ASSIGNMET ENGLISH

Name: Abdul Rehman.

Introduction:
Soliloquies are essential to the presentation of a story through the medium of a play because they
provide the opportunity and chance to tell the audience specific pieces of information which
cannot be disclosed through normal conversation. In his work, Hamlet, Shakespeare’s title
character is shown to speak in seven soliloquies. Each soliloquy advances the plot, reveals
Hamlet’s inner thoughts to the audience, and helps to create an atmosphere in the play.
Hamlet (1600-1601) by William Shakespeare (1564, 23 April-1616, 23 April) is „often described
in superlatives: the most popular, most often played and published drama of the past over four
hundred years not only in England but also in Western culture‟ (Thompson and Taylor, 2006 P.
13) whose core themes are presented through several soliloquies. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gives
soliloquies either to villain (Claudius) or to Protagonists (Hamlet’s Ophelia). They are pertinent
to the play because they are beneficial in disclosing the most intimate thoughts of the
protagonists, Hamlet such as Hamlet’s mental state; his changing attitude towards life and the
other characters in the play; his dilemmas and fears on questions of morality and his reflection on
the task of revenge that has been assigned to him. Perhaps the soliloquies of Hamlet apart from
building the structure of the play can also suggest the complex and chameleonic beauty of the
character. Actually the soliloquies of Hamlet are among the chief glories of the play according to
Beazley. (XXXIII) However before discussing the significance of the soliloquies in Hamlet,
taking a glance on the definition of soliloquy and its necessity is important.

Definition of soliloquy:
Literature view:
Problem of statement:
Hamlet is a young prince whose father has been murdered, who has difficulty finding
appropriate response. Severely criticized by many critics, and occasionally he criticizes himself,
for not acting more swiftly and carrying out the ghost's command to achieve revenge. But
Shakespeare takes pains to explore some of the alternative possibilities using other characters.
pas sive response. There is no doubt that Ophelia is eventually overwhelmed by her
circumstances: by Hamlet's rejection and by the death of her father, she goes mad and she dies.
Whether her death is suicide is left uncertain. The priest is dubious and reproving about it. Since
she's mad, it is not a consciously chosen suicide, but it may be unconsciously willed. This is the
passive response to the death of a beloved and respected father.
This is a transcript from the video series Shakespeare: The Word and the Action Lacerates gives
us an active response. He returns from Paris in a rage. He raises a rebellion, demands vengeance,
threatens the king, and finally adopts any means to get his revenge. He swears of the murderer,
"I'd cut his throat in the church." What he does is not sacrilegious, as an assassination carried out
in a church would be, but it is underhanded and dishonorable. Claudius leads him into agreeing
to have what is supposedly a friendly duel with Hamlet, only Lacerates' sword is going to be a
real sword-an unbuttoned sword with a point to it-and he'll put poison on the point as well.
Learn more about how Hamlet calls up
"thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls"
Reason over Passion in Hamlet:
This savage action of going after revenge regardless of its moral status is the
kind of act that Hamlet himself had considered earlier in the play. Not In the literal detail of
unbuttoned and poisoned falls, but in its disregard for honor and ethics. In his initial response to
the ghost's revelation of the murder, Hamlet had responded, "Oh all ye hosts of heaven, oh Earth,
whot else? Shall I couple hell? And to use Claudius's weapon of poison. He dramatizes a route to
revenge that Hamlet rejects. Hamlet's weapons are not underhanded and he doesn't cut the throat
of a man at prayer, his uncle Claudius. Lacerates and Ophelia thus demonstrate responses to
father murder that Hamlet considers but does not act upon. The fact that Lacerates and Ophelia
are brother and sister, suggests that these two routes are deliberately paired and complementary.
Both of them surrender to the difficult situation, both yield wholly to passion, and both risks the
damnation that Hamlet himself fears will follow upon the orders of the ghost.
Ophelia and Lacerates yielding entirely to passion show that Hamlet, for all his self blame about
delay and criticisms that are written about his delay, shows that Hamlet has not done so badly in
hesitating over what course of action he should take. He did not yield to passion. Reason, the
sense that there are alternatives, the worry about consequences-these things have restrained his
passions. He may resent reason at times, assign his talk about At" that blunts "enterprises of great
pitch and moment." Indeed, sometimes he casts off reason altogether and behaves quite madly,
but he confines himself to speaking daggers most of the time, rather than using them. Often in
his tragedies, Shakespeare uses a pattern of taking the hero offstage. Hamlet has a climactic
section in Act III; similar to Macbeth and King Lear, before then they disappear from the play
for a long stretch. The actor gets a chance to rest in the greenroom, subordinate characters take
over for a while, and the issues are remanded so that when the hero returns we can see him in a
new light, from a new angle It's an important device of structure in Shakespearean tragedy
whatever else Hamlet has done, we see when. He comes back from England, the -s has managed
to preserve himself. He Death Considered as a Result of
Action in Hamlet:
Action, in other words, leads to death. And death leads to what? "To die, to sleep,
perchance to dream," and there lays the trouble because we don't know what is going to happen
in the afterlife. There Is passivity in the form of endurance, or there is active opposition. Hamlet
is asking, "Can we act at all? Can we act nobly at all?"
He does not fear death; he fears what may happen after death: the
consciousness of the soul that has perished, the exposure of the soul that has shucked off the
body like a snake shucking off its old skin. The mystery of death is the great unknown in all our
equations anybody could deal with trouble with a bare bodkin. You can stab you’re out of most
situations, either by out of most situations, either by stabbing the person who Is bothering you or
stabbing yourself. That will end the trouble. But if you kill yourself, you go out of the world with
suicide on your soul. You have deserted your point of duty. This is key in a play that begins with
soldiers on sentry guard and ends with Hamlet being given a soldier's funeral by Fortinbras. Or
the other option, you commit murder, for which you will probably be punished with execution.
In any case, you'll end up dead. Entrance to the other world with a guilty soul. Action leads to
death, which leads to what?
Thus, "conscience doth make cowards of us all"-a great line from late in the soliloquy. And
"conscience" here means both the moral faculty, the ability to discern right from worn and what
we now call consciousness. Hesitation from Moral Integrity Hamlet's Conscience. The natural
vigor of resolution is enshrouded by Intellectual doubt. Hamlet is a person with a conscience. At
this point in the play, his conscience is aware that the king's guilt is as yet unproven, with only
the word of a dubious apparition to go on. He must be sure that it is the right thing that he will
do, or he will not do it at all. His moral integrity forbids him to act until all possibilities of doing
wrong are eliminated. In that sense, Hamlet is the complete opposite of Prince Hal from Henry
V. Hal will claim responsibility, will narrow the choices, and say, "Let's do It." Hal is the
definitive man of action. Hamlet is his opposite At this point in the center of the pi all Hamlet's
capacity stands poise the Capacity of his aspiring spirit, Luis sense, Hamlet is the complete
opposite of Prince Hal from Henry V. Hal will claim responsibility, will narrow the choices, and
say, "Let's do It." Hal is the definitive man of action. Hamlet is his opposite. At this point in the
center of the play, all Hamlet's capacity stands poised the capacity of his aspiring spirit, his
sympathetic heart, and his conceiving intellect. Those capacities stand before a moral choice
presented by an ambiguous world. "There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of
by our philosophy. How then can we responsibly choose among them? As poor Ophelia says,
one of the most lucid lines in the play uttered in the mad scene,
Textual Analysis:
Dramatic structure:
In creating Hamlet, Shakespeare broke several rules, one of the largest being the
rule of action over character. In his day, plays were usually expected to follow the advice of
Aristotle in his Poetics, which declared that a drama should not focus on character so much as
action. The highlights of Hamlet, however, are not the action scenes, but the soliloquies, wherein
Hamlet reveals his motives and thud’s to the audience. Also, unlike Shakespeare's other plays,
there is no strong subplot, all plot forks are directly connected to the main vein of Hamlet
struggling to gain revenge The play is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of action.
At one point, Hamlet is resolved to kill Claudius. in the next scene, he is suddenly tame Scholars
still debate whether these odd plot Tums are mistakes or intentional additions to add to the play's
theme of confusion and dual Hamlet's statement in this scene that his dark clothing is merely an
outwards representation of his inward prep insane example of his strong retorical skill Much of
the play's language embodies the elaborate witty vocabulary expected of a royal court. This is in
line with Baldassare Castiglione's work. The Courtier (published in [ 528), which outlines
several courtly rules. Specifically advising servants of royals to amuse their rulers with their
inventive diction Once and Polonius seem to especially respect this suggestion Claudius' speech
is full of rhetorical figures as is Hamlet's and, at times Open lass, while foretop, the guards, and
the Ophelia’s, while Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers use simpler methods of speech.
Claudius demonstrates an authoritative control over the language of a King, referring to himself
in the first person plural, and using anaphora mixed with metaphor that hearkens back to Greek
political speeches. Hamlet seems the most educated in rhetoric of all the characters, using
anaphora, as the king does, but also asyndeton and highly developed metaphors, while at the
same time managing to be precise and sunflower (as when he explains his inward emotion to his
mother, saying "But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits
of woe ") His language is very self-conscious, and relies heavily on puns. Especially when
pretending to be mad, Hamlet uses puns Io reveal his true thoughts, while at the same time
hiding them. Psychologists have since associated a heavy use of puns with several places in the
play assign open last speech after the hungry scene ("Th'expectancy and rose of the fair state"
and "I, of all ladies, most deject and wretched" are two examples). Many scholars have found it
odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly arbitrarily, use this rhetorical form throughout the play.
Hamlet was written later in his life, when he was better at matching rhetorical figures with the
characters and the plot than early in his career. Wright, however, has proposed that hendiadys is
used to heighten the sense of duality in the play [30Hamlet's soliloquies have captured the
attention of scholars as well. Early critics viewed such speeches as To be, or not to be as
Shakespeare's expressions of his own personal beliefs. Later scholars, such as Carney, have
rejected this theory saying the soliloquies are expressions of Hamlet's thought process. During
his speeches, Hamlet interrupts himself, expressing disgust in agreement with him, and embeds
dishing his own words. Hehasdifficulty expressing himself directly and instead skirts around the
basic idea of his thought. Net unit late in the play after his experience with the pirates, is Ham et
really able to be direct and sure in his Hamlet really able to be direct and sure in his speech. R1)
Religious:
John Everett Millais Ophelia (1852) depicts Ophelia's mysterious death by drowning.
The clowns' discussion of whether het death was a suicide and whether she merits a Christian
burial is at heart a religious topic The play makes several references to both Catholicism and
Protestantism the two most powerful theological forces of the time in Europe. The Ghost
describes himself as being in purgatory, and as having died without receiving his last files. This,
along with Ophella's burial ceremony, which is uniquely Catholic, make up most of the play's
Catholic connections. Some scholars have pointed that revenge tragedies were traditionally
Catholic, possibly because of their sources:
Spain and Italy, both Catholic nations. Scholars have pointed out that
knowledge of the play's Catholicism can reveal important paradoxes In Hamlet's decision
process According to Catholic doctrine; the strongest duty Is to God and family. Hamlet's father
being killed and calling for revenge thus offers a contradiction: does he avenge his father and kill
Claudius, or does he leave the vengeance to God, as his religion requires??!!
The play's Protestantism lies in its location in Denmark, a Protestant (and specifically a
Lutheran) country in Shakespeare's day though it is unclear whether the fictional Denmark of the
play is intended to mirror this fact The play does mention Wittenberg, which E where Hamlet is
attending university, and where Martin Luther first nailed his 9a teases One of the more famous
lines in the play related to Protestantism is There Is special providence in the fall Ella sparrow. if
it special providence In the fall of a sparrow. If it be not now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to
come, it will be now; If It be not now, yet will it come-the readiness is all."(34)
In the First Quarto, the same line reads: "There's a predestinate providence in the fall of a
sparrow." Scholars have wondered whether Shakespeare was censored, as the word
"predestined" appears in this one Quarto of Hamlet, but not in others, and as censoring of plays
was far from unusual at the time.[5] Rulers and religious leaders feared that the doctrine of
predestination would lead people to excuse the most traitorous of actions, with the excuse, "God
made me do it " English Puritans, for example, believed that conscience was a more powerful
force than the law due to the new ideas at the time that conscience came not from religious or
government leaders, but from God directly to the individual Many leaders at the time condemned
the doctrine as / unfit to keeper subjects in obedience to their sovereigns" as people might openly
maintained that God math as well pre designated men to be traitors as to be kings King James as
well often wrote about his dislike of Protestant leaders taste for standing up to kings, seeing It as
a dangerous trouble to society "" Throughout the play, Shakespeare mixes the two religions,
making interpretation difficult. At one moment, the play is Catholic and medieval, in the next, it
is logical and Protestant. Scholars continue to debate what part religion and religious contexts
play in Hamlet [38)
Philosophical:
Hamlet is often perceived as a philosophical character. Some of the most prominent
philosophical theories in Hamlet are relativism, existentialism, and skepticism Hamlet expresses
a relativist idea when he says to Rosencrantz: "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking
makes it so" (2.2.268-270). The idea that nothing is real except in the mind of the individual
finds its roots in the Greek Sophists, who argued that since nothing can be perceived except
through the senses, and all men fell and sensed things differently, truth was entirely relative.
There was no absolute truth “This same line of Hamlet also introduces theories of existentialism.
A double meaning can be read into the word "is" which introduces the question of whether
anything "Is" or can be if thinking doesn't make it so. This is tied into his to be or not to be
speech, where to be can be read as a question of existence Ham it’s contemplation on suicide this
Scene however is more religious than Hamlet Is perhaps most affected by the prevailing
skepticism in Shakespeare's day in response to the Renaissance's humanism. Humanists living
prior to Shakespeare's time had argued that man was godlike, capable of anything. Skepticism
toward this altitude is clearly expressed in Hamlet's what a piece of work is a man speech this
goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look
you, this brave overhanging firmament, this majestically roof fretted with golden fire, why it
appeared!) Nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors what a piece of work is
a man-how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving. How express and
admirable in action how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dual"
Scholars nave pointed oin this section similarities to lines written by //impelled Moonshine in his
est. Scholars have pointed out this section's similarities to lines written by Michel de Montaigne
in his Essays: Who have persuaded [man] that this admirable moving of heavens vaults, that the
eternal light of these lamps so fiercely Rowling over his head, that the horror-moving and
continual motion of this infinite vaster ocean were established, and continue so many ages for his
commodities and service? is it possible to imagine so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched
creature, which is not so much as master of himself, exposed and subject to offences of all
things, and yet dearth call himself Master and Emperor Rather than being a direct influence on
Shakespeare however Montaigne may have hen reacting to the same general atmosphere of the
time, making the source of these lines one of context Mather than direct.
Importance of Soliloquies:
Conclusion:
References: