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The dramatis personae of mythical or literary tragedy are characters towards whom fate slowly reveals inevitable destruction, but tragedy is not limited to the unfolding of an unavoidable fate. In Hamlet, tragedy extends its concerns into landscape and axial directionality. Landscapes in plays of myth and literature give a specific location for imagining the moods and elements for the particular genre. Axial direction refers to the aim of the play's action, as in what direction is the play's action aimed. The clowns at the grave, much like the ghost Hamlet, orient the Dane prince to the psychology of verticality, and, by means of homeopathic language, lead young Hamlet's soul into memoria. Any serious investigation of tragedy, and tragedy is vested in seriousness, needs to track ideational antecedents (rather, go into the past by means of tragedy's relationship with past events).
Aristotle (1992) laid the first tie on the track to the modern understanding of tragedy when he wrote the following: Tragedy, therefore, is an imitation of a worthy or illustrious and perfect action, possessing magnitude, in pleasing language, using separately the several species of imitation in its parts, by men acting, and not through narration, through pity and fear effecting a purification from such like passions. (pp. 10 - 11; italics mine) The action of tragedy is perfect since it is inextricably tied to fate. There is no way out of the circumstances except onward and further into them. The magnitude that tragedy possesses is a leap out of a personal history and into the realm of mythology. Theater-goers from Aristotle to present seek tragedy to witness "myth, which gives full place to every sort of atrocity, [and] offers more objectivity to the study of such lives and deaths than any examination of personal motivation" (Hillman 1964 / 1988, p. 81). Pity and fear (or terror) are principle emotions of the characters of Shakespeare's tragedy. The words, "Alas, poor ghost" (Shakespeare, p. 894), marks Hamlet's pity for the ghost, and terror is expressed in his cry, "Oh, God" (ibid. )!
Hamlet pities the skull of poor Yorick at the open grave, and his imagination becomes full of terror and abhorrence as he contemplates death (p. 927). The language of the Hamlet tragedy is pleasing to the audience but not the characters, and it is the possessive magnitude of tragedy's language that pleases. An obscure association rises when Chaucer's idea of tragedy in the Canterbury Tales is juxtaposed to the image of the grave in tragedy. The monk defines tragedy as "a story concerning someone who has enjoyed great prosperity but has fallen from his high position into misfortune and ends in wretched-ness (sic. ). Tragedies are commonly written in verse with six feet, called hexameters" (Chaucer 1989, p. 575; italics mine). Contemporary associations with the metaphor of 'six feet' leads to imagining a grave, as in six feet under.
Elizabethan graves were shallow (Rogers-Gardner 1995) and bear no direct allusion to contemporary notions of a grave's depth, but, as meaning-making through imagination takes place today, the association is allowed. What this obscure excursion elucidates is the relatively mercurial influence that the image of the grave provides tragedy. Somehow, the grave is difficult to approach directly; therefore, by means of indirection I make my The deep impression of the grave's image in tragedy is indirectly contained in Nietzsche's idea of the effect of tragedy. "Now the grave events are supposed to be leading pity and terror inexorably towards the relief of discharge" (1993, p. 106 - 7; italics mine). Nietzsche uses the word 'grave' to carry a weighty importance for the plot of tragedy. He does not use the grave plot as a weighty image for tragedy. Where do some of the principal characters of tragedy lie in the end?
Oedipus at Colors, Medea's children, Antigone, Harmon, Polyneices, King Hamlet, and Ophelia all relentlessly end in a grave plot. The very image of the grave imbues people with pity and terror. Pity is feeling which arrests the mind in the presence whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is feeling which arrests the mind in the presence whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause. (Joyce 1916 / 1970, p. 204) Joyce uses the word "grave" much as Nietzsche does above, to express serious importance.
There is a grave pity for the human sufferer and a grave terror of the secret cause in tragedy. For Hamlet, pity is the emotion that enables him to feel into, in other words 'unite with', the personal sufferings of his father's spirit. Also, terror is the emotion that binds Hamlet into swearing to remember the ghost. A major complaint of Hamlet, other than the begging question of madness, lies in his inability to act. The action of tragedy, according to Joyce, is arrested because the feelings are equivocally static. "The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and pity" (Joyce, p. 205). Is it a wonder that Hamlet does not act overtly in the tragic landscape of Elsinore when his emotion is arrested between pity and Although the emotion may be arrested in tragedy, what do landscape and vertical directionality have to do with the tragedy of Hamlet?
The global landscapes of Hamlet are as follows: a platform, rooms in castles and houses, the queen's closet, a plain, a hall, a church yard. They offer little in a macrocosmic scheme and beg for detail. So if landscape may offer anything in particular to the understanding of tragedy, it must come through a specific detail (taken up below). The vertical psychology of Hamlet is below: a question of the throne's succession, the ghost's internement to swear from beneath the platform -- "fellow in the cellarage" (Shakespeare, p. 895), the shallow depth of the grave, Claudius's peace to Hamlet about lineage.
Vertical imagination takes H hamlet into ancestry, the ghost, and the grave. The grave is an image of tragedy left out of much psychological and literary reflection. For example, the grave scene with the clowns in Shakespeare's Hamlet is brushed off by literary critics as superfluous and trivial (Rogers-Gardner 1995, lecture, May). Literary critics question the necessity of the scene and propose that its removal improves the play (ibid. ). I searched the MLA and the Psychology Journals and Books at San Jose State's Clarke Library for Hamlet and Gravediggers or Clowns. Out of 1122 literary books and journals about Hamlet, the search yielded one five-page article on the combination.
The psychological search on Hamlet was not as fruitful, having no references in 42 journals and 24 books. In the last art presentation of our class, the artist proclaimed that the little girl with the knife in her chest was dead and on her way to the grave. Many students would not allow themselves to imagine this little girl dead and in a grave. How can the grave's image, so preponderant in tragedy, be covered up with dirty Archetypal psychology starts in pathology (Hillman 1993), and what could be more pathological than to go against one of the fundamental prescriptions from Christianity: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image" (Exodus 21: 3). A graven image is one that is etched in stone, permanently engraved. A grave's tombstone is not only an artifice for remembrance of a dead body's place, it is engraved (indelibly fixed) with an epitaph that holds a particular image of the deceased.
The plot of Hamlet is to indelibly fix Claudius for his murderous sin against the throne. It is my fantasy here that the 2000 -plus year sanction against graven images inhibits fantasizing about the image of tragedy's grave. Completing his thoughts about knowing the downward plunge and imagining an...
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