Existence Of The Afterlife In Hamlet

Mortality: Existence of the Afterlife?

“Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day… unseen, unheard, but always near. Still loved, still missed and very dear.” Is there an afterlife? This quote mentions how even in heaven are loved ones will always be in our hearts. Most people think heaven is a peaceful place where the souls of the dead would go after they’ve passed away. It depends on religious experience, the bible, preconceptions of the world and existentialism. Heaven can be known has peaceful, mysterious, religious or spiritual. Throughout the tragedy of Hamlet prince of Denmark (“Hamlet”), mortality is one of the main themes and always being questioned. C.S. Lewis believes that you shouldn’t over analyse and just enjoy,

Lewis mentions how “is not ‘a man who has to avenge his father’ but ‘a man who has been given a task by a ghost” (Lewis). The Ghost creates Hamlet’s and other characters minds. The topic or even the action of death appears because of the Ghost, but Lewis does not believe that those are the reasons why the subject of Hamlet is death. Lewis says, “The sense in which death is the subject of Hamlet will become apparent if we compare it with other plays”. He compares it with Macbeth, Brutus, Lear and Romeo where “death is the end”, “they think of dying: no one thinks, in these plays, of being dead” then for Hamlet “we are kept thinking about it all the time”. Hamlet’s fear of death; not a “physical fear of dying but a fear of being dead. With Lewis’s experience he says he wished that when he was younger “I could have enjoyed; but I had got it into my head that the only proper and grown-up way was of appreciating Shakespeare was to be very interested in the truth and subtlety of his character drawing”. So, he believes that it ruins the play if you over analyse

From the beginning of act one where the Ghost first appeared to when Hamlet kills himself in Act V. The Ghost represents foreshadowing spiritually, the bloodbath and “Chaos is come again” as C. S. Lewis mentions. Hamlet thinks, speaks and mentions suicide even after he sworn avenge, his problems lies much deeper than simple grief over his father’s murder. The anger that Hamlet has for is mother isn’t because of the action she did by marrying his uncle and moving on so quickly from his dad, but of the fear that someone’s life can be easily forgotten after death and that a life can no longer have meaning. His crisis is morality and not existential. Death has many variety and depth of it’s meditations (The Ghost: spiritual death and Yorick’s skull: physical death). Mortality is the shade that covers each scene of the play. There are many questions asked but very few are answered such as what happens after death? The dread of the afterlife “conscience does make cowards of us all... thus the native hue of resolution— Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (. Hamlet comes to conclusions and finds a solution to answer what happens after