Hamlet Summary‘O THAT THIS TOO TOO SULLIED FLESH WOULD MELT’ 1ST SOLILOQUY

‘O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt’ [emotive language] ‘Thaw and resolve itself into a dew… His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter’ ‘Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’ [cumulation] – Hamlet voices his despair. ‘An unweeded garden that grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature’ [imagery]. ‘so excellent a king’ ‘Hyperion to a satyr’ [classical allusion] sun-god = honour and mythical beast = lust. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ – incestuous and misogyny. ‘A beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer’. ‘O most wicked speed… such dexterity to incestuous sheets’ [sexual imagery]. ‘It is not, nor it cannot come to good’ [foreshadowing].

‘O ALL YOU HOST OF HEAVEN!’ 2ND SOLILOQUY ‘Shall I couple hell?’ – Philosophical questioning. ‘Remember thee?’ [repetition] – Portrayal of his confusion and doubts. Metaphor of the ‘distracted globe’ – Elsinore is a disordered world. ‘O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!’ [Repetition]. Proverbial image of treachery, ‘That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’.

‘O WHAT A ROGUE AND PEASANT SLAVE AM I!’ 3RD SOLILOQUY ‘It is not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion could force his soul

to his own conceit… had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?’ – Hamlet compares himself to the actor who can create emotion through acting while he cannot.

‘He would drown the stage with tears’ [hyperbolic] ‘… and cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ [the motif of the ‘ear’]. ‘Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal’ – sluggish spirited, highlighting his inaction. ‘Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause and can say nothing; no, not for a King…’ ‘A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?’ ‘But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall’ – lacks guts. ‘Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindles villain! O vengeance!’ ‘Why, what an ass am I … prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell’ ‘The guilty creatures sitting at a play have by the very cunning of the scene been struck so to the

soul, that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions’ [meta-theatre] – confession of sins. ‘The spirit that I have seen may be the devil’ [low modality]. ‘The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’ [rhyming couplet].

‘TO BE OR NOT TO BE…’ 4TH SOLILOQUY ‘to be or not to be… to suffer… or to take arms’ [dichotomies] ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune… a sea of troubles’ ‘by a sleep… we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks’ ‘Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished’ ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’ – living can be unbearable? ‘makes calamity of so long life for who would bear the whips and scorns of time’ ‘Oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay…’ ‘To grunt and sweat under a weary life’ ‘The dread of something after death’ – the afterlife? His fear of the unknown? Metaphor of ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. ‘Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all’, thinking makes him impotent. Juxtaposition of ‘native hue of resolution’ and ‘pale cast of thought’. ‘Their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action’

‘TIS NOW THE VERY WITCHING TIME OF NIGHT’ 5TH SOLILOQUY ‘Now could I drink hot blood, and do such bitter business’ – Hamlet is consumed by evil. Allusion to ‘the soul of Nero’ – a Roman emperor who murdered his mother. ‘Let me be cruel, not unnatural, I will speak daggers to her’

CLAUDIUS SOLILOQUY ‘O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven’ – [imagery of rot and disease].

‘It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, a brother’s murder’ [biblical allusion to Cain’s curse]. ‘My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent… like a man to double business bound’ ‘Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow?’ [Evil VS purity]. ‘My crown, mine own ambition and my Queen’ – Claudius cannot give up his possessions. ‘in the corrupted currents of this world… the wicked prize itself buys out the law’ But ‘tis not so above; there is no shuffling, there the action lies in his true nature’

On Earth, bribery and corruption works but in heaven, you will be punished. Dramatic [rising] – ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below’ – he cannot repent.

‘NOW MIGHT I DO IT PAT…’ 6TH SOLILOQUY ‘I his sole son do this same villain send to heaven’ – dramatic irony as we know Claudius cannot

repent yet Hamlet is reluctant because he is tricked by the praying façade. ‘I then revenged, to take him in the purging of his soul, when he is fit and seasoned for his passage?’

– Signs of hesitation and this event = opposite to the typical revenge tragedy plot. Hamlet wants to kill Claudius when ‘he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, or in th’ incestuous pleasure

of his bed’ to ultimately send him to hell. ‘His soul may be as damned and black as hell whereto it goes. My mother stays.’

‘H OW ALL OCCASIONS DO INFORM AGAINST ME…’ 7TH SOLILOQUY ‘What is a main, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?’ – This clearly

shows Hamlet’s Humanist side where man can do anything. ‘That capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused’ – more Humanist thinking. Contrast between Fortinbras and Hamlet, ‘bestial oblivion’, ‘of thinking too precisely’. ‘One part wisdom and ever three parts coward’ – coward due to contemplation? Hamlet describes Fortinbras as ‘a delicate and tender prince’ – hypocritical? Hamlet criticising Fortinbras’ rashness ‘death and danger dare, even for an egg-shell’. ‘A father killed, a mother stained, excitements of my reason… and let all sleep’ – his inaction. Fortinbras causes ‘imminent death of twenty thousand men... go to their graves like beds’. ‘O, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.’ [Rhyming couplet].

OPENING [King Hamlet has just died – Elizabethan superstition of the supernatural after a king’s death] ‘Who’s there?’, ‘this portentous figure’, ‘prologue to the omen coming’ [foreboding mood]

CLAUDIUS OPENING SPEECH [IAMBIC PENTAMETER RHYTHM] ‘our dear brother’s death… us befitted to bear our hearts in grief’ [possessive pronoun] ‘Our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe’ [personification] ‘Defeated joy’ [oxymoronic], ‘an auspicious and a dropping eye’ (emblematic of deceit – proverb

for weeping with one eye and laugh with the other) [antithetical] ‘With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage’ ‘In equal scale weighting delight and dole’ [juxtaposition] Denmark’s ‘state to be disjoint and out of frame’ – highlighting vulnerability.

GHOST SCENE [DRAMATIC DEVICE] ‘Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned… from heaven… from hell’, ‘my fates cries out’. Horatio’s warning - ‘might deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness’ ‘lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold’, ‘Speak, I am bound to hear’ Hamlet’s ‘father’s spirit’ urges him to seek vengeance - ‘So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt

hear’ [subverted Revenge Tragedy convention]. ‘Murder… most foul, strange and unnatural’ [accumulation]. ‘So the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of my death’ [motif of the ‘ear’]. ‘The serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown’ [biblical allusion]. ‘That incestuous, that adulterate beast’ – apparition’s description of Claudius. ‘My ears did pour the leperous distilment’ [disease imagery]. ‘Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest’ [imperative]. Tells him not to let revenge ‘taint not thy mind’ yet he later adopts an ‘antic disposition’. ‘O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right’ [rhyming couplet].

HAMLET AND OPHELIA and the NUNNERY SCENE Polonius: ‘You speak like a green girl… think yourself a baby’, Ophelia: ‘I shall obey my lord’ ‘As if he had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors’- Ophelia describing Hamlet.

‘As you did command, I did repel his letters, and denied his access to me’ ‘Ha, ha, are you honest? … Are you fair?’ – Hamlet knows her dishonesty. ‘I did love you once… I loved you not’ - him messing with her feelings after her betrayal. ‘Get thee to a nunnery – why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners’ Hamlet criticises Ophelia, ‘God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another’.

POLONIUS’ DEATH and HAMLET’s CONVERSATION with GERTRUDE Hamlet’s dramatic [drawing] to slay Polonius ‘A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead.’ ‘O I am slain!’ – Polonius’ dramatic [behind]. ‘Is it the King?’ – For Hamlet, a shocking ironical anti-climax. Gertrude: ‘O what a rash and bloody deed is this!’ ‘A bloody deed, almost as bad, good mother, as kill a king, and marry with his brother’ ‘Takes off the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love, and sets a blister there, makes

marriage vows’ [garden and disease imagery in Hamlet’s speech] ‘Here is your husband like a mildewed ear, blasting his wholesome brother’ ‘Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, and batten on this moor? ... King of shred and

patches’ – Comparison between King Hamlet and the ‘moor’ Claudius. Queen: ‘O, speak to me no more; these words, like daggers, enter in mine ears’ Ghost: ‘This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose’. ‘But my madness speaks. It will but skin and film the ulcerous place, whiles rank corruption… infects

unseen… do not spread the compost on the weeds to make them ranker’. Telling Gertrude - ‘Confess yourself to heaven, repent what’s past, avoid what is to come’ ‘To punish me with this… that I must be their scourge and minister’ – Hamlet feels burdened. ‘I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room’ – Hamlet is shown to be capable of being violent.

GRAVEYARD SCENE Gravediggers’ black humour ‘the gallows maker, for that frame outlives a thousand tenants’. Hamlet tells Horatio that death makes us equals ‘the age is grown so picked that the toe of the

peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier’. Confrontation with ‘Yorick’s skull’, symbolic of death, leads to his acceptance of mortality. Anaphora/allusion ‘Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust’.

OPHELIA’S FUNERAL [GRAVE FIGHTING BETWEEN HAMLET AND LAERTES] ‘Like wonder-wounded bearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ – notion of identity. [Leaps into the grave] and [grapples with him] – dramatic action with Laertes and Hamlet. ‘I loved Ophelia, forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum’.

ENDING [Dramatic irony in fight scene as audience knows that Claudius has planned for everything] Anti-Humanist thinking, ‘there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will’ ‘There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow… yet it will come – the readiness is all’ ‘Whose motive in this case should stir me most to my revenge but in terms of my honour’ – Laertes

is driven by medieval values such as honour and will take action. Claudius’ dramatic aside, ‘it is the poisoned cup, it is too late’, indicates lack of feelings. Laertes states that ‘the King, the King’s to blame’ – Claudius’ death = order restored. ‘Horatio, I am dead, thou livest; report me and my cause alright to the unsatisfied’ ‘But I do prophesy the election lights on Fortinbras, he has my dying voice’ Horatio’s summation – ‘so shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts… purposes mistook

fall’n on the inventors’ heads’ Fortinbras’ acknowledgement ‘Let four captains bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage’.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [loyalty, betrayal] By Act 2 Scene 2, Hamlet knows that R&G ‘were sent for’ – the notion of BETRAYAL. Hamlet’s final warning to Guildenstern and Rosencrantz about his madness that- ‘I am but mad

north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’. Metaphor of this duo as ‘a sponge that soaks up the king’s countenance…’

Polonius Gives advice such as ‘to thine own self be true’ yet he is shown to be a pompous fool – ‘brevity is

the soul of wit’ which is ironic as his character is the opposite of this suggestion of being brief. Actually believes Hamlet is mad ‘Mad call I it… what is‘t but to be nothing else but mad?’