Hamlet: Table of Soliloquies
The audience becomes Hamlet’s confidant
1.
(I, ii, 131 p. 42) O! that this too too solid flesh would melt
Hamlet is very melancholic, depressed but also vehemently angry toward his mother
because of her quick marriage to Claudius.
“Frailty, thy name is woman!”
2.
(I, v, 97 p.62) Oh all you host of heaven
After meeting the ghost, Hamlet has a goal in his life again: He swears by god to follow
the commandments of his father’s ghost.
“And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain!”
3.
(II, ii, 552, p. 92) O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I:
Hamlet thinks about theory and practice, he wonders about the player who showed real
emotions about his play:
“…and all for nothing! For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?”
Then he takes up the plan to use the subsequent play to make the King confess:
“…the play’s the thing,
4.
(III, I, 63 p. 103) To be or not to be
In this most famous soliloquy Hamlet reasons whether suicide would be the better and
quicker solution. But he fears the unknown: the “undiscovered country.” He also
remarks that too much thinking kills the action: “Thus conscience does make cowards
of us all.”
5.
(III, ii, 394) Tis now the witching time of night
Hamlet is being called to his mother where he will “speak daggers to her, but use none.”
6.
(III, iii, 74) Now I might do it pat
Hamlet sees the King kneeling in the chapel and con sideres killing him now. But if he
kills the king in prayer in the sight of God, he risks thar the King goes to heaven. “And
now I’ll do’t…..and so ‘a goes to heaven.”
7.
(IV, iv, 34) How all occasions do inform against me
Hamlet is now convinced that he has to do something. Other people (Fortinbras’ army)
follow orders and kill without thinking as much as Hamlet does. But then he says the
ability to think is what distinguishes him from animals.
“…while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
Fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause.
Claudius’ Soliloquy (III, iii 37) O my offense is rank
It hath the primal eldest curse upon ‘t;
A brother’s murder