Hamlet Epitaph: Fill & Download for Free

It’s not about grave robbing, but about re-using his grave.That’s what was going on in Hamlet, when the gravedigger is pulling up the bones of various bodies, to make room for Ophelia’s grave. The bones would be put elsewhere, perhaps re-buried. They take up a lot less room that way. A church graveyard would otherwise either become full or have to expand over an enormous area.Such a move might not jeopardize Shakespeare’s chances in the afterlife, assuming his bones were reburied in consecrated ground. But Shakespeare wasn’t taking any chances. He had a memorial built, and he wanted it to stay there.So he wasn’t cursing grave-robbers, but grave-diggers:Blessed be the man that spares these stonesAnd cursed be he that moves my bones

How much do you know about the inner workings of the aristocracy and court politics of England? Are you able to determine that Shakespeare got all the details right, or do you just assume it?Do you believe that the aristocracy actually spoke in iambic pentameter? That last question may seem silly, but I have argued with one Oxfordian who actually believed that iambic pentameter really was spoken at court.William Shakespeare was an observer of human life, and he took what he observed and recast it in poetry. He did not attempt to write kitchen sink realism.He probably got a lot of things wrong. I’m a lawyer, and most films and television shows about the law bother me because they get so many things wrong, but people who don’t know the law do not catch the mistakes. My brother, who is a doctor, has the same problem with medical shows.Yes, Shakespeare got some basics right, because people in London gossip about the court. There is a line in “HAMLET” with which you may be familiar. Hamlet warns Polonius to be kind to the actors who are visiting the court, because the touring actors spread gossip about what goes on in Court. (AND SHAKESPEARE WAS AN ACTOR WHO PERFORMED AT COURT.) Hamlet says, “Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After your death, you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”So it it clear the author of HAMLET thought that players knew something about what went on in court.

In three of Shakespeare's four great tragedies--Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear--it can be argued that evil triumphs, even though in each play it also exhausts itself and burns out, and some sort of order is restored at the end of the play. However, the order is a vastly diminished one, and it has succeeded in destroying everything good.In Hamlet, the force of evil in the figure of Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, succeeds in murdering Hamlet's father, the King, and then marrying his wife, Hamlet's mother, in order to claim the throne. Hamlet is flawed--he is too prone to reason and to indecision, and his feigned madness starts to seem like real madness until he goes away and then returns. But he is also one of the most intelligent and attractive characters in all of literature. In the end, Hamlet dies in a swordfight with the brother of Ophelia, his girlfriend who killed herself after Hamlet killed her father, and basically everyone else dies, too, except for Hamlet's college friend, Horatio, who gives his epitaph, and a kind of fascist-seeming prince from a neighboring country, Fortinbras, shows up with his army to take over Denmark and reassert order. The death of Hamlet is a victory for evil.In Othello, the main character, who is a great warrior but prone to jealousy and impetuous action, is deceived by a very evil counselor, Iago, into believing that his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful to him. Despite the fact that she is deeply in love with him, and faithful, and Othello himself of course loves her beyond meaure, he winds up believing Iago's lies and strangles her, then learns the truth and kills himself by stabbing himself in the heart. Iago does not make it out alive, but as the personification of pure evil, he destroys the goodness of Othello and Desdemona.The plot of King Lear is so complicated I won't summarize it all. Basically, the King divides his kingdom between his three daughters, but his one true daughter, Cordelia, loves him so purely that she can't lie to him in order to get one third of the kingdom. He banishes her, the two evil sisters take over, and eventually they banish Lear to the heath, where he goes mad. After a long harrowing period of his descent into madness, he is finally re-united with Cordelia, who has brought an army with her to recapture the kingdom and get rid of the evil sisters. The good guys win the battle, but unfortunately Cordelia has been captured, and she is hanged before Lear can save her. The play ends with him carrying her out in his arms and howling in grief, and then he dies of a broken heart. Pretty much everyone is dead by now, including all the forces of evil, but they leave a vastly diminished world, and Cordelia, who is a symbol of pure goodness and love, is dead.These three plays are basic touchstones of English literature, and it is interesting that each is such a powerful statement of the power of evil to destroy the good. Theere is a lot to be said about what this means for the formation of British culture and the American culture that derives from it.