Graveyard, skulls, and Ophelia's burial

Scene summary

Two gravediggers dig Ophelia's grave, she who drowned, and debate whether one who seeks his own death deserves Christian burial. The first, pretentious, argues that whoever goes into the water of his own will is responsible for the act, and the second admits that if she were not noble she would be buried outside Christian rites. The first laments that the powerful have the privilege of drowning and hanging themselves more than other Christians. Singing, he throws skulls out of the grave. Hamlet and Horatio, who approach, imagine whose they might be: a politician's, a courtier's, a lawyer's, a landowner's. Hamlet concludes that death levels everyone, since each man inherits at the end only his own coffin.

Hamlet asks the gravedigger whose grave it is, and he answers with wordplay that the prince admires. The gravedigger says he began in the trade the day King Hamlet defeated Fortinbras, the same day the prince was born, and that Hamlet, sent to England for being mad, will not be noticed there, where men are as mad as he. He then shows a skull that spent twenty-three years in the earth: it is Yorick's, the court jester, who once poured a bottle of Rhenish wine over the gravedigger's head. Shaken, Hamlet holds it and recalls that Yorick carried him on his back a thousand times. He asks the skull where its jokes and songs are now, and asks it to go to a lady's chamber and tell her that, however much paint she uses, she will come to this look. He asks Horatio whether Alexander the Great would also be like this in the earth, and imagines the clay into which he was converted stopping up a beer barrel.

Ophelia's procession arrives, with the king Claudius, the queen Gertrude, Laertes and a few courtiers, and Hamlet and Horatio hide. The priest explains that, by the king's order, they grant only garlands and the tolling of the bell, because the death was doubtful, and without the royal order she would receive stones and gravel. Laertes, indignant at the minimal rites, orders that she be laid in the earth so that violets may spring from her, and tells the priest that his sister will be an angel when he is howling. Hamlet understands that it is Ophelia. Gertrude scatters flowers and says she had hoped to see her married to her son. Laertes curses whoever deprived her of reason and leaps into the grave; Hamlet reveals himself, "Hamlet, the Dane," and leaps after him. They fight until they are separated. Hamlet says he loved Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers could, asks Laertes what he would do for her, and withdraws. Claudius says Hamlet is mad, asks Gertrude to watch him, and reminds Laertes of the conversation of the day before.