He advances by talking to Laertes, Polonius and Hamlet. However, while Hamlet is his nephew but now stepson, assumptions are made to that he would address Hamlet first and talk to him about any problems. But, he doesn’t and talks to Laertes first. He tries to butter him up and tells him he can have anything he wants. He establishes him importance over Laertes and flatters him to get what he wants but also to win over Polonius. All Laertes wants, however, is to go back to France and, Polonius, his father, reluctantly agreed. It is strange that Claudius should address Laertes first over Hamlet but he also addresses Laertes first over Polonius. Polonius is his political statesman, advisor, and there is an unusual significance that Claudius should do such a thing.
He then finally moves onto Hamlet and turns to him as a second thought. He addresses him as his son but Hamlet only answers ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind’. Hamlet means he is unlike Claudius and he doesn’t have to like him even though they are related by marriage. Hamlet becomes sick and cynical after the death of his father, whom he greatly admired, and the hasty remarriage of his mother to his uncle is not appreciated and approved of by Hamlet. He disliked Claudius before they married and now he detests him even more now that they have. He starts to put Hamlet down about why he still grieves for his father, and he cant understand why it is so special to him. Hamlet, however, does actually mourn his father and feels grief, he doesn’t pretend it like Claudius thinks he does. Claudius goes on saying that death is common, ‘your father lost a father and that father lost, lost his’ and that he shouldn’t grief for his father because he has gone to Heaven. He thinks Hamlet should come to terms with the death and accept it and accept that his father has gone to heaven.
Hamlet can’t understand his mothers’ reactions to all of this. His mother has no empathy towards Hamlet and is not sympathetic to her sons’ grief. He expects his mother to be in mourning as well but she shares her views with Claudius. His disbelief causes him to be angry towards her. Claudius tries to belittle Hamlets death and tells him he is next on line to the throne and to forget about his father and take him on as the fathering role. Claudius then brings round to the subject about not wanting Hamlet to go back to Wittenberg, ‘we beseech you bend to remain’. He doesn’t want Hamlet to leave his sight and wants him where he can keep an eye on him ‘in the cheer and comfort of our eye’. He makes it seem he doesn’t want him to go and that he is part of the family and that he should stay because of his mother, she to, thinks he should stay, ‘I pray thee stay with us’. Hamlet replies to this, ‘I shall in all my best obey you madam’. This is a slightly different connotation to that that have been used and it seems that Hamlet will only obey his mother and not Claudius.
Claudius tries to end on a high note celebration, ‘no jocund health that Denmark drinks today’. In his speech Claudius has managed to attain himself as the rightful monarch and allay any fears of people or subjects about the war with Norway and his future as King of Denmark. He has managed to establish himself in the position of ruler of Denmark and sort out, so he thinks, any political or personal problems.
After Claudius exits, Hamlet is left on his own. And Shakespeare has used a soliloquy for this part. The purpose of a soliloquy is to outline the thoughts and feelings of a certain character at a point in the play. It reveals the innermost beliefs of the character and offers an unbiased perspective, as it is merely the character talking to the audience, and not to any other characters that may cause the character to withhold their true opinions. Hamlet's soliloquy is essential to the play as it highlights his inner conflict caused by the events of the play. It reveals his true feelings and as such emphasises the difference between his public appearance and his attitude towards Claudius in the previous scene is less confrontational than here where he is directly insulted as a ‘satyr’.
Hamlet thinks his father was an ‘excellent king’ who loved his mother so much ‘that he may might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face to roughly’. However, his mother mourned for little than a month and then she married a man who was ‘no more like (his) father than (he) to Hercules’. These extraordinary events cause him to launch into a state of melancholy and depression in which he desires that ‘this too too solid flesh would melt’. He wishes he could just disappear. He wishes he could commit suicide but then God had made it a sin and wished that God hadn’t forbidden it. In this melancholy, Hamlet becomes disenchanted with life, and to him the world seems ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’. His disinterest for life, and his wishes for death are definite indications of Hamlet's sickness but his beliefs in Christianity are still to be strong. Hamlet's sickness is also shown through his strong relationship, bordering on obsession, with his mother. Throughout the play he constantly worries about her, and becomes angry when thinking of her relationship with Claudius. Also in this soliloquy, we also learn about Hamlet's adoration of his father and how this serves to emphasise the scorn that he shows towards his mother. Hamlet communicates that his father was a divine, almost 'god-like' character, ‘so excellent a king’, who was ‘so loving to my mother’. He also illustrates the contrast between the new king and the old and as such his mother's choice, ‘Hyperion’ to a ‘satyr’.
This example of extreme contrast increases the importance of Hamlet's father and yet also makes a mockery of Claudius' character one that, to this point, the audience could have seen as strong and domineering.
We also see that Hamlet becomes enraged when he thinks about her ‘incestuous sheet,’ and cant understand why she has changed. He creates an image of warmth and love between her and his father and believes their relationship to be nothing but that. Then for her to go and turn her back on his father. He can’t understand that,’ two months dead’ his mother marries, but to no other man than his uncle whom he detests. He cannot bear to think about his mother and Claudius together and thinks of it as an unspoken crime. Hamlet's despair stems from his mother's marriage to his uncle and it is this that is the driving force behind what is communicated. His constant repetition of the time in which it took the two to get married, ‘but two months dead...yet within a month...a little month...within a month...most wicked speed’, suggests his disgust at the situation and that it is not necessarily the nature of their ‘incestuous’ relationship that troubles Hamlet; more the short time in which it occurred. In fact, this is especially well communicated to the audience as, throughout the soliloquy, the passage of time that Hamlet describes gets less from ‘two month’ to ‘within a month’. This has the effect of outlining Hamlet's supposed contempt of his mother for only mourning a month whilst also highlighting that it is the time involved that is vexing him and not specifically the deed. When Hamlet says, ‘frailty, thy name is woman’, he is personifying frailty as the entire of the female race. The actions of his mother have lead him to believe that all women are capable of acting in this ‘wicked’ way and that all women are weak. Alongside the image of his father that is communicated, Hamlet is saying, and therefore feeling, that the people that he could look up to in life have departed and that his entire world has been altered, ‘it is not nor it cannot come to good’.
The distressed nature of Hamlet's mind is also communicated well by the imagery that is used throughout the soliloquy. At the start, Hamlet says that he wants his ‘too too solid flesh’ to’...melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew’. This goes alongside the later lines, ‘how weary, stale,
flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world’, where the build up of adjectives, one after the other, serves to highlight just how difficult it is for Hamlet to live in the world. It is as if Hamlet cannot deal with or, indeed, stand the physical side of life anymore; he needs to get rid
of his body to be able to deal with the inner conflict going on in his head. The poetry of these lines and the image that is expressed serve to reveal not only the tragic nature of his problem, also highlighted by his allusions to suicide, but also create a link between him and the audience. In fact, the entire soliloquy establishes a connection between the audience and Hamlet, a concept that is essential in the play.
The structure of the piece also communicates the nature of Hamlet's thoughts as he is constantly changing subject, ‘let me not think on't, frailty thy name is woman’, and is doing so by using short, broken sentences. These help reveal and suggest the depth of Hamlet's thoughts; he has so much going in his head that he wants to commit suicide and is therefore trying to rationalise his feelings.
This soliloquy shows the communication of the emotional state of Hamlet to the audience because it reveals the true nature of Hamlet's feelings not only through the diction itself but also through the imagery, language and underlying messages of the text. His true feelings contrast highly to that of Claudius’s.