Hamlet: the first soliloquy
The second post based on a podcast I did a while ago: here’s the first, on the opening scene.
One of the most distinctive and important dramatic techniques that Shakespeare deploys in Hamlet is the soliloquy. He uses it in other plays too (perhaps most powerfully in Macbeth), but nowhere else does it have such a prominent role. It is used most significantly by Hamlet, and also, once and memorably, by Claudius. Check the bottom of this post for performances by actors Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant, as well as an RSC video explanation. Even – or especially – when you know the speeches well, there is no better way of refreshing your understanding of them by seeing and listening to great actors performing them. What actors need to do with these soliloquies is to give us the sense of a mind working; they are thoughts as they occur to Hamlet, a deeply-thinking man. It is for this reason that this play highlights soliloquies so consistently.
The very first words that Hamlet speaks are ‘Aside’, to us rather than the people around him, his spitting embittered A little more than kin and less than kind. He is still in mourning clothes, standing out in the celebrating court scene marking Claudius’s ascension to power. In the following lines we hear more of his barely suppressed bitterness, as he responds to his mother’s attempts to jolly him along. He becomes particularly bitter when it seems that she is suggesting that his continuing grief is common, that it is common for people to die, and he retorts: Ay madam, it is common, suggesting that she knows all about behaving in a common way. She is followed by Claudius, who at his most smarmy tries to argue him out of his black mood:
'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd: whose common theme
Is death of fathers.
Claudius is prodding at an open wound, and a few lines later when he leaves with his new Queen he leaves behind a Hamlet who is seething, boiling over with a potent cocktail of frustration, outrage and anger. And so we come to his first soliloquy.
Each of Hamlet’s soliloquies has a different tone, and indeed different targets. This one is before he gets the crucial news of his father’s murder, and learns who murdered him. Its target is not himself (like his second soliloquy, O what a rogue and peasant slave am I.) It’s not even really his uncle/stepfather. It’s overwhelmingly dominated by his feelings about his mother. After the first ten lines, which express his attitude to life and the world generally, the rest of the speech is almost completely about Gertrude (Claudius gets just a couple of mentions). Obviously he can’t stand him, but far deeper are his feelings about his mother. These come to full fruition in the extraordinary closet scene, III iv, when he really lets her have this anger with both barrels. They also come out every now and then in between these two moments, especially in his bizarre treatment of Ophelia, but you should certainly consider the closet scene as the delayed culmination of this first soliloquy.
The opening lines express Hamlet’s yearning (in the words of the third soliloquy) not to be:
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
His flesh is too too solid – this is the first of a series of repetitions which express his frustration:
O God, God / Fie on’t Fie! / but two months dead, / why she, even she...
In one version the word solid becomes sullied, dirty – which also makes sense, though solid leads logically on to thaw and resolve or dissolve (yet another version has sallied, meaning besieged, under attack). This is someone who doesn’t wish to be in the world, a sentiment he also expresses to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act ii scene ii when he calls the earth a sterile promontory. He wishes that God had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter: he has a fine sense of religious law (as we see when he decides not to kill Claudius when he is praying). The next time self-slaughter might be on the menu it is impossible, since if he kills himself he will not be able to avenge his father. The world is weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. It is an unweeded garden, that grows to seed; things rank and gross possess it merely. Again, this chimes with many images of rankness, corruption and rottenness in the play, most famously with Marcellus’s line Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and the Ghost tells Hamlet in I v that
'the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused.
His syntax almost trips over itself in the next sentence:
That it should come to this: / but two months dead, nay, not so much, not two / So excellent a King, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr.
A few lines later he says it was within a month and a little month, while the more dispassionate Ophelia in III ii says it is in fact twice two months: so it seems, even to himself, that Hamlet is so wound up with fury that he is sarcastically (subconsciously?) exaggerating the shortness for effect. And there is more exaggeration or hyperbole: his father was Hyperion (the Greek God of the sun), whereas Claudius is a satyr (a lecherous half man, half goat). Now there is no doubt that King Hamlet was morally better than his brother, who is a fratricidal murderer, but there is no evidence that he is particularly lecherous. And it’s stretching things to suggest that his father loved his mother so much that he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly. He follows this comment with a despairing rhetorical question: Heaven and earth, must I remember? (Yes.) He can’t help remembering, and when the ghost tells him the awful truth, he will never be able to forget it. He accuses his mother of a kind of emotional and sexual betrayal – he would hang on him / as if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on … and yet within a month. It is important to say that there is no evidence at all that his mother cheated on the King before his death – Hamlet’s sense of betrayal comes from his belief that she has cheated on his memory, and on the special nature of their relationship.
Then comes his comment on ‘yet within a month’ followed by the hopeless ‘Let me not think on’t’ which of course is an impossibility. You can’t deliberately not think about something; it just isn’t the way the human mind works. And thinking is one thing Hamlet, that student of philosophy, does almost obsessively. He has a vision of his mother following his father’s coffin, ‘like Niobe, all tears’, after exclaiming ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’: the terrible implications of the poisoning of his mind against women are acted out later in his treatment of Ophelia. Niobe really did mourn when her children died. And again his syntax gets chopped up in his agitation :
why she, even she – O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer – married with my uncle, my father’s brother.
(well, thanks for reminding us just what uncle means – he’s spelling out the horror to himself. This whole sentence is long and contorted). He says that Claudius is no more like my father / than I to Hercules, the mythical Greek hero who had to complete 12 superhuman tasks (so already Hamlet sees himself as someone unsuited to great tasks). He accuses his mother of most unrighteous tears in her gallèd eyes when she married. And most bitterly of all, he exclaims:
O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
Again, be careful : this is not evidence that she was sleeping with Claudius while still married to King Hamlet – it is evidence that Hamlet sees her behaviour as emotionally rather than legally incestuous. No-one other than Hamlet and the Ghost (two very biased parties) regards this new marriage as incestuous (Claudius doesn’t mention it in his list of sins when attempting to pray when he’s honest about everything else).
The soliloquy ends with:
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.
He cannot say anything, and what he really wants to say is how wounded he is by his mother’s behaviour. This soliloquy is about her; before long Claudius will dominate his thoughts, but for the moment it is not Claudius who angers him most.
Then Horatio, Marcellus and Barnardo enter, and he switches to cheerful welcomes before Horatio’s news changes his life.
So that is the first soliloquy – poised just before that life changes, the words of a man eaten up with bitterness, frustration and anger. When you’re studying this play, it’s important that you have a detailed knowledge of this and the subsequent soliloquies – they’re hard evidence of what is inside the head of this most complex character.