Hamlet's Soliloquies

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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

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