Chapter Synopsis and Commentary of Hamlet - Study Guide by William Shakespeare

(IV.vii.136-140)

A cup of poisoned wine will also be prepared for Hamlet to drink. The King builds up Laertes’ passionate desire for revenge, which is further fuelled by the news that the Queen has seen Ophelia drown in a brook. Drowning is a traditionally feminine death, the water representing the fluidity perceived in women: tears, menstruation, amniotic fluid and milk. She dies with the utmost human dignity, rising from the animal imagery that Hamlet attributed to her in the closet scene. The lyrical and beautiful depiction of the death is cut short by an abrupt ending that finishes halfway through a line, suggesting the innocent beauty of Ophelia’s life and the tragedy of it being cut short:

"Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death."

(IV.vii.182-183)

Act V

Two gravediggers, who prepare us for the deaths to follow, offer light relief as they dig a grave for Ophelia. For Hamlet to understand his own identity, he must see the graveyard where all are equal and all identities disappear into nothingness. Hamlet and Horatio stand watching them and Hamlet soliloquises on a skull that they throw up from the earth:

"Let me see. [Takes the skull] – Alas, poor Yorick! – I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

(V.i.166-167)

At this point, Hamlet realises man’s mortality in the emblem of his own friend’s death and that physical corruption is the inevitable end for all.

Ophelia’s funeral procession enters and Laertes declares the extent of his love for his sister as he leaps with passion into Ophelia’s grave. It is here that the two revengers finally meet, as they grapple over love and death. Hamlet joins Laertes in jumping into Ophelia’s grave, proclaiming that his love for her was infintely stronger:

"I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers

Could not, with all their quantity of love,

Make up my sum."

(V.i.249-251)

It is Hamlet’s obsessive revulsion from sex and sinful mankind that stops him from loving Ophelia; he rejects her because she would tempt him to the evil committed by his uncle and mother. We remember his repulsive images spoken to Gertrude:

"Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty" (III.iv.91-4)