Grief and Hamlet
Molly Knight wrote the other day about Natasha Richardson's death, and she mentioned Joan Didion's experiences. I commented with a read I'd been meaning to pass along here, Meghan O'Rourke's ongoing "Long Goodbye" series for Slate. After her mother's death, O'Rourke is exploring different aspects of the experience, and it's difficult to click away. Her grief reading of Hamlet is my favorite installment so far.
Hamlet is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief, Shakespeare understands, is a social experience. It's not just that Hamlet is sad; it's that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. And Shakespeare doesn't flinch from that truth. He captures the way that people act as if sadness is bizarre when it is all too explainable. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is "common." His uncle Claudius chides him to put aside his "unmanly grief." It's not just guilty people who act this way. Some are eager to get past the obvious rawness in your eyes or voice; why should they step into the flat shadows of your "sterile promontory"? Even if they wanted to, how could they? And this tension between your private sadness and the busy old world is a huge part of what I feel …
