involved in suicide, but he reasoned that social factors are the only relevant cause. Two historical incidents adequately demonstrate this causal relationship. The first example of this phenomena is witnessed by the high numbers of suicides reported directly after the Great Depression in the U.S. The second illustration of this relation is provided by the fact that the values of some cultures, like the Japanese hara-kiri, actually promote suicide. Therefore, social environment can play a major role in generating suicidal impulses within the individual, “Major differences have existed in societies’ attitudes toward suicide, in the way in which suicide is committed, and in the rates of frequency at various times in history…the most common element involved in suicide seems to be the person’s perception that life is so painful that only death can provide relief” (Suicide 1). The individuals who killed themselves in both examples above believed that life was so painful they would rather be dead; because it was too painful to live a poverty-ridden existence after having wealth in the case of the former and it was more honorable to die than to live a disgraced life in the case of the latter. In Hamlet, Hamlet’s consideration of death is definitely generated by his social environment: he learns his father was murdered by his uncle and that his mother, some scant months after the murder, is sleeping with him as man and wife.
The grief and melancholy this engenders in Hamlet is almost more than he can bear. He is told to accept his father’s death by his Uncle, King Claudius, but Claudius and Gertrude do not know the real depths of Hamlet’s depression and melancholy. He explains to them that it is a melancholy that runs deep and cannot be gleaned from external perception:
Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems.
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy...