I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be

I've been helping a friend from church who is doing year 12 English literature (which takes me back more than 25 years), and so I've been rereading Hamlet and watching film versions. It's noticeable how the best literature only reveals its depths with time - as I experience more, so new angles appear even in classic works. The book reads you, rather than you reading it.

In Hamlet, I'm noticing the theme of the power of grief, how it can push people to the brink of insanity or produce great outbursts of anger and violence. There is also the interplay between those who want to 'move on' and suppress grief, and those who are still mourning.
   

Queen: Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
             And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
             Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
             Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
            Thou know'st 't is common; all the lives must die
             Passing through nature to eternity.
Hamlet: Ay, madam, it is common.
Queen: If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet: Seems, madam! nay, it is; I know not 'seems'.
'T is not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Not windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, modes, shows of grief,
That can denote me truly; these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show;
These are but the trappings and the suits of woe.

The sense of despair and dejection also resonates with me:

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on 't! ah fie! 't is an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this! 

Of course Hamlet then experiences what modern writers label as "complicated grief", since he is told that his mother was involved in an adulterous relationship with his uncle, who then murdered his father. His grief can transform to rage at any moment, even or especially with people that he loves. Depending on one's reading of the play (is the ghost real, or a project of Hamlet's mind?), there is a sense that grief distorts ordinary judgement, and tempts one to rash and dramatic gestures.

T.S. Eliot's poem "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" comes to mind:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, not was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Polite, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, bit a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous --
Almost, at times, the Fool.

One of the temptations of grief (or of blogging about it) is to overdramatise it in order to elicit sympathy, even from oneself. It's easy to think that my loss, which to me is world-shattering, needs that dramatic attention and poetry of Hamlet. The truth is that most of us play lesser roles - perhaps like Polonius, a bit ridiculous, not having the great speeches. Much of grief is now has the dullness of familiarity - yet another day when Jen is not here, eight months on - not the drama and passion of the first weeks. Yet the banality of grief is just as hard to cope with, since it feels like a diminution of love and memory.