Now cracks a noble heart.

For Robert Ball

Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Hamlet 5.2.397-8

The lines are Horatio’s, mourning the loss of his friend and companion, Hamlet. Some people think of these as the final lines in the play, but they are not. The final lines belong, fittingly, to Fortinbras, who enters the hall and reasserts authority over the carnage he finds there:

FORTINBRAS:  Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royal; and for his passage,
The soldier’s music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

Hamlet 5.2.440-9

In a sense, this presents a strange finality–the discharge of what seems to be ordnance capping the previous scene which dealt so much in swords. Yet, this is fitting too. For although shots may be deadly, swords suggest the more personal nature of vendetta and/or vengeance. Blades are proximal and intimate. Rifles (or their forerunners dating from around 1411 c.e., or even earlier), more often suggest a more remote kind of martial authority, and have long been discharged as an honorific at occasions of state or military importance, as well as at funerals.

What’s more interesting may be the various quality of the different characters’ epitaphs for Hamlet. Horatio’s words describe not only singing angels, but suggest flying ones as well. His “flights of angels” suggests something lofty, soaring, and transcendant. On the other hand, Fortinbras’ speech emphasizes the more immediate resumption of earthly authority. Where Horatio guides our thoughts to an everlasting rest, accompanied by celestial music, Fortinbras speaks to the physical world with language of bodies and fields. The language not only reflects their different characters (Horatio the philosophical scholar contrasted with Fortinbras the soldier), but also those different characters’ more immediate concerns.

Horatio (himself kept from suicide at Hamlet’s urging that he remain to tell the tale) harkens after his friend. His aggrieved impulse yearns to follow his friend in death. His thoughts seem already fixed beyond this earthly life in which events have profoundly unseated his sensitivities.

Fortinbras, in contrast after a brief assessment, rapidly assumes the mantle of courtly responsibility, stepping into the role of ruler of Denmark as well as Norway. This ending brings Fortinbras’ character full circle, because his own father had been killed by Hamlet’s father before Hamlet begins. The settlement of this ancient grievance and of the lands disputed in it gives the narrative its final symmetry.

Yet, if Fortinbras’ last words are the epitaph for the action in the text, and if Horatio’s last wishes for Hamlet are a kind of epitaph for the character, what of Hamlet’s last words? In his dying speech, Hamlet also briefly assumes authority, at least long enough to transfer it to Fortinbras:

HAMLET:  O, I die, Horatio!
The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.
I cannot live to hear the news from England.
But I do prophesy th’ election lights
On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th’ occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited—the rest is silence.

5.2.389-95

Silence. Mute as the grave. Hamlet has gone. The actor playing the character subsequently lies onstage with the other dead of the play’s Danish court until the curtain call rouses the actors from their slumber. Always a challenge for the director.

Yet, when examined together, the three characters’ eulogic words also display a kind of overarching symmetry which may not be immediately apparent. Silence, rest, and shoot. The first two seem immediately akin. When the flights of angels have finished singing, the ensuing silence beckons as the hallmark of eternal rest. ‘Shoot’ seems to resume the active and suggests a more controlled governance, but it also marks a profound finality.

Presenting arms displays worldly force, a more mundane kind of power, which is limited. The sound of shooting breaks the silence, and may rouse one from a rest, but it cannot raise or wake the dead. In the world of the play, this final display of death seems irrefutable.

Yet, the idea of shooting also suggests projecting, or issuing forth, especially when we think of stars. For shooting stars are traditionally our collective repository of hopes and wishes. This blog has cited the words of Robert Ingersoll previously, but part of the eulogy that he spoke at his brother’s grave bears repeating:

He was a worshipper of liberty, a friend of the oppressed. A thousand times I have heard him quote these words: ‘For Justice all place a temple, and all season, summer!’ He believed that happiness was the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest. He added to the sum of human joy; and were every one to whom he did some loving service to bring a blossom to his grave, he would sleep to-night beneath a wilderness of flowers.

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.

He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his latest breath, ‘I am better now.’ Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and tears, that these dear words are true of all the countless dead.

Robert Ingersoll, spoken at the graveside of his brother, Ebon, 1879.

Ingersoll parallels the star with hope, and in spite of the fact that he was sometimes reviled for his atheism, he pointedly hoped for something better beyond this life and beyond this world, as many of us do.

Zen practitioners in particular, monks and priests, have an ancient tradition of writing death poems–jotting down impressions, thoughts, or feelings about life or the beyond at or near the moment of their death. Perhaps one of the most striking of these is that of Takuan Soho (沢庵 宗彭), who died in 1645. A major figure in the Rinzai School of Zen Buddhism, Takuan was a scholar, painter, and poet who initially refused to write a death poem. Those around him entreated him, however, and at last he took up his brush and wrote:

As multimensional as existence, the idea presents any number of potential facets. Perhaps life is the dream, perhaps the moment. Perhaps the after. Perhaps all of them or the fact that, from our perspective, they appear distinct.

It may be that the Zen poet Shinkichi Takahashi captured it best:

Gods

Gods are everywhere:
war between Koshi and Izumo
tribes still rages.

The all of All, the One
ends distinctions.

The three thousand worlds
are in that plum blossom.
The smell is God.

English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto.

Endings happen. Characters, loves, friendships, plays, and fellow human beings. However we react to that may depend greatly upon who and where we are at any given time. Whatever our perspective or our understanding, endings may leave us seemingly alone in a moving cosmos to sort whatever we can. Or not. In the end there may be only hope, stars, and plum blossoms. However we may contrive to craft or shape it, whatever shooting we may bid, the rest is silence.