There is so little comic business in this scene that actors are at their wits' end to make it hold the audience. They used to wear a dozen or two waistcoats, and, pretending to be hot and blown, strip them off, one after another; wearing all the time an air as if each one was the last, until you doubted whether, instead of a man inside, there were any thing more than a yardstick to measure vest-patterns with. So Thackeray takes George IV. to pieces by peeling away all the well-known articles of his apparel,--"under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing." But the waistcoated business always secured the laugh which the clowns' insipid discussion could not raise.
This scene, as it stands in the Folio of 1623, had no existence in the earlier Hamlets, and was plainly an after-thought of Shakspeare as he moulded the play to its perfection.
In the vignettes of mediæval manuscripts and the frescoes of chapels, there were ghastly drawings of the Dance of Death, or the so-called _Danse Macabre_.[7] It was a retort of religious art upon the fleshly man by the spectacle of his own skeleton waltzing down "the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." But blood runs counter to the violent bad taste of these unfleshed processions; they contrast with the warm truth of Nature too sharply for the work of redemption. Shakspeare was anxious not to point the old moral, but to enhance our pity: he needed this contrast with Ophelia. Perhaps he was recalling those paintings when he set the grave-digger dancing stark naked in his verses. "O rose of May, dear maid!" He purposely lifts a handful of mould to our faces, that we may smell the rose above it.
"A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade, For ----, and a shrouding sheet: Oh, a pit of clay for to be made For such a guest is meet."
Taine mentions with surprise that the English audiences still laugh when Hamlet traces the noble dust of Alexander to its final bier in a bung-hole. The Frenchman does not relish the broadness of the incongruity between the great commander and a cask of ale. But the laugh comes rightly in with the boldness of fancy which suddenly brings together such opposite things. The effect is like that of witnessing any ludicrous circumstance which takes no account of dignity. Extremes meet with a shock, as if a great orator's chair should be whipped away just as he sits down from his climax. Hamlet does not think it too curious to consider how indifferent Nature is to all our pomp: she is not impressed, and serves it with not one inopportune mischance the less.