Graves in Shakespeare

Grave.  1) A place of burial for a dead body. 2) used as an allusive term for death.  Ever featured in horror movies and spooky stories, graves and graveyards are a typical Halloween symbol because they themselves are the site of death, and said to be the original homes of ghosts and zombies.  

In Hamlet, an entire scene (Act V, Scene 1) is dedicated to Hamlet and Horatio watching two gravediggers converse while they work. It is quite ironic that, though the characters are gravediggers, Shakespeare actually refers to those two as “First Clown” and “Second Clown.” Perhaps we should credit Shakespeare with inventing the creepy horror-movie clown! During the scene, the First Clown says that “There is no ancient gentleman but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers: they hold up Adam’s profession.” (V.1)  

This same idea of grave-diggers as indispensable members of the community appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, when the narrator affirms that “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery.” (1) In both Hamlet and The Scarlet Letter, we can recognize that graves, which often foreshadow ominous storylines or become symbols, are also ancillary to the function of a society.  

However, our connotations of the grave-yard impart a deathlike motif to whatever story we are hearing. The First Clown adds a religious nuance to our understanding of a graveyard by mentioning that “Adam digged.” (V.1) The First Clown’s remark not only glorifies his own seemingly low-class position, but also pushes against our modern-day connotations of the grave-yard as a secular image. Adam, the purest man, created a holy place to lay the dead, who deserve to be remembered by humans and reconnected with the natural world.   

Shakespeare made use of the eerie and frightening connotation of the grave to compliment the deathlike and often gory storylines in his tragedies. Now we have developed an even stronger image of a grave, shaped by Poltergeist, Beetlejuice, and Night of the Living Dead. So even though Shakespearean societies seem so far away, perhaps we have more in common with the 16th Century English than we thought.

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