Hamlet; the Noir Adaption 2023 Act 5 Scene 1 Sub Scene 2

 Act Five

Act Five Scene One

Sub Scene Two

Respect for the dead

Hamlet and Horatio had arrived earlier and heard the gravediggers talk. Hamlet was not amused at the two making remarks on the dead and the faith that was there.

“Has this fellow no feeling of his business? He sings in grave-making.” Hamlet said to Horatio.

“Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.” Horatio had done his sessions of digging graves, some were there at the plot, and as most were done at odd hours; earlier of it, he had taken to muttering prayer verses. He was a killer of some sort but burying the dead was never a pleasant task. He had buried the Great Chamberlain on the instruction of Hamlet.

“Give him a burial, my dear friend. I had him killed and feared if his body was found, I will be called to explain.” Hamlet had told Horatio. “He was despicable to hide in my mother’s chamber. He had infringed his right and invaded my mother’s privacy.”

“Tell me not where he was to be. Be it the rack that will wreck my body, I won't be able to tell what I do not know.” Hamlet told Horatio. The latter had not hesitated to remove the body. He buried the body in the forest, in a grave he dug himself.

“Old man, I disliked you but above all, I have my loyalty to Hamlet. Stay there and do not return as a ghost to taunt us. Don’t forget, we still hold your daughter ransom.” Horatio spoke over the grave. “You may know me as a gentleman but I have hardened over the years. I am vicious now.”

“Tis e’en so. The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.” Hamlet’s words interrupted Horatio on his thoughts.

“To every person, their sanity to prevail in their task,” Horatio said to Hamlet’s words. “Some of us had it easier.”

At the grave, Albert had begun his digging, and to keep him company, he also sang.

“But age with his stealing steps
Hath clawed me in his clutch,
And hath shipped me into the land, 75
As if I had never been such.”

“Oops, I hit something hard.” Albert reached to pick it up. It was a skull.

“The part that remained harder to give away to the soil.” Albert held up the skull. “All of you are gone, yet you remain intact here. Do you hear me? I doubt without ears you could listen.”

Hamlet saw the gravedigger holding the skull to talk to it and then placing it on the side moving it every then and now.

“That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once.” Hamlet was naïve most times; he assumed everyone like him as an actor would have sung before. “Why does he disrespect it by making it a mantlepiece shifting it on fancy?”

“How the knave jowls it to the ground as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder!” Cain was the first to murder Abel according to the Book. The jaw-bone is not Cain's, but the ass's with which Cain slew Abel. Since the ninth century, the weapon of Cain in English vernacular accounts of the first murder is the jaw-bone of an ass. Cain did toss Abel's head like a discarded item.

“This might be the pate of a politician which this ass now overreaches, one that would circumvent God, might it not?” Politicians are always the butt (asses) of jokes since the Greeks era.

“It might, my lord. They are not likeable.” Horatio chuckled. “So when we're dead…. At times.”

It was a sarcastic remark to comment on the Great Chamberlain; respected and fearful when he was in the castle then laid in the ground, unmarked or perhaps dug up by scavengers,

“Or of a courtier, which could say “Good morrow, sweet lord! How dost thou, sweet lord?” This might be my Lord Such-a-one that praised my Lord such-a-one's horse when he went to beg it, might it not?” Hamlet snapped back at Horatio to patronize him with every word he said. “You are not my servant, Horatio but my friend. Be fair and real to me.”

“Ay, my lord.” Horatio smiled.

Why, e’en so. And now my Lady Worm’s,  chapless and knocked about the mazard with a sexton’s spade. Here’s the fine revolution, and we had the trick to see ’t. Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with them? Mine ache to think on.” Hamlet was annoyed at the way the gravedigger handles the skull; once had been a living person which then was feeding the maggots.

“A pickax and a spade, a spade,
For and a shrouding sheet,
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet.
He digs up more skulls.”

Albert reached into his repertoire of songs to keep himself amused still unaware that he was observed by two gentlemen

“There may be another. Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his
qualities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? I dislike their tongues wagging with the selection of words and memory. But he was still a living person then.” Hamlet finds the lawyers an irritant but felt that dignity should be conferred at death.

Horatio looked on with wonderment the young man was speaking as if he was divided in his mind. He had not respected the dead Great Chamberlain and there he was then making comments on bones that he knew whom.

“Why does he suffer this mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell
him of his action of battery? Hum, this fellow might be in ’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes,
his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines and the
recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?” Hamlet was all consenting to the soul that once inhabited the bones.

For Horatio, he had done his share of taking other life’s that he sees as a task to be put down, or bury. He held no conscience for them, but he does believe that their ghosts may be floating around, hence his mutterings of prayer verses. They can challenge him when he is also dead, and let the outcome be decided then.

“Au revoir,” Horation had said many times before the first shovel of soil on the head of the dead.

“Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box, and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?” Hamlet turned to the miscreant side of his. He mocks the dead who may have left properties to his next of kin, yet none seems to thank him here. Such was the ‘dignity’ of the living, care not for the toils of the bereaved but lavish on the wealth left behind.

“Not a jot more, my lord.” For once Horatio agreed with Hamlet. He was without any great inheritance, perhaps the ongoing servitude to Norway may be it with his twin; good meals, and a roof over their head. The occasional burial tasks.