A Wedding and Four Funerals: Conjunction and Commemoration in Hamlet

Summary

There are a lot of funerals in Hamlet: four, if you count the first for Hamlet’s father, marred by that one hasty wedding, the ‘hugger-mugger’ (4.5.82) burial of Polonius, Ophelia’s abbreviated obsequies, and finally the somewhat incongruous soldier’s funeral for Hamlet himself. The first three leave the chief mourners bitterly disappointed, and both are almost as distressed by the funeral arrangements as they are by the deaths of their loved ones. Laertes is furious at the ignominious obscurity of his father’s interment, and he is enraged at the priest for denying his sister ‘sage requiem’ (5.1.232). Hamlet is nearly mad with melancholy at the shocking brevity of his mother’s mourning. From beginning to end, this is a play obsessed with getting a decent burial, and nobody seems to get one. What constitutes a decent burial in Shakespeare’s time? The answer is not clear because the Elizabethan religious settlement was so ambiguous on this point. A growing belief in predestination, the subordination of human works to faith alone, and the abolition of purgatory and indulgences made traditional Catholic funeral practices such as the requiem, the annual obit, and other intercessory rites and prayers unnecessary. Elizabeth’s bishops, meeting in convocation in 1563, reaffirmed the Protestant position and denounced ‘sacrifices of Masses . . . for the quick and the dead’ as ‘blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits’, and the requiem continued to be left out of the vernacular funeral service in The Book of Common Prayer.