Soliloquy Term Paper: Hamlet’s Soliloquies -- GCSE English Literature

Hamlets Soliloquies Reading Shakespeares Hamlet, it seems that at every other turn in the narrative the prince is alvirtuoso and uttering another soliloquy. What is the genius of his various soliloquies? How many are there? What are their contexts? This essay will answer these questions and more. John Russell Brown in Soliloquies and Other Wordplay Let the earreach Share Some of Hamlets Thoughts explains that soliloquies are but one form of wordplay Hamlet uses By any reckoning Hamlet is one of the most complex of Shakespeares characters, and a series of soliloquies is only one of the means which encourage the audience to enter imaginatively into his very personal and shake predicament. The plays narrative is handled so that a prolonged two-way chase is sustained between him and the king, during which the audience knows more than either one of them and so thinks ahead and anticipates events. In interplay with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Polonius, and perhaps with Claudius, Ger trude and Ophelia, Hamlet has asides to draw attention to what dialogue cannot express. (55-56) The first soliloquy, or act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud (Abrams 289), occurs when the gunman is left alone after the royal social gathering in the room of state in the castle of Elsinore. He is dejected by the oerhasty marriage of his mother to his uncle less than two months after the funeral of Hamlets father (Gordon 128). His first soliloquy emphasizes the frailty of women an obvious reference to his mothers hasty and incestuous marriage to her husbands brother O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew Or that the Everlasting had not... ...es An Impulsive but Earnest Young Aristocrat. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. adopt Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, NJ Univ. of Delaware P., 1992. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technolog y. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html West, Rebecca. A Court and institution Infected by the Disease of Corruption. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 1957. Wright, Louis B. and Virginia A. LaMar. Hamlet A Man Who Thinks Before He Acts. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar. N. p. Pocket Books, 1958.