Men Behaving Madly
Performing Hamlet’s Seven Soliloquies
What is a soliloquy?
soliloquy, n.
Pronunciation: /səˈlɪləkwɪ/
Etymology: < Latin sōliloquium (introduced by St.
Augustine), < sōli-, sōlus alone + loqui to speak.
1a. An instance of talking to or conversing with oneself,
or of uttering one’s thoughts aloud without addressing
any person.
(Oxford English Dictionary)
Soliloquy in Doctor Faustus
FAUSTUS. Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin
To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess.
[...] Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?
Affords this art no greater miracle?
Then read no more; thou hast attained the end.
A greater subject fitteth Faustus’ wit.
[...] These metaphysics of magicians
And necromantic books are heavenly,
Lines, circles, signs, letters, and characters –
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, of omnipotence
Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. (A-text, 1.1.1-59)
Psychomachia in Doctor Faustus
Enter the Good Angel and the Evil Angel
GOOD ANGEL. O Faustus, lay that damned book aside
And gaze not on it, lest it tempt thy soul
And heap God’s heavy wrath upon thy head!
Read, read the Scriptures. That is blasphemy.
EVIL ANGEL. Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art
Wherein all nature’s treasury is contained.
Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,
Lord and commander of these elements.
Exeunt [Angels]
FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!
(A-text, 1.1.72-80)
Direct address in Hamlet
A disclaimer: the text is not a coded set of instructions
so much as the basis for creative response. There’s no
single “right” way to perform it.
Peter Brook:
‘The Deadly Theatre approaches the classics from the
viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and
defined how the play should be done.’ (1968: 14)
Some critics, however, express a clear preference one
way or the other…
Direct address in Hamlet
Bert O. States:
‘In fact, the only characters in tragedy who “work” with the
audience seem to be clowns and villains. […] It would be
unthinkable for a character like Lear or Macbeth – or even
Hamlet, who is brother to the clown – to peer familiarly into
the pit because there is something in the abridgement of
aesthetic distance that gives the lie to tragic character and
pathos. A character who addresses the audience immediately
takes on some of the audience’s objectivity and superiority to
the play’s world.’ (1983: 366)
Andrew Gurr:
‘…the explanatory soliloquy or aside to the audience was a
relic of the less sophisticated days which developed into a
useful and more naturalistic convention of thinking aloud, but
never entirely ceased to be a convention.’ (1992: 103)
Direct address in Hamlet
Bridget Escolme, on the other hand, critiques Gurr’s ‘postnineteenth century assumption about theatrical progress’ (2005: 7),
and points out that States’ description of an actor ‘peering’ into the
pit assumes modern rather than Elizabethan theatrical conditions:
‘audience in darkness, actor with bright lights shining into his/her
eyes’ (2005: 70).
When David Warner played Hamlet for the RSC in 1965, one critic
noted:
‘This is a Hamlet desperately in need of counsel, help, experience,
and he actually seeks it from the audience in his soliloquies. That
is probably the greatest triumph of the production: using the
Elizabethan convention with total literalness. Hamlet communes
not with himself but with you. For the first time in my experience,
the rhetoric spoken as it was intended to be, comes brilliantly to
life.’ (Ronald Bryden, New Statesman, 27 August 1965)
Direct address in Hamlet
David Warner as Hamlet, RSC, 1965
Direct address in Hamlet
Mary Z. Maher concludes:
‘Generally speaking, direct-address soliloquies temper or
even negate madness in a Hamlet. Direct-address
soliloquies are perceived as more persuasive and
objective, cooler and more rational than internalized
soliloquies – Hamlet stepping outside the play and
commenting upon it. … The converse is also generally
true: an actor can move toward communicating fullblown insanity if he keeps his soliloquies inward.’ (1992:
xxvi)
Hamlet’s first
lines
Hamlet’s first line is often
played as an aside, but is
not necessarily.
Hamlet has no speeches
marked ‘aside’, in fact.
Alan C. Dessen points out
that ‘Shakespeare
apparently did not use the
term as part of his
working vocabulary’
(1995: 52).
First Folio, 1623
Hamlet’s first
soliloquy
Actor and director Michael
Pennington argues that in the
first soliloquy, Hamlet speaks
‘with a shocking candour
new to the play’ (1996: 40).
David Warner ‘did not use
the soliloquy to bond with
the audience […]; he rather
assumed their collusion and
let off steam. The character
established was a rebellious
prince who did not respect
authority’ (Maher 1992: 54).
First Folio, 1623
Hamlet’s second soliloquy
‘…it was not unusual for
Hamlets who chose the
direct-address mode to find
that one of the soliloquies
was best addressed inwardly
even though he performed
the other six outward. There
was a tendency for most of
the Hamlets I interviewed to
internalize the second
soliloquy, “O all you host of
heaven.”’ (Maher 1992: xv)
First Folio, 1623
Hamlet’s third soliloquy
First Folio, 1623
The last of these
questions, suggests
Pennington, ‘hangs in
the air’ (1996: 75).
Pennington argues that Hamlet ‘must
surely have got an answer’ to some of
these questions at the Globe, and ‘even in
these restrained days, the responses sit at
the front of our mouths’ (1996: 75).
Hamlet’s third soliloquy
Mark Rylance as Hamlet,
Shakespeare’s Globe, 2000
Lars Eidinger as Hamlet,
Schaubühne Berlin, 2008
Hamlet’s fourth
soliloquy
‘The Christian inhibition against selfslaughter which Hamlet recognised in his
first soliloquy has gone now, replaced by
fear, and his typical strengths have deserted
him. […] There is no personal pronoun at all
in its thirty-five lines, so it is in a sense
drained of Hamlet himself: although the cap
fits, it also stands free of him as pure human
analysis.’ (Pennington 1996: 81)
‘Although the content of this speech was
very contemplative and personal, Warner
never questioned that it should be given to
the audience. Indeed, he felt that this
soliloquy was the most direct of all of them.
He saw it as sharing his dilemma with them
(“after all, he’d shared everything else!”) and
“debating gently” the very serious options.’
(Maher 1992: 56)
Second Quarto, 1604
Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy
Mark Rylance:
Mark Rylance as Hamlet,
Shakespeare’s Globe, 2000
‘I found if I came out speaking “to be or not
to be” as if it had not been cooked before,
but I was cooking it at that very moment,
ingredient by ingredient … it provoked a
different response from the audience.
Shakespeare comes to life when we speak and
move with the audience in the present,
particularly with famous speeches like that
one. … if you actually take it step by step, you
know, “to be or not to be, that is the
question”; then imagine the audience saying,
“What do you mean, that is the question?”
And go on, “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune”, there is a sense of dialogue with the
audience who are playing the role of Hamlet’s
conscience at that moment.’ (Rylance 2008:
106-7)
Hamlet’s fourth
soliloquy
The writer of the ‘bad’ quarto
misplaced this soliloquy, putting
both it, and the subsequent
scene with Ophelia, before the
arrival of the players and
Hamlet’s decision to use them
to ‘catch the conscience of the
King’.
Modern productions (including
recent ones by the RSC and the
Young Vic) have copied this
placing of the speech.
First (‘Bad’) Quarto, 1603
Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy
The speech is evidently detachable:
Laurence Olivier’s film (1948) puts
it after the nunnery scene (itself
repositioned into the Q1 spot);
Peter Brook’s production (2001)
placed it after Hamlet’s murder of
Polonius and subsequent
banishment to England, making it
Hamlet’s last soliloquy (sliding in
‘From this time forth / My
thoughts be bloody or be nothing
worth’ at the end);
Sarah Frankcom’s (2014) did
something similar;
Dreamthinkspeak’s The Rest is
Silence (2012) allowed every single
character to deliver the speech!
Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of
William Shakespeare’, 1811:
‘I confess myself utterly unable to
appreciate that celebrated soliloquy
in Hamlet, beginning “To be or not
to be”, or to tell whether it be good,
bad, or indifferent, it has been so
handled and pawed about by
declamatory boys and men, and
torn so inhumanly from its living
place and principle of continuity in
the play, till it is become to me a
perfect dead member.’
Hamlet’s fifth soliloquy
John Gielgud described the fifth
soliloquy (which his production
cut) as ‘difficult to deliver and
unrewarding to play’ (Maher 1992:
12).
First Folio, 1623
Pennington notes a tendency for
Hamlets ‘to move into this new
purposeful phase by making some
identification with the Players –
wearing a multi-coloured Player’s
cloak (me), the Player King’s
crown (Dillane), a Player’s mask
(Ralph Fiennes). […] face to face
finally with ‘proof and therefore
the need for action, Hamlet
retreats, making himself an actor
whose deeds are only gestures’
(1996: 92).
Hamlet’s sixth soliloquy
Second Quarto, 1604
First Folio, 1623
Hamlet’s sixth soliloquy
As Lars Eidinger’s Hamlet
debated killing Claudius, prefilmed footage of an audience
applauding played behind him.
When I saw the production at
London’s Barbican theatre in
2011, Hamlet’s speech descended
into a torrent of action-movie
clichés (‘You killed my father,
you’re fucking my mother, and
that’s why you’re going to die!’),
before Eidinger broke off and
asked the audience, ‘Is this what
you want to see?’.
Lars Eidinger as Hamlet,
Schaubühne Berlin, 2008
Hamlet’s seventh
soliloquy
This soliloquy appears only in the 1604
Second Quarto.
It gives Hamlet a very different ‘arc’…
CAPTAIN. Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
(4.4.8-10)
Second Quarto, 1604
Hamlet’s seventh soliloquy
‘Gielgud viewed “How all occasions” as a “very
important soliloquy” that showed Hamlet’s state of
mind as “clear, noble, and resolved” before he went to
England, with a “clear understanding of his destiny and
desire.” Here was an assertion of the Victorian notion
of the noble prince who valued honour above “the
death of twenty thousand men.” After World War II
and Vietnam, it would become less and less popular to
find inspiration in Fortinbras, and, in fact, his portrayal
on the stage would become more and more brutal and
dictatorial.’ (Maher 1992: 14)
Hamlet’s seventh soliloquy
Escolme describes the change in the character/spectator
relationship following Hamlet’s last soliloquy:
‘As a clown’s skull is replaced in its grave, as Ophelia is
newly laid in hers, it seems we must also say goodbye to
the complex theatrical subjectivity of Hamlet, as he slips
back into a simpler moral frame where there can be no
questioning of man’s inevitable fate.’
In Mark Rylance’s performance at the Globe, this shift
was, suggests Escolme, nothing less than a ‘bereavement
of the spectator’ (2005: 73).
Hamlet’s seventh soliloquy
Bertolt Brecht described Hamlet’s final soliloquy as ‘the
turning point’ at which ‘he succumbs to Fortinbras’
drums of war’ (1948: 101).
‘After at first being reluctant to answer one bloody deed
by another, and even preparing to go into exile, he meets
young Fortinbras at the coast as he is marching with his
troops to Poland. Overcome by this warrior-like
example, he turns back and in a piece of barbaric
butchery slaughters his uncle, his mother and himself,
leaving Denmark to the Norwegian. These events show
the young man… making the most ineffective use of the
new approach to Reason which he has picked up at the
University of Wittenberg.’ (1948: 100-1)
Hamlet’s seventh soliloquy
Arnold Kettle puts the same idea more subtly:
‘Hamlet is not merely a Renaissance prince. Along with
Marlowe’s Faustus he is the first modern intellectual in our
literature and he is, of course, far more modern as well as
much more intelligent than Faustus. And his dilemma is
essentially the dilemma of the modern European intellectual:
his ideas and values are in a deep way at odds with his actions.
[…]
Hamlet, the prince who has tried to become a man, becomes a
prince again and does what a sixteenth-century prince ought to
do – killing the murderer of his father, forgiving the stupid,
clean-limbed Laertes, expressing (for the first time) direct
concern about his own claims to the throne but giving his
dying voice to young Fortinbras… The end then, is, in one
sense, almost total defeat for everything Hamlet has stood for.
But it is an acceptance of the need to act in the real world, and
that is a great human triumph.’ (245-6)
References
Brecht, B. (1948) ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ in Cole,
T. [ed.] (2001) Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco,
New York: Cooper Square Press, 72-105.
Brook, P. (1968) The Empty Space, London: Penguin.
Dessen, A. C. (1995) Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical
Vocabulary, Cambridge: C. U. P.
Escolme, B. (2005) Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare,
Performance, Self, London & New York: Routledge.
Gurr, A. (1992) The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642: Third
Edition, Cambridge: C. U. P.
References
Kettle, A. (1964) ‘Hamlet in a Changing World’, in Hoy, C.
[ed.] (1992) Hamlet: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed., New
York: W. W. Norton, 237-46.
Maher, M. Z. (1992) Modern Hamlets and their Soliloquies, Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press.
Pennington, M. (1996) Hamlet: A User’s Guide, London: Nick
Hern.
Rylance, M. ‘Research, Materials, Craft: Principles of
Performance at Shakespeare’s Globe’, Carson, C. & KarimCooper, F. [eds] (2008) Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical
Experiment, Cambridge: C.U.P., 103-14
States, B. O. (1983) ‘The Actor’s Presence: Three
Phenomenal Modes’, Theatre Journal 35: 3, 359-375.