How Does Shakespeare Present Death In Hamlet

Elizabethan era exploration and travel inspired an age of curiosity, the English Renaissance, and discovery full of life experiences for those who earn funding. The end of life experience is universal, the beliefs and behaviors associated with the afterlife and expressing grief are constantly reimagined and culturally bound to specific regions and times. Shakespeare’s time was a period of humanism which resulted in new, old Roman and Greek ways of thinking about death, and “became a more complicated issue than it had been in the earlier morality plays” (Best, 2011). Instead of portraying death as a Grim Reaper type figure that preyed upon every man, Shakespeare’s writing explored new ways of thinking about mortality and transcendence. Using the Ghost, Hamlet contains references to this idea in connection with death and mortality as the great equalizer, and in particular explores the idea of death as an “undiscovered country” in an era considered the Golden Age of Exploration.
Shakespeare, like other dramatists, combined new Renaissance thinking on the transformation of matter with traditional Christian
Ghosts are believed to have died in terrible and violent conditions, to be stuck in purgatory. Such circumstances result in an unhallowed burial ground, allowing the spirit to roam with the living (Secara, 2010). King Hamlet was murdered in his sleep, thus not ready for the afterlife and “deprived of his chance to receive three of the Sacraments that would have prepared him” (Low 454). The teaching of the Church and testaments was that the dead cannot return. Yet, there was wide circulation of ghosts and hauntings. In Hamlet’s soliloquy, he hesitates in his contemplation of suicide not because of the Christian belief in divine retribution and sin of taking ones’ own life, but his fear of an uncertain