“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.” This quote from Rumi has a great irony in the play Hamlet written by William Shakespeare. When Hamlet’s father dies, he returns as a ghost and asks Hamlet to take revenge for his death. There is a question, however, if Hamlet’s father really did come, or it was just part of his grieving process. There is a constant battle throughout the play regarding the naturalness of certain aspects of Hamlet’s grief. In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare uses the five stages of grief in humans to show natural grieving can be shown through revenge and suicide.
“Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.” This is said to Hamlet by his deceased father, King Hamlet. In translation he was saying take revenge for my horrible murder for it is a crime against nature.
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O God, God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!”. At the beginning of the play Hamlet is clearly suicidal. Suicide is almost always a side effect of depression. Being depressed is a crucial step in the five stages. Depression after a tragic loss is often seen as unnatural and something someone can just snap out of, and this was a very common thought of the time. No one fully understood the effects of grief, or even the human mind. Claudius even called Hamlet’s depression, “unmanly grief”, because everyone experiences a death of father eventually, so why could he not just get over it? Everyone grieves for a different amount of time, and today we see that as natural. In addition, if someone did not at any point in time feel sadness after the loss of a loved one, it seems that that would be by far more unnatural. The argument that someone may be mad or mentally unstable just because they are depressed seems