Deleting one's Existence

Deleting One’s Existence

Kush Ghatlia

August 28th, 2017

Suicide is a highly dishonourable act in today’s day and age, but the disgrace around suicide has existed for centuries. William Shakespeare wrote the play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark about Prince Hamlet, the protagonist, and his quest to get revenge for the murder of his father, the King. This leads Hamlet to embark on an extraordinary journey of madness, corruption, murder, suicide, treason, and friendship which ends with the deaths of all involved. Through this play, the audience gets insight into the diverse perceptions relating to suicide in the 1600s through the aesthetic, moral, and religious perspectives.

Firstly, Shakespeare dives into the aesthetic aspects of committing suicide through the individual eyes of Hamlet, and social response to Ophelia’s drowning. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. That it should come to this! (1.2.129-137)

Above, Hamlet describes life as stale, dispirited and not beneficial. He longs for death. If Hamlet sees life through such a negative viewpoint, his perspective on death might seem opposite to that. To him, perhaps death is aesthetically pleasing and even beautiful. Moreover he artfully explains how we wishes to die. He wishes that his tainted flesh would melt away and turn into dew. Dew is a stunning phenomenon, hence one can understand Hamlet’s view of himself perishing as something attractive. Next, he compares suicide to something as innocent and peaceful as sleeping. For instance in, Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy:

To die- to sleep-

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die- to sleep.

To sleep- perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause (3.1.61-69)

Sleep is the time of the day when one dreams and escapes all of their worldly issues and concerns. Similarly, Hamlet expects to find his safe haven in death. He compares the after life to the dreams that are to come. When Hamlet says, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” (3.1.67) this is in reference to whether he will go to heaven, hell or purgatory. On the other hand, when Gertrude delivers the news of Ophelia’s death to Laertes and Claudius, she provides graphic descriptions of the event, as if she were present at the scene. Yet, she fails to mention, it was a suicide (4.7.165-82). This and other examples reveals how the social aesthetics of suicide were deemed taboo and too grotesque to even mention the word. Consequently, Ophelia’s funeral was held in private as it was seen as appalling (5.1.200-05). Thus, Shakespeare uses Hamlet’s soliloquies to treat the idea of suicide as potentially aesthetically