In Tudor England, the sons of noblemen had to choose a literary or popular figure to model themselves on, upon whom to base a large part of their disposition. Many chose to emulate Hamlet.
At first glance, it’s easy to see why. The tortured, poetic soliloquies. The commanding dominance over his lover, repulsive to us now but no doubt inspiring to a young aristocrat of the time. His resistance to control and subjugation. His desire to avenge the injustices of his father’s death.
Manliness, which in retrospect we consider Shakespeare’s tragic hero to be lacking, personified to them through Hamlet and his debilitating introspection.
Another of Hamlet’s character traits so lauded by these men-in-training was no doubt his inclination for the melodramatic. Especially around the topic of death, ‘The Dane’ was prone to lofty and flamboyant theatrics. His ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy stands tall as one of the greatest ruminations on death, courage and the unknown in the English literary canon. He wonders;
Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Death is understandably a theme on Hamlet’s mind. His father’s ghost has just told him of his uncle’s malevolent fratricide, and made Hamlet swear to exact his revenge. Hamlet’s psyche is both processing the results of and plotting the execution of a death, a murder, and this duality is noticeable in his oscillating attitudes towards his own ‘mortal coil’.
Perhaps the attitude that Hamlet takes which we would be most receptive to, both in Tudor training and in our modern times, is his romanticisation of death. We’re suckers for a charming death quote, a pithy but profound aphorism comparing the tribulation of death to the great curtain fall, the great leveller, the great unknown… whatever death is, we feel the need to call it great.
We’re in love with talking about death, in no small part owing to the wealth of previous literary material. There’s no need to look further than Shakespeare:
‘But here, upon this bank and shoal of time / We’d jump the life to come.’ [Macbeth]
‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.’ [Julius Caesar]
‘To die, to go we know not where; / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’ [Measure for Measure’]
Shakespeare presents us with a host of death-aesthetic quotes, but he’s not alone. Death and its ideation permeates more modern literature also:
‘He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.’ [Gatsby]
‘Death is a beautiful thing. It takes so much away, but it leaves us with this—a baby’s heartbeat.’ [Beloved]
‘Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time’. [Never Let Me Go]
Why have we always felt the need to romanticise death?
Notice that in literature, film, and art, death often symbolizes something more extraordinary—be that love, sacrifice, or destiny. By romanticizing it, we give death structure and meaning, an interpretive framework which makes it easier to process. We can soften the harsh reality of death by poeticising it. We can construct narratives where death becomes a moment of transcendence rather than just a bleak ending.
Less practically, we might think there’s a certain beauty in the melancholy of death—consider Gatsby staring at the green light, knowing he can never reach it. The mourning, longing, and sorrow of death and loss have a poetic quality; we make death feel more like an art form than a biological reality.
Much like Hamlet, we’re uncomfortable when confronted by the bleak realities of death. We always have, and we always will, look for ways to comfort ourselves, using this process of romanticisation to help us reshape death. We use the poetic and dramatic form to fashion death into a literary device, purposefully dulling the knife’s edge so that we might hold it by the blade, and comprehend it fully. ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all’, Hamlet concluded. Rarely have words written in the 17th century been so enduring.
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