CW: suicide

Enter two Clowns [a GRAVEDIGGER and a SECOND MAN].

GRAVEDIGGER           Is she to be buried in Christian burial, when she wilfully seeks her own salvation?

2 MAN I tell thee she is. Therefore make her grave straight. The crowner hath sat on her and finds it Christian burial.

GRAVEDIGGER           How can that be unless she drowned herself in her own defence?

2 MAN Why, ’tis found so.

GRAVEDIGGER            It must be se offendendo. It cannot be else. For here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, itargues an act, and an act hath three branches – it is to act, to do, to perform. Argal, she drowned herself wittingly. (5.1.1-13)

The audience might expect Hamlet, perhaps Hamlet and Horatio—but no, it’s a breath of fresh air, and two entirely new characters, a couple of comic gravediggers! The sheer audacity of it! And it’s very far from being comic relief, not just because it ramps up the tension—where’s Hamlet? what’s he up to? what about Claudius and Laertes?—but because the episode’s subject matter is entirely serious, as serious as Hamlet’s soliloquies, which it recapitulates, but in a different idiom.

The gravediggers, one older, one perhaps younger, are having an intense discussion, and the older in particular has something on his mind. Is she to be buried in Christian burial, when she wilfully seeks her own salvation? An early modern audience would be familiar with the convention that people who died by suicide were regularly buried outside the churchyard, in unconsecrated ground—and this grave is clearly being made among other graves. In the Gravedigger’s formulation, wilfully is the crucial bit: did she do it on purpose? was this a suicide? but the idea of Ophelia seeking salvation, solace, healing, among the flowers, in the water, even more than in heaven is also a powerful one; that’s part of the vision that Gertrude’s just articulated, although for the Gravedigger it’s just a way of saying, did she mean to kill herself, then?

His mate is adamant, we’ve been through this, I tell thee she is. (And perhaps even the suggestion of: we’ve been paid to turn a blind eye, paid for our silence. So shut up about it.) Therefore make her grave straight; get on with it! (Straight is also strait, narrow, and in biblical terms the way to heaven. That’s where she’s going, yes.) The crowner hath sat on her and finds it Christian burial. There’s been an inquest—the Gravedigger might harrumph at that, oh yes, we all know about that, and how they can be rigged, bought—and the coroner’s said it’s fine.

The Gravedigger is not giving up, though, and it’s partly the principle, partly because he’s interested in the legal question. (So would the audience be, law students among them, from the Inns of Court.) How can that be unless she drowned herself in her own defence? This is of course ironic, because impossible. Why, ’tis found so, replies the other; that’s what’s been decided, and so that’s what happened. That’s how the law works. The Gravedigger has another go; it must be se offendendo, which is somewhat mangled (by the Gravedigger or the printer)—that kind of offence, then. It cannot be else. No other possibility. For here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly it argues an act, and an act hath three branches – it is to act, to do, to perform. The point, really, is that this sounds right, it sounds like legal argument, even if it doesn’t make sense. Argal—he means ergo, therefore—she drowned herself wittingly. If she did it, she did it knowingly. Because she did it.

This is SUCH a weird change of pace, idiom, everything, and it’s going to get weirder…