The Importance of Setting in Hamlet

Layne Bolden

            Though on the surface setting may seem unimportant, it actually serves a larger purpose than to provide a backdrop against which literary action takes place. Setting has the power to inform the emotions and attitudes of the audience. This proves incredibly relevant in plays; setting is even more important to the narrative but often scarcely described. In works steeped in layers of meaning, such as Hamlet, setting acts as a key to perhaps unraveling some of these layers. Most of the action in Hamlet takes place in the castle, but some of the most notable scenes occur in a nearby graveyard, and with good reason. Placing such scenes as Act 5, Scene 1 in a graveyard emphasizes the play’s obsession with questions of mortality and death.

            In many ways, the first scene of the final act mirrors the famous “To Be or Not To Be” scene occurring earlier in the play, in which Hamlet, standing in the same graveyard, contemplates whether or not life is worth living. Similarly, the last scene before Hamlet’s death concerns itself with mortality and the fleeting nature of life, but with an even greater sense of urgency, as if Hamlet somehow knows his fate. This time, Hamlet also witnesses’ Ophelia’s funeral and gets into a fight with her brother, Laertes, inside of her grave. This fight within a grave at a funeral held in a graveyard is in and of itself a layered instance of setting-related imagery that should cause the audience to consider ideas such as death and what it actually means and whether or not it is quite as significant as Hamlet and Laertes believe it to be. Consider the context of the fight itself:

“HAMLET: [comes forward] What is he whose grief

Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow

Conjures the wand'ring stars, and makes them stand

Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,

Hamlet the Dane. [Leaps in after Laertes.]

LAERTES: The devil take thy soul! [Grapples with him.]

HAMLET: Thou pray'st not well.

I prithee take thy fingers from my throat;

For, though I am not splenitive and rash,

Yet have I in me something dangerous,

Which let thy wisdom fear. Hold off thy hand!”

The main focus in this passage should be less on the words and more of the irony when considering the characters’ attitudes in context with the larger events of the play, as well as with the setting that frames them. Hamlet and Laertes are uncannily similar, both young men unhealthily bent on revenge, both with a connection to the young woman who recently committed suicide, and both eventually show themselves willing to kill in order to get their revenge. Though they fight formally at a later time, this is a powerful instance of no-holds-barred emotion and an almost animalistic way of expressing it. The entire reason that this fight seems so important is the fact that it takes place in a grave. On one level, it shows that the two completely disregard everything around them in their desire to attack one another. On another level, though, it foreshadows the outcome of the pair’s second battle – Hamlet ending up in a grave of his own. Unrelated to the actual events of the play, by having the two fight inside the grave of the newly dead Ophelia, it shows a sort of disrespect to her, even though it is likely that neither Hamlet nor Laertes would have intended it that way. In any case, it should cause the audience to pause and wonder what, if anything, Shakespeare is attempting to convey. Much of the play focuses on attitudes toward life and death, and whether they really mean as much as one might think. This fight provides a subtle nod to such attitudes; does Ophelia’s death really mean that much if her grave serves no purpose but as a place for a fight between two angry young men?

            Whenever an author employs setting with such specific connotations as a graveyard, the audience should take notice. In Hamlet, Shakespeare sets one of the most iconic scenes of all time – the “To Be or Not To Be” scene – in a graveyard, but he also sets the second-to-last scene there as well. By doing so, he instantly brings to mind ideas of life and death. Against the larger thematic backdrop of the play, one should wonder what this scene says about the significance of life and death. The end of the scene gives a slight nod to the problem as Hamlet and Laertes battle it out in Ophelia’s grave. No matter what the audience might take away from the scene, one thing is for certain – it is not long before Hamlet ends up back in that same graveyard, though under far different circumstances.