Hamlet and Identity

Hamlet is one or more of the following:

A university-trained scholar.

A scientific rationalist.

A follower of stoic philosophy.

Montaignean skeptic.

Clinically depressed son/son-in-law/nephew.

A paltry lover.

Actor/dramaturge.

A Christian prince.

A pagan warrior.

Machiavellian killer.

A tricky fool, more fit to be son of the late king's jester than son of the late king himself.

"To thine own self be true": to which of these selves ought he be true? All of them, apparently, at one point or another.

Hamlet tries out the different roles until he finds the one that is most dramatically expedient. The play is like a maze, a game that Hamlet plays until he finds his way out--which is to say that he finds his fate, which is death.

The identity Hamlet creates for himself in Act 5 is a result of his experiences in Act 4, Scene 4, and in Act 5, Scene 1: the only two scenes in the play that take place outside of Elsinore. Hamlet has to get outside, get a bit of fresh air, observe Fortinbras, and dig about in the dirt a little to figure out his motivation. The graveyard scene is perhaps most apt: Hamlet fears death; he muses on the fate of the body, and then he viacariously encounters that fate in the most direct of fashions. He even ends up inside of a grave for a while, wrestling with Laertes. Finally, death is no longer a thought but a reality. Hamlet learns something from the gravedigger as well: that death is something one can grow accustomed to in such a way that the jokes can lose their sting. What is death to the gravedigger? A business opportunity, and that is all.

It is the intersection of all of the above identities that Hamlet stands upon in Act 5, Scene 2. Hamlet's allusion to scripture, his belief in the "special providence in the fall of a sparrow," is less a full-fledged Christian precept than it is a representation of the intersection of Christianity and stoicism, where the two modes of living arc together on the Venn diagram. Hamlet summarizes his acceptance of fate in two words: "Let be." He knows the role he is supposed to play, and he plays it. And in doing so, he robs death of its glory, which is and always has been merely the fear of it.