Hamlet Literary Analysis - Stages of Grief

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross developed a theory based on what she perceived to be the stages of acceptance of death. Her theory has been taken further by psychologists and therapists to explain the stages of grief in general. Kubler-Ross identified five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, as happening in that order. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet exhibits all five stages of grief, we can assume in relation to the recent death of his father, but not necessarily in this order, and in fact the five seem to overlap in many parts of the play.

Instead of denial and isolation, which is the first stage according to Kubler-Ross, Hamlet dwells in a state of depression. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Department of Psychiatry states “Depression occurs as a reaction to the changed way of life created by the loss. The bereaved person feels intensely sad, hopeless, drained and helpless” (www.uams.edu). Hamlet’s depression is revealed in his fourth soliloquy. “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ Or take arms against a sea of troubles,/ And by opposing them? To die, to sleep;” (Shakespeare III.i.57-60) Meditative and weary Hamlet gives up on any hope for the future. He contemplates suicide making obvious his profound state of despair. Hamlet’s thoughts of suicide continue in this painful speech, “His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! Oh God! God!/ How weary, stale flat and unprofitable,/ Seem to me all the uses of this world!/ Fie on’t! Ah fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden” (I.ii.132-135) Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, that strengthens Hamlet’s intense depression.

While Hamlet may still be feeling depressed Hamlet moves into the stage of denial and isolation. Hamlet feels the effects of denial and isolation mostly due to his love, Ophelia. Both Hamlet’s grief and his task constrain him from realizing this love, but Ophelia’s own behavior clearly intensifies his frustration and anguish. By keeping the worldly and disbelieving advice of her brother and father as “watchmen” to her “heart” (I.iii.46), she denies the heart’s affection not only in Hamlet, but in herself; and both denials add immeasurably to Hamlet’s sense of loneliness and loss—and anger. Her rejection of him echoes his mother’s inconstancy and denies him the possibility even of imagining the experience of loving an...

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...r. Hamlet speaks to Horatio quietly, almost serenely, with the unexultant calm which characterizes the end of the long, inner struggle of grief. He has looked at the face of death in his father’s ghost, he has now endured death and loss in all the human beings he has loved, and he now accepts those losses as an inevitable part of his own condition. “He states, “The readiness is all” suggesting what is perhaps the last and most difficult task of mourning, his own readiness to die” (Bloom 135). Hamlet recognizes and accepts his own death.

Hamlet throughout the play lives in a world of mourning. This bereavement route he experiences can be related to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s theory on this process. The death of Hamlet’s spirit can be traced through depression, denial and isolation, bargaining, anger, and acceptance. The natural sorrow and anger of Hamlet’s multiple griefs include all human frailty in their protest and sympathy and touch upon the deepest synapses of grief in our own lives, not only for those who have died, but for those, like ourselves, who are still alive. Hamlet’s experience of grief, and his recovery from it, is one it which we ourselves respond most deeply.