There’s something about this line that calls to mind some of the exchanges in Twelfth Night – Viola talking about her father’s daughter who loved a man, for example – or Feste splitting hairs with language. There is a rhythm to this kind of comedy. This moment links back to Hamlet toying with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern earlier, when “man delights not me.”
It all just has comedy rhythm and it is fun to play with gender in comedy.
The success of this joke depends on the assumption of the Default Man. When Hamlet says “man” he means human because the sense, for time immemorial, has been that men are the standard humans and women are the deviation. So everyone always starts with man first – as in, is it a normal person or a woman?
I would actually love to see this scene played with a female gravedigger and a male Hamlet who might, condescendingly, ask his next question, as a concession to the lady gravedigger. Or even better – what if the gravedigger were non-binary and Hamlet’s questions are not just part of a vaudeville routine but also an attempt to engage with the gender of the person before him.
If we could pass quickness to one another, quickness in the sense of life, that would be an interesting world. Mothers would almost always give life to their children. Lovers would keep passing life back and forth between them. “I’ll die for you.” “No, I’ll die for you!” “No, I’ll die for you!” “No – I give MY life to YOU!” Being a lover would become quite hazardous to one’s level of life.
But in a way, we do give one another life. We energize each other with love, with attention, with affection, with inspiration.
I think I always assumed this was a FAST lie but now that I’m looking at, I’m not entirely sure what a fast lie would be. I suppose one that slips easily from one’s lips without any forethought or planning. But we are in a graveyard here. It is not a place for the quick, as in the living – but it IS a place for talk of the quick. Nothing reminds the living of their own state of aliveness than being surrounded by the dead. Surrounded by the dead. Surrounded by the living, a person might think, “Am I dead?” but surrounded by the dead, you know you’re alive.
So I wonder now if a quick lie might not so much be a fast lie as a living lie. Or both. It’s probably both. Shakespeare is known for that sort of thing.
The world seems ever more full of liars than ever before and bold-face liars, no less. It starts to feel as though truth itself were under assault, that in the face of such astonishing perfidy, facts and truth and justice might all be submerged in the swamp of mendacity.
There is such poetry in the evolution of language. Now, quick means, almost exclusively, rapid. We understand it when paired with the dead, as death’s opposite but we almost never describe the living as the quick anymore. But that is how the word began. To be quick once meant to be alive. That’s it. But because life is brief and flies so quickly – the word began to also mean fast.
And life is so quick that quick no longer means life, it is now pure speed. Quickly, a life, a quickness, evolves into something else entirely.
That is a lot of repetition of “it.” In’t, in’t, it. The assonance is really quite extraordinary, as well. It reminds me of this exercise that my grad school advisor used to do with students. He’d have everyone read their text with the vowels only. It made everyone sound (and feel) ridiculous but occasionally, that sort of pedantic exercise yielded some interesting results. This is a line that might really deliver some juice that way.
If you dig it, it is yours – no matter who lies in it after. Or perhaps it changes ownership once a body is laid in a grave? It starts as the maker’s and shifts to the body’s once it has been covered over. The hole, now filled, no longer belongs to the hole maker.
I’ve rarely heard this line spoken in such a way that gave it anything but a sort of “I know you are but when am I?” quality.
But looking at it now – it’s got a sense of – splitting hairs about location. Hamlet accuses the gravedigger of lying in the grave. The gravedigger accuses Hamlet of lying outside of it – which confirms its ownership, at least in the negative.
Also – the status of the characters is immediately obvious to both of them. Hamlet delivers a sirrah, an informal address and the gravedigger gives back a You. He doesn’t know who Hamlet is but he knows he should be using formal speech with him.
I have trouble understanding how a person could hate puns. I mean, sure, some of them can be groan inducing and ridiculous – but on the whole, they’re harmless and encourage a nice sense of double-ness.
I wonder if that’s the issue. I mean, to enjoy a pun requires a holding of two concepts at once. In this case, it is both lying as in fibbing and lying as in reclining. You have to hold both ideas at once to find such a thing amusing. Or maybe it isn’t so much amusing as pleasurable – it rings a simultaneity bell.
But maybe that simultaneity chime sounds more like a school bell to those who do not enjoy a pun.
I’m curious.
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