The untimely marriage of Queen Gertrude to Claudiu

Andrews explains the significance of this passage in relation to Hamlet’s mourning and confusion by saying:

He [Hamlet] cannot tell why he has of late lost all his mirth, forgone all custom of exercises. Still less can he tell why he delays: “I do not know why yet I live to say, ‘This thing’s to do,’ Sith I have cause and will and strength and means to do’t.”

In the final scene of the play, Hamlet found the answer to his question of “to be, or not to be.” After avenging his father’s death, and in the process taking the lives of almost all of those dearest to him, Hamlet learned that it was best to simply let be. All of Hamlet’s confusion about vengeance and his duty as a son would not have existed if no meddling had taken place at all. Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Claudius, Gertrude, and of course, Hamlet, would all have been much the livelier if Hamlet had just let be.

This is a crucial and dreadful vow for many reasons, but the most important, as Freud places us in a position to understand, is that the ghost’s injunction to remember him—an injunction that Shakespeare’s commitment to whole force of the revenge genre never permits either us or Hamlet to question—brutally intensifies Hamlet’s mourning. The essence of the work of mourning is the internal process by which the ego heals its wound, differentiates itself from the object, and slowly, bit by bit, cuts its libidinal ties with the one who has died. Yet this is precisely what the ghost forbids, moreover, with a lack of sympa

Some topics in this essay:
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