Hamlet has six soliloquies throughout the play, it is a substantial extensive, and they cover a wide range of emotion and feelings, like what he feels about his father’s death, his mother and Claudius’ marriage and his relationship with Ophelia. Even Claudius has two soliloquies revealing his true feelings for people like Hamlet. There are many asides that take place throughout the play at key moments –
- Act 1, Scene 2 lines 129 – 159 – overwhelmed by his personal problems surrounding his father’s death and his mother’s marriage to his uncle Claudius.
- Act 2, Scene lines 522 – 580 – contrasts his failure to respond to his fathers murder with an actors expression of grief for imaginary characters.
- Act 3, Scene 1 lines 56 – 88 – he expresses his disillusionment with life “To be or not to be…”
- Act 3, Scene 2 lines 362 – 373 – he uses strong and vivid language to work himself into a frame of mind in which he can visit his mother and confront her with the evils of her incestuous relationship with Claudius.
- Act 3, Scene 3 lines 73 – 96 – he decides he will not kill Claudius while he is praying because he does not want him to have any chance of going to heaven and escaping the hell his actions deserve.
- Act 4, Scene 4 lines 32 – 66 – this reveals his firm intention to take action at the earliest opportunity whilst at the same time condemning his earlier inactivity.
There are no soliloquies in Act 5 – the time for talking and thinking is over – this act is all about the dramatic conclusion to the plot.
Claudius’s soliloquy:
- Act 3, Scene 3 lines 36 – 72 – he considers his evil actions and tries to repent by praying to God.
- Act 4, Scene 3 lines 56 – 67 – demonstrates that his attempts to repent have failed and he is determined to have Hamlet murdered in England.
In Hamlets main soliloquy, Hamlet is in mourning, Gertrude and Claudius try to cheer him up but it doesn’t work. He is depressed because of his father’s death, and his mother’s fast marriage to his uncle, Claudius. He feels since Claudius has taken the throne off his father Denmark has become gone off and polluted, ‘too sullied flesh would melt’, he also feels himself has become unclean. There is assonance in the repetition of ‘Oh God! God!’ it is of vowel sounds for literary effect. He gets angry and starts shouting things like ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!’ ‘Fie on’t ah fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden’. He moves onto how he is unhappy about his mother because she remarried to fast ‘But two months dead – nay, not so much, not two’. He then says how his father was the best king ever ‘ So excellent a king’ ‘that was to this’ emphasis, this shows his contempt. He compares a ‘Hyperion to a satyr’ because his father wouldn’t allow the ‘winds of heaven’ touch her face too roughly. He protected her well, and Claudius doesn’t protect her as well as his father did, he is angry with this, it is a pain of memory, he breaks mid-sentence in the middle of a line. Caesura. ‘Heaven and earth, must I remember?’ It is a rhetorical question. ‘Appetite had grown’, the more his mother has his father the stronger the bond. ‘Frailty thy name is woman’ gender difficulty, the faults of his mother he generalises to all women, he is making his mother = all women. This is including Ophelia his girlfriend, who he criticises many times for her mistakes, which leads to her insanity and eventually, her death. ‘Like Niobe, all tears’ never stopped crying with grief like Niobe. ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer – married with my uncle’ His mother, Gertrude hardly mourned the death of Hamlet senior, her husband, he says a beast would have mourned longer than his mother, he is suggesting she is lower than a beast. He compares himself to Hercules and considers himself weak ‘Than I to Hercules’. ‘Salt of most unrighteous tears’ he is saying her mothers tears were not genuine, ‘unrighteous’ and ‘o most wicked’ because of the speed in which she married to Claudius, ‘incestuous sheets!’ Moral connotation. It is good and bad, he condemns the relationship between his mother and Claudius, but for the first time he puts it in moral framework. The soliloquy is mainly about his anger and contempt at incest of mother and uncle, it will have bad consequences. He keeps all his feelings inside - oppression.
Soliloquies are very important as a dramatic device because it reveals what the characters are really thinking and could make the story better for the audience. If it weren’t for this soliloquy in ‘Hamlet’ we wouldn’t find out his true feelings and what he is going to do because he doesn’t reveal them to anyone else but himself.
