How far is Shakespeare's presentation of Elizabethan attitudes towards death in Act 5 a development of earlier attitudes expressed in the play? Write about the ways attitudes to death are presented in Act 5.
When Shakespeare wrote 'Hamlet', as with many of his plays, death was always an underlying if not prominent theme. Shakespeare lived in a time when death was much closer and a fact of life, rather than being a distant thought as it usually is now. The Elizabethan audience would have been living with the continual threat of death from the bubonic plague and it would have entered into most areas of life.
Giovanni Boccaccio, a contemporary of Shakespeare wrote about the devastation the 'Black death' had on the population of a town or a city in Italy. Much would have been the same in Britain. Even the church had trouble keeping up with the amount of dead from this terrible disease.
'Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made it known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches,'
In England 90% of the victims died of the disease, that meant that nearly 2 million people a year died from it, a total in the end of approximately 137 million people. Even the Globe theatre, the centre of Elizabethan entertainment was closed due to the disease. Shakespeare was known to have had a fear of the plague and there are definite references to its effects on lifestyle in Hamlet.
'This bodes some strange eruption to our state.'
Evil contaminates almost the entire Royal family and some members of the court resulting in a final climax where the infected die. This is a metaphoric plague of deceit representing Shakespeare's consciousness of the plague and the way it caused so much death. With a society so accustomed to death, by incl...