional for his deep rooted fear of his own death that likely surfaced when faced with his own child’s mortality. The name of his son being nearly the namesake of the tragic hero of his play is not the only haunting similarity that the playwright had to his public work.
Shakespeare was no stranger to loss living in Elizabethan England amidst the plague and incredibly low infant mortality rates. As Greenblatt illustrates in “Speaking with the Dead,” there were many instances of loss within a small time frame in Shakespeare’s life, including the loss of his son Hamnet. It is no surprise that Hamlet explores a personal and painful loss as well as a relationship between a father and a son. Sacks writes: “The dead, like the forbidden object of a primary desire, must be separated from the poet, partly by a veil of words” (Sacks 9). This could explain why in the early 1602 performances of Hamlet a son mourns the loss of his father, while in 1596 a father mourned the loss of his son. With the reversal of the roles, Shakespeare is envisioning a near reversal of real life—separating himself from his mourning by writing a play that depicts how grief impacts a son following the loss of a father, perhaps in an attempt to place himself in his son’s shoes and face the inevitability of his own death.
The focus on loss and individual death found in both Milton’s Lycidas and Shakespeare’s personal connection to his work Hamlet illustrates how a loss evokes an individual’s own fear of death. Ernest Becker argues in his 1973 book The Denial of Death that the only way to maintain sanity and to move through life with some semblance of stability is to deny the inevitable fact that death is the only constant and predetermined outcome in life. Becker writes:
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. (Becker 17)
According to Becker, all knowledge of death must be deeply repressed in order for life itself to continue. The mere fact that one inhabits a living body can lead to psychological demise, let alone experiencing the loss of a loved one. In Hamlet, the grief Hamlet experiences as a result of a multitude of losses places him in a position where he is incapable of denying his own mortality any longer. There is no longer a defense to protect him from the undeniable truth—nothing left to veil him from the dead, to return to Sacks—and in turn he must come to accept the inevitability of his own death. For Shakespeare himself, writing Hamlet was an act of grasping hold of the remnants of a veil and the writing acted as a container in which he could bottle up his remaining attachment left behind following the death of Hamnet.
If it was the loss of his son that led to Shakespeare’s revisionist play of a son losing his father, it could be said that Hamlet is a response to Shakespeare facing his own mortality, and a successful example of overcoming a loss by denying one’s own mortality in the form of a fictional play. Like Milton in Lycidas, writing to process the grief and realization of his own death, Shakespeare uses the play to preserve the precarious denial of his own death. As the loss of his son forced him to face it, the writing of Hamlet was his way of returning to his previous state of denial.
The play itself begins with the famous line spoken by Barnardo: “Who’s there?” (Shakespeare 1.1.1). This is a question that suggests the speaker’s inward turn to the self—as though it is a question with a definitive answer. It is as though Shakespeare is questioning humanity itself, asking the ultimate question of “who” is there, almost suggesting the question of “what” is out there beyond the line of sight—beyond our individual understandings of life. The line invites a reply, an answer from the unknown. Similar to the question of death and mourning, the line “who’s there” is arguably what must be asked by all in the face of death, in the face of the unknown. It also functions as a plea, a question that demands an answer from someone or something.
Becker writes: “Man’s fears are fashioned out of the ways in which he perceives the world” (Becker 18). The question “who’s there?” implies that a perception of the world has been established—the speaker asks with the expectation of a reply, a perception that there will be something or someone out there to respond—and from it fear can develop. The line carries an air of both hopefulness and hopelessness, one that implies that there will be an answer, although there is no way to know what the answer is at the time of one’s death. The speaker seems to both want and need to know who is there, but also fears what he will have to face should there be a reply. It is this theme of facing the unknown while maintaining a fear of it that runs throughout both Hamlet and Shakespeare’s own personal motives for writing the play.
Greenblatt writes that the conflict Hamlet faces in response to his father’s death, “enabled the playwright to focus almost the entire tragedy on the consciousness of the hero suspended between his ‘first motion’ and the ‘acting of a dreadful thing’” (Greenblatt 304-305). If read through Becker's theory, it could be argued that the hero of the play—Hamlet himself—is not merely a hero in regards to avenging his father’s legacy, but instead a hero in his transcendence of his own denial of death, his finding consolation to the grief of the inevitable by having conquered the naturally occurring fear of death that is an inherent experience throughout the work of grief. Becker writes on heroism:
Heroism is by definition defiance of safety. But the point that we are making is that all the strivings for perfection, the twistings and turnings to please the other, are not necessarily cowardly or unnatural. What makes transference heroics demeaning is that the process is unconscious and reflexive, not fully in one’s control. (Becker 156)
Hamlet’s heroism appears in his desire to avenge his father’s death. Reading his actions through Becker’s view on heroism, it would be a natural reaction to a loss, however it is not a reaction that Hamlet was wholly in control of. The Beckerian scholar Keith Helmuth writes in his 2019 essay, “Ernest Becker and the Human Problem: A Memoir and an Appreciation”: “the effort to deny mortality has to continually up the ante on the heroic forms and actions that keep its story believable and its social and cultural world from losing its meaning” (Helmuth). Perhaps Hamlet’s hesitation to kill Claudius as he prayed was a suppressed attempt to deny his own mortality. Hamlet himself sheaths his sword and declares: “No. Up sword, and know thou a more horrid hent” (Shakespeare 3.3.92-93), perhaps in an attempt to up the ante on the possible heroism he could earn from killing Claudius, when he would not be sending a villain to heaven.
Shakespeare created a hero who is both in control and out of control of his actions, a hero who has the ability to unconsciously determine his destiny. However, when he is given the opportunity to kill Claudius, he hesitates. “Now might I do it now he is a-praying, And now I’ll do ‘t” (Shakespeare 3.3.77-78). Yet he is not fully in control, as he hesitates as he realizes with Claudius praying: “And so he goes to heaven, And so am I revenged. That would be scanned: A villain kills my father, and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven” (Shakespeare 3.3.80-83). The fact that Hamlet has an opportunity to become the hero and fulfill his longing for vengeance and chooses not to take it suggests that it is his heroism that he is attempting to avoid. He abandons the safety that he so desires because he lacks the control he needs to recognize what he is truly doing.
It could be argued that Hamlet’s heroism is merely a fragment of his grief and the result of his melancholic state in which he has little control or desire for control. Freud proposes in “Mourning and Melancholia” that there are two separate reactions to loss. He explains that a melancholic griever differs from a mere mourner in their inability to remove their attachment from the lost object and in their failure to replace their lost object with something else. Grief for Hamlet seems to take both forms at different points throughout the play. While he experiences mourning for the loss of his father, his mother, and Ophelia, it also appears as though Hamlet is experiencing melancholic grief in what these losses have done to damage his system of repression regarding his own death. Hamlet the melancholic griver seeks to avoid the reality of what he has lost—his innocence—and Hamlet the mourner puts down the sword providing him with the opportunity to kill Claudius.
One particular aspect of the play that should be examined as it pertains to the manifestation of misplaced grief is the supposed sightings of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. As Greenblatt points out, “in Hamlet, it is the death not of a son but of a father that provokes the hero’s spiritual crisis. If the tragedy swelled up from Shakespeare’s own life—if it can be traced back to the death of Hamnet–something must have made the playwright link the loss of his child to the imagined loss of his father” (Greenblatt 311). The loss of the father is further explored by Becker, as related to the development of an inner denial of death, writing that a child:
Accepts to work on becoming the father of himself by abandoning his own project and by giving it over to ‘The Fathers’ … there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit–what we call the ‘mature’ character. (Becker 46)
Whether this occurrence is a fact or merely a vision, Hamlet first tells Horatio that he has seen the ghost of his father in Act I, scene ii. When questioned on where he saw the apparition, Hamlet replies: “In my mind’s eye, Horatio” (Shakespeare 1.2.193). This could be a melancholic response to grief as Freud explains: “This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (Freud 244). As Hamlet has no outlet in which to channel his attachment to his father, he fails to properly mourn and develops a melancholic drive to avenge his father’s death, mistakenly believing that it will provide him with inner denial of what he has truly lost.
The fact that Hamlet’s father appears as a ghost is another symptom of Hamlet’s own repression of his true grief. As Robert N. Watson writes in his 1994 book The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance:
The ghost is a design our psyches read into the threateningly black Rorschach page called Death. If it appears to be a ‘composite of what Catholics, Protestants, and skeptics thought about spirits,’ rather than a consistent entity, that may be because Shakespare intended it to stand for all projective beliefs about afterlife. (Watson 76-77)
For Hamlet himself, encountering the ghost of his father could be a sign of his inner attempt to believe there is life after death, perhaps representing the first step towards facing his denial of death. If Shakespeare intended the ghost to be recognizable for all as the personification of what the afterlife is, the return of a being from the dead provides a hope that death is not a void of existence, not a state of nothing. Becker writes, “No living person can give genius the powers it needs to shoulder the meaning of the world” (Becker 207). This is the intent of the ghost, the role that it plays for Hamlet’s denial of death. It is a non-living “person” who can provide Hamlet with a meaning of his death and therefore a meaning of the world in which Hamlet inhabits.
The event of his father’s death is merely a springboard for his succumbing to the difficulty of facing his own inevitable death and acceptance of this fact. What Hamlet does not realize is that it is not only the loss of his father that he is mourning, but that his grief is also the cataclysmic reaction of his loss that resulted in his realization of the inevitability of his own death. Freud explains that a particular occurrence unique to melancholia is that a person: “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (Freud 245). It is Hamlet’s libidinal energy derived from the loss of his father that is searching for another object to attach itself to. For Hamlet, at the start of the play he knows that he has lost his father, but he is not aware what has been lost within himself.
According to Freud’s theory of the work of grief, the libidinal energy once attached to his father must reattach itself elsewhere in order for Hamlet to avoid the melancholic alternative to mourning. Hamlet mistakenly believes that this libidinal drive is merely attached to the figure of his father, and he attempts to grieve the loss of his father by seeking revenge on the man he believes was his murderer. However, when this loss is read through Becker’s idea of death, it is apparent that Hamlet mistakenly is grieving the loss of his father, when instead the libidinal energy attached to this loss was a symptom of repressing his true loss, allowing for ignorance and attempted deflection of his own inevitable death.
It is clear that he does not know yet what he is truly mourning or what to direct his grief towards when Hamlet declares to the ghost of his father: “Haste me to know it, that I with wings as swift/ As mediation or the thoughts of love may sweep to my revenge” (Shakespeare 1.5.35-37). In his pleading with the ghost to reveal the identity of his murderer, Hamlet is attempting to create a veil for himself to avoid the truth of his grief. He is mourning immoderately. He inherently does not feel vengeful because it is not his true response to loss.
It is an emotion he pleads with the ghost to instill within him by providing knowledge of his father’s killer. It is an example of his repression of the truth. Becker writes “even more important is how repression works: it is not simply a negative force opposing life energies; it lives on life energies and uses them creatively” (Becker 21). While Hamlet is still functioning as a human with his desire to repress the knowledge of his own death, he is doing so mistakenly, believing that what he has lost is his father, not the innocence of unexamined mortality.
For Hamlet himself, the grief of his father’s death manifests itself in a desire for revenge, arguably in an effort to avoid the loss’s evocation of his own death. If read within Becker’s exploration of the denial of death as a failure to properly defend oneself from the truth of life, Hamlet is attempting to remain ignorant of his own death by believing that obtaining revenge for his father will provide him with a sufficient distraction and a veil for denial. Hamlet’s repression of what he truly grieves is an example of what Becker suggests is necessary for one to establish what psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich coins “character armor” to deny death. Becker writes: “even more important is how repression works: it is not simply a negative force opposing life energies; it lives on life energies and uses them creatively” (Becker 21). The repression that Hamlet experiences takes the form of his vengeful drive. Revenge functions as a mere distraction for what it is that Hamlet cannot face—his own death.
As we see later in the play, it is this mistaken grief that Hamlet deflects from his own death that eventually resolves his grieving process and results in his own death. Along the way, Hamlet mistakenly grieves the loss of his father and believes avenging his death is the answer to his loss. He seeks revenge as a release from his grief, yet this is a case of misplaced libidinal energy. It is true that Hamlet maintains the capacity of double grief or even triple grief, experiencing the loss of more than only his father.
However, what is important to keep in mind is that it is necessary for Hamlet to recognize he has lost more than his father. Hamlet inaccurately believes that the only thing that truly haunts him is his father’s death, and believes he is reacting to the loss of his father throughout his actions. Instead, he is facing a multifaceted loss—a reaction to his newfound inability to deny his own death any longer as well as the loss of Gertrude, the loss of Ophelia, and the loss of himself. In order for the work of Hamlet’s grief to find some semblance of consolation, Hamlet must examine if he can continue to live knowing that he will one day die himself, and in order to do so he must come to terms with what it is that he has truly lost. It is the confrontation with his own mortality that poses the question of misplaced libidinal energy within Hamlet’s grief.
It is not until Hamlet encounters the gravedigger in Act V that he seems to first articulate his inner thoughts on the reality of death, seemingly abandoning his suppressed drive to rebuild his character armor in the physical presence of the remains of death. Hamlet speaks reflectively on the physical process of death and decay:
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and what of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind awat. O’ that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s flaw! (Shakespeare 5.1. 216-223)
Hamlet’s reflection on how all human bodies return to the earth as equals shows a distinctive shift in his grief. Similar to his holding Yorick’s skull and reflecting upon the impact he had on his own life as well as that of his family, Hamlet is recognizing a necessary understanding he must make to accept his own death and overcome the need for denial of death. Becker writes: “Man is literally split in two: he has awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feed in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever” (Becker 23). Hamlet’s choice to evoke both Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar in his observations on death allows him to see the universality of mortality. Even the greatest and most powerful men meet the same fate, as they return once more to the same earth to become the same nothingness.
What makes Hamlet a Beckerian hero is that in the end he faces his denial of death and arguably overcomes it. As his grief has led him to confront what he truly fears, he has overcome the human instinct to suppress the reality of his mortality. The mistaken grief he turned from and suppressed within the death of his father is finally faced when he speaks:
There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. 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. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be. (Shakespeare 5.2.233-238)
Hamlet realizes that his death is inevitable, that he has been running from something he has no control over. Unlike proving his father’s murder and avenging his family’s name, Hamlet can do nothing to turn away from the grief he is experiecing of his own mortality. There is nothing left for him to turn to. He faces his inevitable death with the knowledge that it comes for all. To Becker, in a sense Hamlet has been “cured”:
“If neurosis is sin, and not disease, then the only thing which can ‘cure’ it is a world-view, some kind of affirmative collective ideology in which the person can perform the living drama of his acceptance as a creature. Only in this way can a neurotic come out of his isolation to become part of such a larger and higher wholeness as religion has always represented.” (Becker 198-199)
Hamlet has completed the living drama of his acceptance as a creature. He announces himself that no man can know when they will die, only that one day it will happen. It is the only and ultimate absolute. This is the world-view that cures him. He will not know what he has left, and he will not know that he has left at all. To Hamlet, death has finally become no thing and his immoderate grief work has come to a close. He can reflect upon his father’s death in what Freud would consider a typical mourning fashion. When Hamlet faces his own death at the hands of Claudius and Laertes, it is not a death he fears—it is a death he welcomes with open arms, his dying words being: “the rest is silence” (Shakespeare 5.2.395).
The grief seen throughout Hamlet as reflected in the human denial of death mirrors that of real world situations, such as Shakespeare’s own grief of his son, and Milton’s mourning of his close friend in Lycidas. Like Lycidas, Hamlet acts as the container into which Shakespeare channels his own deeply rooted fears of mortality, illustrating a story of a hero in a hauntingly familiar reflection of his own son, yet with a revisionist plot where it is Shakespeare himself who has died. Hamlet is a hero of the human condition, a hero who has overcome the denial of death and faces his mortality by accepting that human beings have no control. Becker writes: “The fear of death must be present behind all normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning, else the organism could not function” (Becker 16). Hamlet accomplishes what Becker would argue is impossible—he is willing to look at death directly. While he does not know what is coming, he does not fear it, as he realizes that all men are the same, that none know what lies beyond life. Hamlet is no longer attempting to preserve himself. Does he find consolation in this realization? That is debatable, but can any griever be consoled in their grief? It is an unanswerable question. As Becker so concisely quotes Freud, the “unconscious does not know death” (Becker 22).
Works Cited
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Clewell, Tammy. “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 52, no. 1, Mar, 2004, pp. 43-67
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. House of the Dead. Alma Classics, 2019.
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. (1917). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. The Bodley Head, 2016.
Helmuth, Keith. “Ernest Becker and the Human Problem: A Memoir and an Appreciation.” Ernest Becker Foundation, 5 Mar. 2019, https://ernestbecker.org/ernest-becker-and-the-human-problem-a-memoir-and-an-appreciation/.
Kierkegaard, Søren, and Alexander Dru. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard: 1834-1854. Collins, 1960.
Milton, John. Lycidas. Ed by Abernethy, J.W [New York, Maynard, Merrill, & co, 1906] Pdf, Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
Pender, Stephen. “Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern England.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 43 no. 1, 2010, p.54-85. Project MUSE
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet from The Folger Shakespeare. Ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library, July 2012.
Watson, Robert N. Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance. Univ of California Press, 1994.