A Soliloquy is a discourse uttered by a speaker that is alone on the
stage and oblivious to the listeners present. The dramatist employs it with of
divulging the character’s innermost thoughts and plan of action in advance to
the audience. In fact the practice of soliloquies became so popular with the
Elizabethan writers that they banished chorus from their tragedies.
Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet earns an impregnable name and fame by
employing this field. Hamlet’s soliloquies unfold the internal dilemma and
mental obsession of the chief speaker. They lend an insight into Hamlet’s
contemplative nature and the problem of procrastination. Most of all, they mark
the movement from his inability to overcome his scholarly nature to his final
resolution to become an avenger. The audience comfortably gets sundry approach
to the psyche and mindset of Hamlet.
Hamlet’s first soliloquy
gives the first true insight into Hamlet’s inner turmoil. By beginning the soliloquy
with, “O, that this too too flesh solid
flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve into a dew”, Hamlet wishes that his
physical self might cease to exit, expressing the gravity of his innermost
grief. Hamlet’s words, “How weary,
stale, flat and unprofitable/Seem to me all the uses of this world!” indicate
his intense disgust with the world. He refers this world as “an unweeded garden”, in which “rank and gross” things grow in
abundance. Hamlet’s grief over his father sudden death is intensified by his
mother’s hasty marriage to his uncle whom he considers inferior and venomous
naturally. He denounces her disloyalty in the words, “frailty thy name is woman”, and juxtaposes Claudius’ inferiority
to his father’s greatness in the image of “Hyperion
to a satyr”. Furthermore his allusion to Niobe and the contrast between her
mother’s “galled eyes” and her “dexterity to incestuous sheets”, serve
only to accentuate his tormented emotions. He scornfully protests: “O God! A beast that wants discourse of
reason/Would have mourned longer.” Nevertheless he conceals his great
misery from the king and the queen: “But
break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”
Hamlet’s next soliloquy “What a rogue and peasant slave am I!” is
delivered after the arrival of players and reveals the root of true conflict:
his inability to act. By juxtaposing a player who “could force his soul to his own conceit”, to weep for Hecuba
without any apparent reason, against him, who has “the motive and cue for passion” but cannot do anything for his
godlike father “upon whose property and
most dear life/A damned defeat was made.” Hamlet regards himself “a dull and muddy-mettled rascal” who
has done nothing to avenge his father’s murder. He vents his anguish on his uncle
by referring to him as “a bloody, bawdy
villain!/Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!”. Finally, We
find Hamlet resolving to devise a mouse-trap play for Claudius in which he will
closely watch his reaction and “catch the
conscience of the king”.
Unlike Hamlet’s first two
major soliloquies, Hamlet’s next and the most celebrated “To be or not to be” soliloquy is governed by intellect and not
frenzied emotion. Hamlet sparks an internal philosophical debate on the
advantages and disadvantages of his existence. Here Hamlet is shown to be on
the horns of dilemma “Whether it is
nobler in the mind to suffer /The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/Or
take arms against a sea of troubles.” He jumps to tentamount that death is
no doubt a sleep but there are thousand dreadful visions that disturb and shock
such sleep. Hamlet’s dilemma is that he cannot sure what death has in store; it
may be a sleep but in “perchance to
dream” he is speculating that it an experience perhaps worse than life. The
death is called “undiscovered country” from
where “no traveller returns”. Hamlet
declines to the idea of suicide by saying “thus
conscience doth make cowards of us/And thus native hue of resolution /Is
sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.”
Hamlet’s next soliloquy is
delivered after the players’ scene when he goes the queen’s closet and on the
way finds the king at prayer. It is golden opportunity for Hamlet to carryout
the revenge but his scholarly nature intervenes and he starting contemplating:
“Now
might I do it pat now he is praying/And now I’ll do it and so he goes to
heaven/I so am I revenged!”
Wisdom stands mighty resistance
between him and his revenge. He consoles himself for another opportunity in
which he must be in rage, intoxicated, gambling or busy in his incestuous
pleasures of bed or about some other act that has “no relish of salvation in it”, and then to trip him so that “his soul may be as damned and black/As
hell, whereto it goes”.
Hamlet’s last soliloquy is
prompted by the passage of Fortinbras’ army through Denmark. It is another
protest against the dullness of his passion and slow methodical march of his
contemplative nature. Hamlet scolds himself by saying, “How all occasions do inform against me/And spur my dull revenge”. He
ponders “whether it be bestial oblivion
or, some craven scruple/Of thinking too precisely on the event”, that has
thwarted his purpose. Remembering a power motive as “a father killed, a mother stained”, Hamlet now forms an ultimate
resolve:“O, from this time forth/My
thoughts be bloody, or nothing worth”
Besides Hamlet, Ophelia
and Claudius also burst into soliloquies. Ophelia’s soliloquy is very
significant as the audience is acquainted with the stately position of lord
Hamlet:
Oh,
what a noble mind is here overthrown/The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye,
tongue, sword/The expectancy and the rose of the fair state/The glass of
fashion and the mould of form/The observed of all observers.”
In a nut-shell, reverting back to Hamlet, the prince
of Denmark without these soliloquies would be an elusive shadow, a character
without personality.