I live in Salt Lake, my mom lives in Salt Lake. She works on campus, and I go to school on campus (imagine that). So we carpool back and forth every day. We get a lot of talking done in those commuting hours, and the other night as we were headed back north, I read an essay out loud to her from last year's Criterion. It's titled "Something Rotten: Hamlet's Onto-Ecology." We were able to discuss several elements of Hamlet with each other as they came up in the essay. The essay focused largely on the body and the existence of the soul, and how human beings are a part from other creatures because we know and can ponder on our own existence. We sorted through that philosophy a little, and then we went off on another tangent about the conspiracy that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic in the very Protestant England. If you read Hamlet that way, as Shakespeare being a Catholic, there is a lot of underlying proof, mostly in respects to purgatory and the salvation of the soul.
Very interesting stuff.
The essay also focused largely on the theme of decay in Hamlet. Because of the death of his father, Hamlet was undoubtedly cornered by thinking of decay, and he mentions so frequently the matter of bodies lying in the earth becoming rotten and decomposed. After reading this mentioned essay on onto-ecology, I read more of Hamlet, and in act four, scene three when Hamlet is being questioned on where he put the body of Polonius, Hamlet tells his uncle that Polonius is "at supper...Not where he eats, but where 'a eaten." Then he goes on to say, "A man may fish with the worm that hath eat / of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that / worm." This quote right here illustrates the cycle of decay, and that once our souls separate our bodies, our bodies become sustenance to maintain other forms of life.
Anyway, I'm glad I read the ontology essay before finishing Hamlet so I was able to read in to the theme of decay and death.
After all, something was indeed rotten in Denmark.
