TEXT:
LAERTES
What ceremony else?
HAMLET
That is Laertes,
A very noble youth: mark.
LAERTES
What ceremony else?
Priest
Her obsequies have been as far enlarged
As we have warrantise: her death was doubtful;
And, but that great command o'ersways the order,
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged
Till the last trumpet: for charitable prayers,
Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her;
Yet here she is allow'd her virgin crants,
Her maiden strewments and the bringing home
Of bell and burial.
LAERTES
Must there no more be done?
Priest
No more be done:
We should profane the service of the dead
To sing a requiem and such rest to her
As to peace-parted souls.
LAERTES
Lay her i' the earth:
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A ministering angel shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.
NOTES:
Funerals
Shakespeare’s plays actually feature a great many funerals. But, given that it was against the law to put relegious ceremonies on stage (or to use religious language), it is worth noting that whenever there’s a ceremony on stage, you can bet that it will go wrong. The plays are full of weddings and funerals that go wrong; in Titus Andronicus, the burial is interrupted because Titus refuses to let his sons be buried in the family tomb. In Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen buries herself in the face of defeat - but of course, she’s still alive. And in Richard III, the funeral of a dead king is subverted when Richard interrupts its procession, seduces the widowed queen and sends the corpse to be buried in a different resting place. In Hamlet, there are multiple funerals that have not happened properly. The play begins in the shadow of the former king’s death, and Hamlet is at pains to tell us how little of the proper respect has been shown. Instead of an appropriate time of mourning, his mother the queen has married Claudius so fast that he can joke that the food for the appropriate funeral dinner was served to the guests at the wedding. After that, Polonius’ body was likewise hastily interred - he didn’t have a proper funeral, and was buried “hugger mugger” (see the Glossary page for more on this.) And now we have a third funeral, for Ophelia, which is likewise a ‘maimed rite’. Something really is rotten in the state of Denmark, when even in death one cannot be guaranteed any hope of an appropriate funeral.
Trumpets
According to the Book of Revelations (11:15), the seventh trumpet shall signal the end of the world and the beginning of the Kingdom of Heaven. The ‘last trumpet’ is an apocryphal way of describing the end of time. When I directed a play about the end of the world, one of the more peculiar challenges was to find a sound effect that might replicate what such eschatological trumpets might sound like…!