Do you find the ending of Hamlet satisfactory?

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Remind yourself of the final section of the play, from the entrance of Claudius, Laertes and Gertrude. How satisfying an ending do you find this?

The creation of great tragedy is the rarest of literary finds. The main reason we have just a small number of sincere tragedies is that our cultures have developed nurturing attitudes towards human experience and death. This has hindered the formation of tragic perspectives. These attitudes have various social and religious forms but they all have two purposes. The first is to reduce the uniqueness of death by understanding it as simply the common fate of nature, and the second is to contradict the finality of death, understanding it as simply the doorway to another life in eternity.

Tragedy becomes a possibility when consciousness finds society inadequate to perceptions of a specific human destiny. This emergent tragic awareness finds its realization in art when it can display death as a passing over into eternity and also an end to suffering. In this sense, tragedies are subversive in that they obstruct the tendency of cultures to accommodate the deaths of individual members.

At the centre of all great tragedies are obstinate,