"Good Night, Sweet Prince": Death and Reconciliation in Shakespearean Tragedy

Death and Shakespearean tragedy are two things that inevitably go together. Although adaptations of tragedies have been performed where character deaths were removed, for the most part the deaths remain essential to each play’s plot and themes (Bradley 225). The death of a tragic hero has come to define the genre of tragedy beyond the traditional definitions set by Greek tragedies and later medieval tragedies. It has become a deciding factor in designating the genres of Shakespeare’s less obvious plays (Bradley 25). Why is the death of a tragic hero so key to the genre of tragedy? It provides a fitting end for a character who has spent the length of the play struggling with burning questions about the human condition or endured a great deal of suffering due to their own and other’s mistakes. This is the case for the tragic heroes of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. However, their deaths are always more complicated than that. In Hamlet’s case, he spends the entire play contemplating death as opposed to the meaninglessness of life. He seems to come to the conclusion that death leads to nothing, yet in the end he accepts and even welcomes his own death. In contrast, Othello uses his death as a tool to retrieve his lost honor and his lost love, like many other suicidal characters from Shakespearean tragedies. King Lear, on the other hand, does not contemplate death or use it as a tool. He doesn’t even realize that he is dying. Yet his death still serves an important purpose. Although each of these deaths contribute to the natural bleakness and pessimism of tragedy, they also add an element of hope to the end of the play because they provide an opportunity for reconciliation and redemption for the tragic hero as well as other characters within the play.
Hamlet’s death provides him with an opportunity of reconciliation with the idea of death itself. From the beginning of the play, Hamlet contemplates the idea of death obsessively. In several different soliloquies, such as the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy in Act III, scene i, he wrestles with the idea of death as the end to existence. He sees death as an “end/ The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/ That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation/ Devoutly to be wish'd.” At the same time, he does not know what will come after death, asking “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come”.  As the play goes on, Hamlet becomes more and more prepared for his own death. According to Walter C. Foreman, Jr., in his book The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, “one of the things Hamlet must do (and does) before assuming his tragic destiny is to exorcise his fears about experience after death” (3). In Act 5, scene ii, just before he goes to his tragic fencing match with Laertes, Hamlet expresses his readiness for death by recognizing that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all”. Before he even knows how he will die, Hamlet has already reached a reconciliation with the idea of death.

I will go on to talk about Hamlet’s actual death scene, his final words, and Horatio’s eulogy (“Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”) and how that adds reconciliation and hope in the midst of an otherwise very bleak scene. After that, I’ll move on to Othello and talk about how his suicide allows him to reconcile himself with his guilt and maintain his honor. Then I’ll write about King Lear’s death, how it’s unique but also similar to the others, and how it gives him reconciliation and redemption from his sins through his grief over Cordelia’s death.