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scientific inquiry. But the gravedigger almost incidentally hands Hamlet the skull ofYorick, and Hamlet must suddenly face the mortality not of a social "type" but of someone intimately associated with his own childhood. Confronted by the mutability ofhis past, Hamlet drops his light-hearted banter for amoment, and for the first time feels his gorge rising in earnest. Again, then, he must put distance between hirnself and the skulI. Turning it outward metaphorically, he teils it: "Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come" (V.i.212-14), and then adds a moral emblem made stale by usage: "Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?" (V.i.225-26). But again he is interrupted by mortality doser to horne: Ophelia's funeral, a more recent and unexpected death. And now all efforts at moralizing end, as Hamlet reacts with the e1ementary emotions of anger and grief. It is only in the next scene, after he has achieved the catharsis of looking death progressively doser in the face and evaluating his own responses to it, that Hamlet is able to reach acceptance of
Explorations in Renaissance Culture – Brill
Published: Dec 2, 1984
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