Module A Textual Conversations: Hamlet and Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems

Module A: Textual Conversations is built on the premise that texts speak to one another across time, and that reading two texts together can reveal meanings that neither makes fully clear on its own. The pairing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems is one of the more unexpected combinations on the prescription, given that the two texts are separated by roughly two and a half centuries and by almost every formal convention. However, the texts share a preoccupation so close that the relationship between them resembles a continuation rather than a comparison. Both are sustained attempts to put into language the experience of death, the workings of human consciousness, and the difficulty of the interior life. This post will examine where the two texts converse, where they diverge, and how students might shape that relationship into a coherent response. Examining the shared concerns, the role of form, and the influence of context will help make clear what a strong response to this pairing actually requires.

What the Textual Conversations module asks

The module does not ask students to write one essay on Hamlet and a separate essay on Dickinson. Instead, it asks students to evaluate the relationship between the texts, considering how each one illuminates or complicates the other when they are read together. The central concern of the module is the conversation itself, and a strong response therefore attends to both the resonances and the points of tension between the texts. The module also asks students to weigh how differences in context and form shape the way each text treats a shared idea. According to the rubric, what is rewarded is an informed personal understanding of how reading one text reshapes a reading of the other. This is the standard that each paragraph must meet. A paragraph that discusses only one text, or that identifies a similarity without examining what it reveals, has not yet fulfilled the demands of the module.

Death and the question of what lies beyond

The most evident connection between the texts is their shared preoccupation with death, although the two writers approach it from opposite positions. Hamlet contemplates death from the perspective of the living, treating it as an unknown to be feared and reasoned about. When Hamlet asks whether ‘to be, or not to be’, his hesitation rests on ‘the dread of something after death’, the ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’. It is the impossibility of knowing what follows death that prevents him from acting. Even in the graveyard, where he holds the skull of Yorick, Hamlet is attempting to confront a fact he cannot fully accept, namely that every person, the jester and the emperor alike, is reduced finally to dust.

Dickinson, by contrast, repeatedly imagines crossing the threshold that Hamlet fears. In ‘Because I could not stop for Death’, she personifies death not as a terror but as a courteous companion who ‘kindly stopped for me’, and the poem proceeds calmly in its movement ‘toward Eternity’. In ‘I heard a Fly buzz’, she renders the moment of dying from within, reducing it to the small and unremarkable detail of an insect at the window. Reading these poems against Hamlet’s soliloquy is instructive, because Dickinson takes up the very question that paralyses him, the question of what follows death, and answers it with composure rather than dread. This contrast helps establish how differently two writers can stand before the same unknown, and it is a contrast that neither text could produce on its own.

Representing the interior life: soliloquy and lyric

Because the module is concerned with how a text is constructed, the form of each text deserves as much attention as its themes. Many students overlook this, yet form is where the pairing proves most revealing. In Hamlet, the defining device is the soliloquy, which presents thought as drama. The audience is positioned to overhear Hamlet as he reasons with himself, hesitates, and revises his intentions, and it is through this device that the play grants access to his inner life. Dickinson achieves a comparable effect through entirely different means. Her compressed lyric poems, with their fractured syntax and their slant rhyme, enact the movements of consciousness on the page rather than the stage. For example, the opening of ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’ conveys a sense of numbness through its halting rhythm, so that the feeling is registered in the way the lines move and not only in their statement. There is further craft beneath this, since Dickinson frequently writes in the common metre of hymns and then unsettles it with imperfect rhyme, producing a sound that is at once familiar and subtly wrong. The soliloquy and the lyric therefore perform the same task by opposite routes, and recognising this helps reveal that the representation of consciousness is a matter of form, and not merely a shared theme.

The two texts also share a fascination with a mind that is coming apart. Hamlet adopts an ‘antic disposition’, and much of the play’s tension arises from the difficulty of determining how far his madness is performed and how far it is genuine. Dickinson presents a comparable disintegration directly. In ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’, the speaker imagines a funeral taking place within her own mind until ‘a Plank in Reason, broke’. Reading the two together produces two perspectives on a single fear, namely that the self may not hold together. In Hamlet, this fear is enacted before a watching court, whereas in Dickinson it is reported privately, from within. This comparison helps shed light on how each text dramatises a mind under strain.

The shared treatment of doubt and uncertainty

Both texts are also drawn to uncertainty, and neither offers the consolation of a settled conclusion. Hamlet’s predicament is in part a crisis of knowledge, since he cannot be certain of the Ghost, of the nature of the afterlife, or of the proper moment to act. His observation that ‘conscience does make cowards of us all’ frames doubt as the condition of a thinking mind rather than a problem to be solved. Dickinson treats truth with a similar caution. Her instruction to ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ suggests that the largest truths, concerning death, faith and the self, can only be approached indirectly. I believe this is one of the most productive points of contact in the pairing, because both texts refuse to resolve what they raise. When writing about uncertainty in these texts, students should therefore present it as the subject of the writing rather than a weakness that either author seeks to correct. A response that recognises this shared refusal is reading the conversation at its deepest level.

The divergence between a public and a private world

The differences between the texts are as instructive as their similarities, and a strong response treats them as part of the conversation rather than an obstacle to it. Hamlet is set within a court and a kingdom, and the protagonist’s interior life is constantly placed under public pressure. There is a murdered father, a usurped throne, and a country in which ‘the time is out of joint’, and each of these forces presses Hamlet towards an action he repeatedly defers. His thinking is never purely private, since it is always answerable to a world that demands a response. Dickinson wrote from the opposite position. She lived for much of her life in seclusion, and many of her poems address no particular reader, as in ‘This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me’. The contexts deepen this contrast. Hamlet emerges from a Renaissance still unsettled by Reformation anxieties concerning death and salvation, while Dickinson writes from a nineteenth-century New England shaped by a declining Calvinist faith and by the narrow domestic sphere available to a woman of her time. The same preoccupations therefore appear in very different forms, depending on whether the mind in question faces outward towards a kingdom or inward towards a single room. Treating this divergence as a meaningful part of the conversation, rather than a difficulty to be explained away, is what distinguishes a sophisticated response from a superficial one.

Approaching the Module A response

The practical task is to convert these observations into a sustained argument that keeps both texts in view. The strongest responses are organised around the shared concerns of death, consciousness and uncertainty, and they move between Hamlet and Dickinson within each paragraph rather than treating the two texts in separate halves of the essay. The most common weakness I encounter is the response that reads as two competent but unconnected studies placed side by side, and markers identify this pattern quickly. The remedy is to ask, of every paragraph, what the pairing reveals that neither text could reveal alone. A few further principles are worth keeping in mind:

• Select quotations because they advance a claim about the relationship, and not because they have been memorised.
• Connect each point to form and context, since the module is as concerned with how meaning is made as with what is meant.
• Adopt a clear position that could be defended if a marker were to challenge it, because a considered argument is more persuasive than a cautious one.
• Range across several of Dickinson’s poems rather than relying on one or two, since she is a poetry text and a response built on a single poem will appear thin beside the play.

There is no single correct reading of this pairing, and the module does not require one. What it requires is an interpretation that is informed, evaluative and genuinely the student’s own, and that treats Hamlet and Dickinson’s poems as two voices engaged in a long conversation about what it means to be conscious, mortal and uncertain. Read in this way, Hamlet’s resignation that ‘the readiness is all’ and Dickinson’s calm movement ‘toward Eternity’ begin to sound like answers to the same question, offered centuries apart. The value of the pairing lies in that exchange. The two texts continue to speak to one another, and the essay is the student’s means of entering the conversation.