Chapter 14 - Grief

Summary

Grief permeates all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and many of his comedies and histories too, but none is so resolutely focused on what it means to feel loss as Hamlet. From the personal loss of a father, to the social loss of a king, to an existential loss of meaning and place in the world, Hamlet explores what happens when one’s sense of life and individuality collapses into something rote and mechanical. This chapter investigates how Hamlet the play, and Hamlet the character, exceed early modern conventions concerning grief in an effort to turn a harrowingly ‘common’ emotion into something much more ‘particular’. By moving away from established understandings of grief, Shakespeare’s play explores how this devastating passion might create new worlds of meaning and, in doing so, help set ‘out of joint’ ones ‘right’. At the same time, the chapter examines how an over-investment in the idiosyncratic nature of grief undermines and even callously contributes to other tragedies in the play, including Ophelia’s death and Denmark’s crumbling political order. Ultimately, the play dramatises both the difficulty and urgency of balancing the ‘particular’ and the ‘common’ when it comes to grief, even as it leaves the possibility of their coexistence unresolved.