It has been said that writer’s use memento mori to represent how the prospect of death serves to emphasise the emptiness and fleetingness of earthly pleasures. Compare and contrast the ways in which authors use momento mori and the extent to which they can be seen as delivering a moral message.

In many texts writers use death to provide a tragic commentary on the futility of man and humanist achievements yet such depictions can often be conflicting in their various manifestations in texts. The Gravedigger Scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet provides a striking example; such a theme is explored through the playwright’s exploration of his protagonist, Hamlet, and the cynical gravediggers which become in this scene almost mirrored images of each other, yet subtly at odds.

The graveyard scene opens on two gravediggers (Or ‘Clowns’ – an odd association considering their sobering affiliation with death) who are preparing the grave that will house Ophelia’s coffin. As they dig they discuss the propriety of allowing the deceased women a Christian burial in consecrated ground, when the factual circumstances surrounding her death argue suicide. The two Clowns obviously have no knowledge of Ophelia’s mental condition at her death and judge simply according to external fact. The use of brute and tangible fact is served up again in the riddle the First Clown serves up to his partner: ‘What is he that builds stronger than the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter’. The fellow served the riddle is stumped and the one who served it supplies the answer: a gravedigger, of course, since ‘the houses he makes lasts till doomsday.’  Matter-of-factly the gravedigger touches on a simple truth. Seen from the perspective of the ongoing cycle of life, the achievements of human beings are transient; an ancient perception, but as delivered by this fellow, without resonance. True, the grave does indeed outlive the maker but the gravedigger’s words delve no deeper than superficial farce. They convey no sense that his perception of death has altered his attitude towards life, that it has had an internal impact. And it has not had on him such transformative impact because he has looked at death from within only the narrow framework of his daily labour and not from within the only framework that will define it in its reality: the trajectory of the individual life and the inherent fruitlessness of the human condition. Andrew Marvell makes a similar point in his poem ‘To his coy Mistress’ in which the threat of death is used as a seductive ploy; an association which, seemingly, carries no moral message for mankind of significance. Arguably the speaker, unlike the Clowns, appears to have been fundamentally changed by his contemplation of death evoking the language of philosophy (‘...we cannot make our sun’) in recognition of mans mortality. Yet such philosophical argument is parodied by Marvell in his use of an antithetic romantic denouement, likening the passing of time to the devouring qualities of ‘am’rous birds of prey’.  

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The Prince, Hamlet, will supply that larger framework, but will reach a conclusion that initially it seems does not differ from that of the gravedigger or the male seducer in Marvell’s poem. Hamlet enters and is greeted by that most typical memento mori, a human skull, thrown up from the grave by the gravedigger. Hamlet handles it and speculates on the part it played when fully fleshed and alive, ascribing it to the roles of politician and courtier amongst others. Such association are trite, nonetheless, as the Prince comments with wit on the vanity of such human endeavour in the ...

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