"Who's there?" Hamlet's Mourning and His Father's Ghost

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, University of Bath (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences), course: MSc Death & Society, language: English, abstract: Hamlet's mourning is part of a complex network of individual memories, feelings, perceptions and actions on the one, social interrelations, discourses and behavioural patterns on the other hand. It is embedded in reciprocal interpretations and role attributions that use language as main media and therefore rely on conceptual, particularly religious traditions. Hamlet's inner and his outer world are continuously interacting and crystallise, as it were, in permanently renewed linguistic expressions and patterns.The Ghost, his father's after-death presence, is an integral part of this intersubjective universe. The quest for its/his identity, therefore, implied in the play's very beginning ("who's there?"), necessarily results in continuously changing ambiguous results mirroring the other protagonists' changing perspectives. The main evidence for the Ghost's "reality" is the play's plot itself that develops around the present absence of the mental, social and physical dead.Many features of Hamlet's experiencing, talking and behaving illustrate recent empirical insights in mourning and grief. The iridescent complexity of mourning as a social phenomenon, however, that the drama is able to unfold will hardly ever be attained by means of social scientific studies.