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If your father had been murdered—the way Hamlet’s was—you’d probably spend a lot of time thinking about death. And if there were people plotting to kill you—the way Hamlet’s stepfather is—you’d also probably spend a lot of time wondering about what happens in the great hereafter. That’s why one of Shakespeare’s themes in Hamlet is the mystery of death. Does Hamlet solve the mystery? Watch and learn.

Video Transcription:

If you watched Recaps 2 and 5, you know that Hamlet is a play about mysteries. I’ll add one more mystery to the stew—next.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet starts and ends with death. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the nature of death is one of the themes of this play.

Hamlet encounters death everywhere: In his father’s ghost, in Yorick’s skull, and in Polonius’s and Ophelia’s demises.

These run-ins prompt Hamlet to look at death from lots of different angles. Remember that the ghost of his father causes Hamlet to think about the spiritual aftermath of death. And remember that after Polonius’s death in Act IV, Hamlet comments that the worm that ate a king’s corpse might be used to catch a fish to feed a beggar. In other words, death is also the great equalizer.

So after all this philosophical pondering, what, exactly, does Hamlet discover about death? In a sense, nothing at all. Sure, Hamlet looks to death as a long-awaited moment of certainty. He sees death as a stepping stone to truth—and away from an ambiguous, dishonest world.

But in the end, how would Hamlet really know? After all, the only thing we know for certain about death is that it remains life’s greatest mystery.