Blurring the Boundaries of Class in “Hamlet” and “The Winter’s Tale”

April 13^th, 2018

Shakespeare’s low-status comedic characters – such as clowns or fools – often serve a function of satire: their poor position in society allows them to exist outside the margins of the play and comment on the events within. These metatextual sensibilities shift the audience’s focus away from the fictional world of the play and into an awareness of the real-world divisions of politics, wealth, and status. Both the Gravedigger in Hamlet and Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale embody aspects of this archetype, yet are unique in that they not only satirize their social betters but reveal, disrupt, and blur the traditional boundaries between rich and poor, high and low, to prove they are illusory. This essay will demonstrate how Shakespeare’s construction of the lowly Gravedigger as a double of Hamlet serves to reveal and deflate the prince’s upper-class pretensions, raising the poor man as a higher power; and demonstrate how Autolycus is similarly constructed as a disruptive force in his easy navigation of opposing social realms through use of consumes, showing class to be a superficial performative role.

The Gravedigger and Hamlet are of a different upbringing, a different class, and a different occupation, which is precisely why Shakespeare draws a connection between them: to make the two equal in their humanity. The Gravedigger claims that he came into his profession of death the “very day that young Hamlet was born” (V.1.137-38) and has therefore “been sexton here [in the castle graveyard], man and boy, thirty years” (V.1.151-52). His position sees him grow from a “boy” to a “man” just as Hamlet grows from the laughing boy upon Yorick’s back to the morose man holding his skull. Their fates are linked through their shared occupation with death, implicitly suggesting that their positions in life are likewise a matter of fate – the Gravedigger could have easily been a prince just as Hamlet could have been a pauper. This doubling continues in the sexton’s song, which claims that “in youth” he “did love” a woman (V.1.56), but “age” eventually “shipped [him] into the land” (implying the grave), “as if [he] had never been such [in love]” (V.1.66-9). It is not coincidental that Hamlet soon finds himself tumbling into the land (the grave) with Laertes, bemoaning the woman he did love in his youth, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead him back to the grave – all after his return to the land of Denmark by ship. Despite his princely status, Hamlet is at the mercy of a common labourer and his portents. As the sexton of Elsinore, the soon-to-be-dead members of the court are all destined to his care, to sink low into the ground alongside him – suggesting that the pretensions of wealth and status which hold them up above him in life are transitory, to eventually be deflated.

Shakespeare further uses the doubling of the men to invite contrast between them. When the Gravedigger’s callousness towards death – his violation of the sacred nature of the body – shocks Hamlet, Horatio suggests that “custom hath made it in him a property of easiness” (V.1.62-3). The Gravedigger is a man completely desensitized to death, greater than Hamlet in his experience and knowledge of the one thing the prince has tried so hard to understand. Hamlet suggests that the hands of those rich enough to avoid manual labour “hath the daintier sense,” a heightened sensitivity towards death, and while he frames this as a general statement, he describes himself perfectly (V.1.64-5). When the sexton confronts him with bones, the physical symbol of death, Hamlet’s own bones “ache to think on ‘t” (V.1.86). His dramatic metaphors of sleep, melting, and dew are all deflated by the Gravedigger’s presentation of reality, characterizing Hamlet not as an intellectual power but as a pretentious, sheltered schoolboy. Their comparison causes an inversion of power that questions the assumed superiority of the educated over the illiterate labourer.

This inversion is enacted through a shift in Hamlet’s conversational approach; his speech becomes diminished in reaction to the Gravedigger’s apparent intelligence and appropriation of upper-class wit. After being confronted by the sexton’s wordplay on the technicalities of death – how it reduces life to the past tense – Hamlet can only remark the that “the age is grown so picked that the tow of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe” (V.1.128-32). Hamlet sets up a class dynamic in which the poor diminish the rich; the idea of servants adopting of the language and persona – the “garb” – of their betters is threatening to him because it blurs the artificial divisions between the two groups, suggesting that the characteristics of class are learned, not inherent. The service, by adopting the power of the served, cause a reversal. This is precisely what Shakespeare enacts within the text. As the Gravedigger is in the employ of the royal family, the logic of Hamlet’s statement suggests that he is diminished by the sexton’s use of wit. It is thus no coincidence that Hamlet, in his desire for answers, resolves to speak simply, “by the card,” (V.1.128). He asks: “What man dost thou dig for?” (V.1.121); “How long is that since?” (V.1.136); “How came he mad?” (V.1.146); “How strangely?” (V.1.148); “Why? (V.1.143); “Nay, I know not” (V.1.167). To navigate the Gravedigger’s adopted wit, Hamlet is forced to reduce his normally eloquent speech to brief questions. While he directs the discussion, his temperament and voice is that of a servant patiently receiving his superior’s clever remarks; he thus begins to sound oddly like Horatio (his personal sounding-board) whose responses throughout the act and the play are often limited to the same short, passive remarks, such as: “What’s that, my lord?” (V.1.185). Power in conversation lies not in one’s native class, but in the assumption of a performative role; the poor, if given opportunity and education, can just as easily exert power against the pretensions of the rich.

The Gravedigger further realizes this dynamic within the text in a visual, literal form by throwing bones liberally from the grave; he takes a man’s skull only to, as Hamlet describes, “knock him about the sconce” in an act of “battery” (V.1.94-6). This is appalling, of course, only because Hamlet hypothetically imagines these men to be of the upper class: “a politician” (V.1.72), “a courtier” (V.1.76), “a lawyer” (V.1.92), “a great buyer of land” (V.1.96-7). In this, Hamlet makes absolutely no mention of commoners or even tradesman – his only concern is for the status of the learned and the courtly, those who own land rather than live on it, implying that he sees the lower class as having no status worth preserving. He may also be simply forgetting them due to a natural association of the poor with dirt; for example, he describes the Gravedigger’s shovel as “dirty” even though a shovel is naturally dirty in its function, suggesting the adjective is not representative of the object itself, but of the man holding it (V.1.95). While the Gravedigger’s callousness reveals these biases privileging the wealthy over the poor, it is this same callousness that confronts and blurs those lines; in his literal act of “o’erreach[ing]” the man’s skull (the skull of what Hamlet assumes to be a genteel man) the Gravedigger “o’erreaches” him on a symbolic level as well, positioning himself as the greater power between the two (V.1.73). The sexton renders the man’s body disjoined and dirty as he considered the poor dirty; the sextons limits the man’s dignity in death as he limited the poor in life. This inversion suggests that power and everything associated with it is not an inherent reflection of an individuals worth, but a reflection of circumstance.

While the Gravedigger’s presence clearly disrupts and reorients the dynamics of class, bringing the wealthy down to his level, Shakespeare also positions him above the genteel as an individual of unquestionable divine power. The sexton introduces this idea himself in his suggestion that “there is no ancient gentlemen but gard’ners, ditchers, and gravemakers. They hold up Adam’s profession” (V.1.28-30). In this, he claims that true nobility lies with those, like him, who work in the earth: the common people, the poor and meek in spirit. While not said explicitly, the connection he makes between himself and Adam lies in the fact that Adam was the first man, created from the dust and ashes in which the Gravedigger now works. This could be dismissed as an empty boast; however, Shakespeare reinforces it independently through Hamlet (suggesting true authorial intent rather than character bias), who remarks that the Gravedigger, in handling a skull, “jowls it to the ground as if it were Cain’s jawbone” (V.1.70-2). If he is able to inflict violence on Cain, it suggests that he holds a power over him – just as Adam would hold a position of fatherly superiority over his son. The fact that the Gravedigger is able to pass judgement on Cain through this association might also place him on the same level as God, the ultimate judge; Hamlet thus characterizes him as “one that would circumvent God,” one able to truly avoid the influence of omnipotence (V.1.73-4). Shakespeare uses biblical illusion to construct the Gravedigger as a man working in the dirt but of transcendent power, both low and high at the same time. Hamlet reinforces this paradoxical language of ascension in his naming of decay as “Lady Worm” (V.1.82), suggesting a genteel woman that literally eats dirt, while the Gravedigger offers Hamlet “Sir Yorick’s skull,” characterising him as noble despite the fact that no true gentleman would ever be a jester (V.1.170). The Gravedigger thus lifts Yorick up, just as Yorick once recognised the divinity in him by pouring “a flagon of Rhenish on [his] head” in what could be considered an act of anointing (V.1.169). Shakespeare is engaged in an effort of placing divinity in those without it to render the lines of class entirely meaningless, obliterating the boundaries between the two realms.

He carries this effort through into his later play, The Winter’s Tale, a story defined by reversals of fortune and transgressions of class; however, no character better demonstrates the artificiality of those classes than Autolycus. Like the Gravedigger, he comes into the play singing, calling attention to himself as a comedic character before grounding this comedy in notions of class, cutting off his song to say: “I have served Prince Florizel and in my time / wore three-pile; but now I am out of service” (IV.3.13-4). While a servant, he was still of high status, and the “time” of that status has passed, marking class as transitory and fleeting. It is telling that the only visual he can conjure to reflect that status is his clothing – he “wore three-pile,” a rich velvet – suggesting that one’s position in life is merely a function of costumes. This is set up to contrast his current state in rags, which he bemoans in his first scene, screaming, “O, help me, help me! Pluck but off these rags, and then, death, death … the loathsomeness of them offends me” (IV.3.55-60). Autolycus is not merely a respectable servant down on his luck – by becoming part of the lower class, he plays into the role of a man without a master, and thus a man without a leash; he is characterized as a shameless liar and a thief, taking upon himself the loathsomeness of his rags. His association of poverty with “death, death” also suggests that a return into his old clothes would be a return to life, a resurrection. Autolycus therefore spins a story of transformation in which “a woman … was turned into a cold fish for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her,” presumably her husband and therefore (in this time) her master (IV.4.316-8). He describes it as a ballad “very pitiful and as true” because it parallels the truth of his own story: his sudden transformation of state which brought him out of favour with the prince and pushed him out into the world as though a fish out of water (IV.4.318-9). This constructs class not as a rigid state but something one can transgress, just as Autolycus is a character defined by constant change. When he answers a request to sing, saying, “I can bear my part; you must know 'tis my occupation,” his meaning is unclear as he is shown to have multiple occupations: he sings plainly, he sings tall tales, and he sings as a form of enchantment, using a silver tongue to sell wares and lies, manipulating his audience into accepting whatever “part” he currently bears (IV.4.334-5). He is in a constant flux, adopting whichever role suits him best, indicating that a person’s navigation of society is not limited by the costume they were born into. Just as the Gravedigger’s appropriation of upper-class language allowed him to appropriate upper-class power, status is similarly a construction that one can build for themselves.

It is thus no surprise that as soon as Autolycus acquires “rich” “garments” from his former master, he drops the ‘poor man’ role and transforms himself into the royal servant he once was: the clothes restore him; they make the man (IV.4.879). He asks the Old Shepard: “Seest thou not the air of the court in these enfoldings? Hath not my gait in it the measure of the court? Receives not thy nose court-odor from me?” (IV.4.858-60). He suggests that the clothes have a look that reveals something in the gait of his walk, an odd air or odor that strangely marks him as superior. The comedic overtones of this exchange suggest that the court is not some mighty institution with an immutable scented essence, but a function of superficialities, appearances – royalty is an illusion maintained only by the clothes they wear. When the two Kings of the play reunite and are overcome with emotion, weeping, raising their hands, dropping their royal demeanours, a gentleman claims that “they were to be known by garment, not by favour” (V.2.51-2). They show themselves equal to any other man in their humanity, and thus all that remains to be seen is their clothing. This draws upon Early Modern England’s obsession with clothes as not merely a reflection of status, but as a total embodiment of it. In this sense, Autolycus is transgressive on a metatextual level as well, as his obsession with costumes, deceit, and roles all characterize him as an performer; in real-life, he is thus an actor playing an actor. When the character wears royal clothing, he disrupts divisions of class both on-stage and off, evoking the era’s anxieties about commoners or even gentlefolk seeing these plays and recognising that royalty is similarly an act of performance – one upheld only by those who believe in the illusion, who can suspend their disbelief.

In both Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare takes the divine right of kings and, through his fool characters, transfers that divinity unto into the poor, deflating the perceived superiority of the rich. The Gravedigger’s total control over Hamlet’s fate, the fates of the dead, and the fates of the entire royal court reveal the fragile and transitory status in which they all exist; they lack a true understanding of the world, and shy away from any indication that those they perceive as lesser share the same capacity for life and learning. Autolycus enacts this same idea visually in his adoption of clothing and roles at varying levels of economic and social status, suggesting that one’s position in life is sustained only by the costumes they wear – that class is a vague and undefined, artificial barrier that can easily be easily passed if one endeavors to construct status for themselves. While the two characters outwardly serve a comedic function, Shakespeare does not look down upon them; their disruptions of class distinctions serve a thematic purpose within the text and a practical one outside it, challenging the very real inequities of the social hierarchy.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet: The Pelican Shakespeare. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller and

Stephen Orgel, Penguin Books, 2001.

Shakespeare, William. The Winter's Tale: Folger Shakespeare Library. Edited by Barbara A.

Mowat and Paul Werstine, Simon and Schuster, 2009.