Tuesday, 9 December 2014

Hamlet's Soliloquies:

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.