Equal.

     In each work of Shakespeare, Act 5 of each play elaborates how his works have come to be defined as “tragedies”. In Act 5 of Hamlet, nearly everyone but Hamlet’s right hand man die, but Shakespeare does not simply kill these characters off however, he leads up to the dramatic climax by enlightening the audience on the abstraction of death. He alludes to the fact that no matter what your position or social class is, all men shall be sentenced to death, and men of prestige shall end up in the same place as the poor.

     To exemplify this notion, Hamlet stumbles upon the skull of Yorick, a childhood friend/mentor who acted as his father’s jester, or a fool of sorts. He could not understand how such a “fellow of infinite jest” could end up in the state that he was currently in. This illustrates Shakespeare’s first rebuttal that no matter how rich in humor a man may be in in life, or even how insufferable for that matter, these two men of different backgrounds are both doomed to the same fate.  Shakespeare then proceeds to use several more examples to reassure this central meaning, as it acts as one of the major themes of the play. With an allusion to Alexander the Great, a noble figure in the time Hamlet was written, Shakespeare exemplifies that even men that are seen as immortal must die, which makes the audience think of an earlier assertion in the play that the king is no better than what goes through the guts of a beggar. In Hamlet, William Shakespeare uses symbolism to explain that death is inevitable regardless of social rank, and hints at the fact that maybe these ranks are pointless and maybe all men should be seen as equal.