A Sea of Troubles

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his musicked vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh;
That unmatched form and stature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see! (Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii, lines 163-175)

Much like an anthropologist can create a fairly reasonable model of what a skeleton's owner looked like in life, with a general knowledge of the plot, one can often come away with an accurate model of a play.

But not with William Shakespeare.

I'd compare a Shakespeare plot more to a coat rack than to a skeleton, as the final shape of one of his plays depends upon the vast array of objects he throws upon his coat rack, rather than the predictable collection of stuff that hangs on a skeleton, whether it belonged to a human being or to a more conventional, plot driven  play. These objects such as speeches, soliloquies, and other diversions may have only a tenuous connection to the action if that, and often do not move the plot along at all. 

But in the end, what we hopefully take away from a Shakespeare play are the things found in these diversions, the "real attractions --- the characters, themes, poetry, prose and philosophy" in short, what makes Shakespeare, Shakespeare, that is to say his unique ability to speak to the truth of what it means to be human. 

We already discovered this in one of my previous posts where we explored the idea that Hamlet is indecisive in avenging the death of his father. If we were to take the plot elements alone, plus a trace of knowledge of how things work in the real world, the amount of time it takes Hamlet from learning the truth about his father's death to taking action should not be surprising to anyone considering the grave nature of what he is asked to do. 

However as Shakespeare gives us deep insight into the character's mind, we are given a front row seat into the profound inner turmoil he is going through, which naturally colors our assumptions about him. 

It seems what many of us want from Hamlet is this:

Take away the speeches, the soliloquies, the asides, and the rest of the diversions within Hamlet the play, left with nothing but the plot, this is essentially what we get, an action hero play.

But instead of Hamlet the Terminator, what we get with Shakespeare is Hamlet the Ruminator. Sorry, can't take credit for that one. 

I find it interesting that many folks who produce Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet most notably, find the speeches and the soliloquies frustrating because they can grind the action to a complete standstill. Therefore it's not unusual for the diversions to be minimized, either by editing, moving them around, or eliminating them entirely.

Except for the last part, this is especially true for the most famous diversion of them all. the one which the noted portrayer of Hamlet, Scottish actor David Tennant responded in an interview to the cue: "To Be or Not to Be..." with: "that is the cliché."

I'm not aware of any production of Hamlet having the nerve to jettison that soliloquy, so tied at the hip is it to the play that removing it would be like serving Thanksgiving dinner without the turkey. For the record, I don't even like turkey all that much, but I certainly would leave the late November table not a little unsatisfied without it.

Rather, the speech is moved around to different parts of the play, usually placing it in a scene all to its own, where it supposedly won't interfere (that much) with the plotline. 

But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. The play Hamlet features seven soliloquies (inner thoughts of a character spoken aloud and shared only with the audience), from the title character alone, in addition to several other speeches (spoken discourse shared with other characters in the play), all of which represent the heart and soul of the play.

Let's look at them.

I'll quote from the speeches and soliloquies sporadically and as I've been doing in these Hamlet posts, give their location in the play (Act, Scene, lines) so you can read them in context and in their entirety, either from your own copy of the play, or online from any number of sources. The online version I'd recommend is the Folger Shakespeare Library's website which is fully indexed as any good print version, and searchable. 

Here's the link to their Hamlet page.

You can easily find performances of these speeches on YouTube but as each performance is an interpretation, I would recommend going to the source itself first so as not to be swayed by a particular interpretation, then moving on to the performances if you like. 

Of course hands down the best way to experience Shakespeare is in a live performance, shared with other human beings in an audience. And if you can do it in London where it all began as I had the tremendous opportunity to do in a West End production of Twelfth Night, all the better.  

OK let's get started, I'll begin each section with a line or two from the opening of the soliloquy or speech and give a little setup before getting to the speech itself. The soliloquies and speeches will appear in the order in which they appear in the play as Shakespeare wrote it.

Here goes:

OH THAT THIS TOO TOO SULLIED FLESH WOULD MELT,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew. (I, ii, 133, 164)

We are introduced to Prince Hamlet, as the newly coronated King Claudius and his queen, Gertrude hold court at Elsinore Castle. It is a bitter-sweet celebration as Claudius opens his speech by paying tribute to his brother, the recently deceased King Hamlet. Then his attention turns to Gertrude, his new bride, who happens to be the widow of the dead king, and mother of the prince:

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we (as ’twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole)
Taken to wife.    (I, ii, 8-12)

Prince Hamlet is easy to spot in the crowd, he's the sulking guy completely dressed in black, still in mourning over the death of his father. 

Both Claudius and Gertrude chide him for this, bidding him to get over it.

When the ceremony ends, only Hamlet remains on stage where he gives his first soliloquy.   

As we'll see, the soliloquies of Hamlet not only serve as indications of what's going on in the mind of the character, but most of them also serve a similar function as the Chorus in plays of antiquity, filling in details that may have not been covered by the dialog or are simply overlooked. This is necessary because Hamlet the play, has a lot of moving parts. 

So in case you missed it in Claudius' speech, Hamlet reminds us in his soliloquy, that his uncle, (and not he, the Crown Prince) has succeeded his father to the throne, and that his mother married his uncle. He also points out that his father has been dead only two months, and Hamlet is not pleased. 

In the first few lines of the soliloquy, Hamlet contemplates death. Here's the second sentence:

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!

This is of tremendous significance to the play. First of all it tells us that Hamlet and Denmark at the time the play takes place, (which is never firmly established), are under the influence of Christianity. Previous to the arrival of Christianity at around 1000 AD, Denmark under the Vikings had no such rule against suicide. It is especially important because in what will play a tremendous role later, Christianity has a much different take on vengeance than did its predecessor in the Nordic lands.

Secondly, in this line Hamlet flat out rejects killing himself, an issue that will come up a couple acts later addressing a common misconception. Keep this in mind.

From Hamlet's first line of the play found at (I, ii, 67), we already know that he despises Claudius. 

In the soliloquy that follows, he compares his father to his uncle with the following: 

So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr...

But he saves the bulk of his wrath for his mother who agreed to marry Claudius not long after his father's body turned cold: 

A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears—why she, even she
(O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!), married with my
uncle,..
...O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It's easy to see how psychoanalysts from Freud on have delved into the plethora of issues affecting poor Hamlet. Shakespeare who created the character and opened up his mind for all of us to see was three centuries ahead of them.

Today even an average bloke like me can check off items from a list of symptoms of depression found online that are exhibited in this soliloquy alone. Here are three:

• Thoughts of death or suicide: check. 

• Loss of interest or pleasure:

  How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
  Seem to me all the uses of this world.

• Persistent sadness or emptiness:

  Fie on't ah fie. 'Tis an unweeded garden
  That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
  Possess it merely....

There will be more visible symptoms of depression in Hamlet in his following speeches.

I remarked in my last post how much of Hamlet is informed by real life and vice versa. Depression of course is a real and debilitating disease. We can't know if Hamlet's depression is chronic although we do have an indication from Ophelia's soliloquy found at the top of this post, that his personality has exhibited a drastic change since the death of his father. 

It hardly matters. His treatment at the hands of both his mother and his uncle/stepfather in this scene is a painful reminder to anyone who has either suffered from depression or has lived with someone who has, how willing people are to dismiss the disease by saying: "just get over it."

In that regard, this is a truly heart-rending scene to anyone with skin in the game.

Now on to the next soliloquy:

OH ALL YOU HOST OF HEAVEN!   (I, v, 99-119)

After his first soliloquy, Hamlet's good friend Horatio enters along with two of the castle guards Marcellus and Barnardo. After exchanging greetings, the men have shocking news for Hamlet, they believe they have seen the ghost of his father, the late king.

This obviously gets the attention of Hamlet who agrees to meet the men upon the battlements of the castle that evening. 

Which they do two scenes later. After waiting around for a time listening to a rant from Hamlet about the character of the new king, the ghost of the old king shows up. He beckons Hamlet to follow him. Scared out of their wits, Hamlet's companions beg Hamlet not to comply, but he insists.

This leads to the next scene:

When he is alone with the spirit, the ghost starts talking. He promises a compelling story is to follow:

So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.  (I, v, 12)

You probably already know what comes next but if not, in a nutshell the ghost tells Hamlet that if he indeed loves his father, he will avenge his murder to which Hamlet cleverly replies:

MURDER???        (I, v, 32, emphasis and extra question marks mine)

It turns out the ghost is almost as loquacious as old Polonius so I'll skip the foreplay and cut to the chase:

The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.   (I, v, 46-47)

Now the cat's out of the bag and Hamlet knows, if this ghost is on the up and up, that his father did not die accidentally as he thought; he was murdered by Claudius. 

With some lurid details about the relationship between the new king and Hamlet's mother, along with a bunch of other stuff, the chatty ghost bids Hamlet adieu with these parting words: 

...Remember me.   (I, v, 98)

I don't know about you, but I feel a soliloquy coming on...

Hamlet is naturally shocked to the core at what he has just witnessed. He begins this soliloquy by calling upon all the powers of the universe,  the angels of heaven, the forces of Earth, and even hell if necessary, to calm himself down and make sense over what he has just witnessed. Then he says:

Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter.

He finishes the soliloquy with this:

So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word.
It is “adieu, adieu, remember me.”
I have sworn ’t.

So far, Hamlet seems unequivocal to my ears anyway, that he has every intention to fulfil his late father's request.

Immediately after the soliloquy, Hamlet is rejoined by Horatio and Marcellus who are anxious to hear what transpired. Hamlet keeps his cards close to his chest, only demanding their pledge that they will not let a soul know what they have just seen. They oblige him.

Then he ups the ante, insisting they swear silence despite the fact that they can expect some strange behavior from him. as he puts...

...an antic disposition on... (I, v, 192)

...for the time being, as he investigates the situation. Given that, it's especially important for them to claim ignorance about his strange behavior.

Again they swear.

The scene ends with these parting words of Hamlet to his friends: 

---So, gentlemen,
With all my love I do commend me to you,
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do t’ express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together,
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together.     (I, v, 204,212)

Commenters since Goethe have cherry-picked those two highlighted sentences to define Hamlet's reluctance to and flat-out resentment of having been burdened with the task of avenging his father's murder. Some even suggest the ghost picked "the wrong man for the job."

Taken out context from the rest of the paragraph, it does sound like Hamlet would just like to go back to his books and forget the whole thing ever happened. 

It all seems so easy. Just kill Claudius whom he hates anyway, claim his throne, take Ophelia as his queen, then go on to live happily ever after; why all the hand-ringing? 

Of course all of that is fantasy, Hamlet knows as did Shakespeare's original audience, that killing the king would certainly result in Hamlet's own death, execution for the crime of high treason. This would be true not only in the real world of Shakespeare's time, but in the world of the revenge tragedy genre that Hamlet the play belongs, where the formula not only the requires the death of the perpetrator of the original murder but also his avenger. 

And it is vastly more complicated than that. Killing Claudius alone would not have "set things right" in the rotten state of Denmark, as Claudius' alleged crimes would need to be made known to the public for any justice to have been served. Sure in his defense before the axe is dropped, Hamlet could have made the claim that Claudius murdered his father, but the only evidence to back that up would be the word of a ghost, who most likely would not have made himself available for the trial. 

In that same vein Hamlet could kill Claudius clandestinely as Claudius killed his father but again Claudius' evil deeds would die along with him. And in doing so, Hamlet's actions in his mind would be no better than those of Claudius.

On top of that is the moral aspect. As I mentioned earlier, Christianity takes a dim view of vengeance unlike the old days of Viking culture where taking vengeance for a father's murder would not only be acceptable for Hamlet, it would have been expected. This clash of cultures and doctrine plays a significant role in Hamlet's dilemma.

Until his father's death, Hamlet was a student of philosophy and most likely also theology.* Since his birth he had every expectation of becoming king one day.

Becoming an assassin likely never occurred to him. Nor did death on the chopping block, nor eternal damnation for that matter. 

Given all that, I think if any reasonable person were to put himself in Hamlet's shoes at that moment, the sentiments found in those two sentences make perfect.sense, and don't necessarily mean that he is not up to the task. 

Now on to Act II scene ii:

DENMARK'S A PRISON  (II, ii, 262)

Roughly two months have elapsed between Act I and Act II. In that time as promised, Hamlet has put on his "antic disposition" to divert attention from trying to glean information about his father's death. This has caused great concern for King Claudius as he suspects correctly that Hamlet might be on to him. It has also concerned his mother because, well, because she's his mother.

At 634 lines, this magnificent scene is by far the longest in the play and it could be described in its entirety as a massive distraction from the play's action broken up sporadically by a plot element thrown in here and there for good measure. 

Hamlet has no soliloquy until the very end of the of the scene, but a prolonged dialog between him and his two old school buddies who were sent by Claudius and Gertrude to spy on him is of particular interest here. There are two things I'd like to mention about this part of the scene which Lawrence Olivier felt insignificant enough to cut from his 1948 film, along with the characters of Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, his school chums.

First is the line above which Hamlet uses to greet the two, here's the setup: 

...What
have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of
Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?        (II, ii, 258-260)

The political situation in Denmark under the rule of King Claudius may be a subplot, but it's the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room throughout the play. Hamlet immediately suspects Rosenkranz and Guildenstern as having been sent to spy on him. The entire MO of Claudius' reign in fact is paranoia and surveillance. The "get thee to a nunnery" (III, i, 96-175) and "Gertrude's closet" (III, iv, 1-240) scenes which we discussed in earlier posts are two notable examples. The first scene of Act II is another. It features the king's chief advisor Polonius sending one of his lackies to Paris to spy on his own son who's away at school.

Needless to say, practically every audience in the last 400 years could relate in one way or other to this level of government interference into people's lives, "the insolence of office" as Hamlet would call it in the next act. 

To add my own little distraction here, this post being written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I was reminded this month of the Patriot Act, a unilaterally passed act of Congress "that greatly expanded the surveillance and investigative powers of U.S. law enforcement agencies in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks." This is a subject for another post, but here I'll refer you to this article from the New York Times, titled: Civil Libertarians Knew This Would Happen. We Should Have Listened, published last Thursday, September 10, 2026.

All I'll say here is that by giving up certain expectations of privacy, we are currently reaping the drawbacks of that Act (which was passed mostly with good intentions), as we speak.

Yet another case of real-life informing Hamlet and vice versa.

The second part of this remarkable half-scene I'd like to mention is a mini speech Hamlet gives to R&G, describing his state of mind. I mentioned above that one of the "real attractions" of the play is its magnificent poetry and prose. This is only my opinion, but what follows I think are some of the finest lines (in this case prose) in the entire play, if not ever written in the English language:

I have of late, but
wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof, fretted
with golden fire—why, it appeareth 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 dust?      (II, ii, 319-332)

Like the psychoanalysts, Shakespeare preceded the Existentialist philosophers by centuries.

Now on to the second half of the scene:

O WHAT A ROGUE AND PEASANT SLAVE AM I!   (II, ii, 577-634)

Hamlet's longest soliloquy follows what has to be to the uninitiated, a head-scratching interlude which seems to have nothing to do with the play, the Phyrrus and Hecuba speech.

And yet, it has everything to do with the play.

I think it's safe to say that Hamlet is Shakespeare's most personal play. It's become common knowledge after the tremendous success of the Chloé Zhao film Hamnet based on the historical novel of the same name by Maggie O'Farrell, that the loss of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway's young son, had a great role in influencing the play which is why the themes of death, loss, grief and hopelessness are so prevalent. 

Shakespeare's own life in the theater takes center stage in this act as a group of actors arrive at Elsinore to entertain the Court. Hamlet for the first time in the play throws off his cast of sorrow as he is delighted to welcome them. 

After a prolonged greeting, Hamlet asks the leader of the troupe to recite a speech he once heard him deliver from an obscure play:

Twas Aeneas’ tale to Dido, and
thereabout of it especially when he speaks of
Priam’s slaughter.         (II, ii, 471-473)

The speech from the fictional play is based upon Virgil's Aeneid, the Roman version of the story of the Trojan war, told from the viewpoint of the Trojans. In the speech, Aeneid tells the story of Phyrrus, one of the Greek soldiers hiding inside the Trojan Horse. As the city is being sacked, Phyrrus looking to avenge the murder of his father Achillies at the hands of the Trojans, bursts into the palace and confronts King Priam. The aged Priam makes a valiant effort to defend himself but is slain by Phyrrus. Meanwhile Priam's ghastly murder is witnessed by his wife, Hecuba.

Shakespeare greatly enhances the story from the original, writing it in a slightly dated style, the over-the-top drama of the verse harking back ten years or so, parodying his own earlier work and perhaps that of his contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. 

The speech reflects Hamlet's own revenge story. Shakespeare even has Phyrrus hesitate briefly before  killing Priam, anticipating Hamlet's retracting his sword while Claudius is praying. Hecuba is a stand in for Gertrude, yet her profound grief over witnessing her husband's murder stands in marked contrast to Gertrude's "most unrighteous tears" as she followed her husband's body then married "with most wicked speed" her brother-in-law within a month of her first husband's death.   

All to bring up the question, what is real and what is not and, who is acting and who is not, one of the central themes of the play. 

Since this speech is a performance of a performance, I'll make an exception here to my moratorium on videos of performances as this one is too good. From Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film adaptation of Hamlet, here is Charlton Heston performing the role of the First Player, performing Aeneas' tale to Dido:

Now THAT'S acting! It can be said here that Heston puts the ham in Hamlet. **

Which is precisely the point. After the actors leave the stage Hamlet is left all alone. Why is it he says that this actor who has absolutely no personal connection to the story...

What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba
That he should weep for her?

... have the ability to conjure up such a tremendous reaction while Hamlet whose father has been slain cannot come close to mustering up that level of emotion:

What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.

Then Hamlet relentlessly tears into himself: 

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing... Am I a coward?
Who calls me “villain”? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? ...
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter...
Why, what an ass am I!...

And so on. 

All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, Hamlet throws on the brakes and does a complete 180, tying everything we've just witnessed together. In doing so, he comes up with the plan that sets everything into motion:

Hum, I have heard
That 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;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick. If he do blench,
I know my course.

This sets the stage for the turning point of the play. Now on to Act III.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE      (III,i, 64-96)

This soliloquy is distinct from the rest of Hamlet's soliloquies in a number of ways.  First, it is the only speech of the seven, not to comment on what has just or is about to happen in the story. ** It is the only one spoken entirely in general terms; in it, Hamlet never refers to himself, no first person-singular pronouns are to be found. It has no emotional climax nor impactful final cadence. The biggest difference is that it reads more like a philosophical discourse than the venting of the soul, which would best describe the other six soliloquies.

I'd be willing to bet that in the last four hundred years, this speech has been recited out of context far more times than it has been spoken during a performance of the play. Generation upon generation of school children and amateur thespians have memorized it by rote without pondering its true meaning.  That's because taken out of the context of the play, it's meaning changes. 

If you don't already have the speech committed to memory, here's a link to its out-of-context version.

Here's a more contemporary, prose version written by yours truly, which sums up I think the gist of the "To Be Or Not To Be" speech when taken out of the context of the play:

Living or dying, that's the issue.

What would be better, putting up with all the crap that life throws at us, 

or putting an end to it all by dying, which when you think of it, is really no different from sleeping. 

When we sleep we forget our troubles and if death is permanent sleep, then we put an end to them for good.

Not such a bad idea is it?

But here's the problem,

If death is prolonged sleep, when we sleep, we dream.

What might those dreams of the sleep of death be like?

This is what has troubled people from time immemorial, because who would suffer all the indignities of life by keeping on living if it weren't for the fear that what we experience after death could be so much worse?

That's the problem with awareness, it prevents us from doing so many of the things we set out to do.

Not too impressive without the elevated language, brilliant use of metaphor, and the sheer beauty of the poetry is it?

But when taken out of context from the play, this speech really doesn't say anything more than "life sucks and we'd all just kill ourselves if it weren't for the fear that death could be worse."

That's not especially profound, considering it deals with the immensely fraught, complicated and heartbreaking issue of suicide. Imagine a therapist reading this speech to a patient suffering from suicidal thoughts. Would that be grounds for malpractice?

I think it's because we're all so used to hearing To Be or Not To Be read outside of the context of the play, that we assume Hamlet is contemplating suicide when he makes this speech.

He is not. 

 

Remember the second sentence of his first soliloquy where he flat out rejects self-slaughter because it goes against God's law? Of course in real life one could reject suicide at one moment then revisit it at another. But within the context of the play, at least as Shakespeare wrote it, the last time we saw Hamlet before this soliloquy was at the end of the last act when he told us" the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. "After two months of inaction, Hamlet finally has a viable plan to determine his uncle's guilt. Wouldn't it be strange if the next time we see him, he's back to where he was in the opening lines of the first soliloquy?

Indeed it would. 

As I read it, during the two months when Hamlet was figuring out how he could prove to himself that Claudius was or was not guilty, taking vengeance on his uncle was an abstract idea. Now he has a plan which if goes as expected and Claudius proves himself guilty, that vengeance will become very real and Hamlet will be faced with either suffering in his mind the slings and arrows of knowing his king murdered his father, or taking arms against him.

It is here where Shakespeare's brilliance particularly shines. In the fourth line of the soliloquy, he uses a whopper of a mixed metaphor: "... take arms against a sea of troubles." Centuries of grammarians and high school English teachers have assailed Shakespeare for this most basic faux pas. After all, how do you take arms against a sea? The Enlightenment poet Alexander Pope who published his version of the complete works of Shakespeare in the 1720's, replaced sea of troubles with "siege of troubles." There have been in fact a plethora of historical suggestions to "improve" the line by folks who claimed they knew better than Shakespeare.

But think about it. In your mind's eye, picture a fully armored warrior standing at the shore, prepared to do battle against a tidal wave. 

Sea wins. 

Now picture a battalion or even an entire army of warriors fighting against the sea. 

Sea wins.

This is Hamlet's dilemma; he is charged with fighting a battle he cannot possibly win. He is faced with two excruciating choices, much like the poor souls who found themselves trapped in the Twin Towers above the point where the planes struck. They had the choice of either suffering the toxic smoke and immense heat from the fire below in the ever-diminishing hope that someone might come along to rescue them, or end their suffering almost immediately by jumping. 

I brought up in one of my earlier posts the "money quote" of this speech:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

The following sentence is:

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought.

Are we to believe, as so many commenters over the centuries seem to have believed, that the message here is that it is better just to act than to think?

I hope not.

Yet Shakespeare does seem to be implying here that this "God-like reason" of ours, (a phrase borrowed from another soliloquy) can be both a blessing and a curse.

One more thing I'd like to add about this soliloquy is its position in the play. In Shakespeare's version it occurs in Act III scene i just after Polonius directs Ophelia where to stand for her "chance" encounter with Hamlet, and just prior to the "Get thee to a nunnery" confrontation between the two lovers. In fact Hamlet spots Ophelia during his soliloquy...

And lose the name of action. Soft you now 

The fair Ophelia. .—Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remembered.speak 

Notice how the sentence "Soft you now the fair Ophelia" begins on the same line as the last line of the soliloquy?****

The reason at times I use the word speech to describe this soliloquy is because Hamlet is not alone when he delivers it. In addition to Ophelia lurking around, her father and the king are in the wings, awaiting to spy on their arranged meeting between the two. It becomes clear during his unpleasant encounter with Ophelia that Hamlet knows he's being watched. But Shakespeare's text never tells us exactly when he realizes it***** Could it be that he is aware of their presence the entire time he is delivering his soliloquy? 

That might explain why he is so careful in his choice of words in the speech. To the eavesdropping ears of Polonius and the king who don't know what we know about Hamlet's motivations, the speech IS out of context and can easily be interpreted to mean that Hamlet is indeed contemplating suicide. Which might not have bothered Claudius very much at this point in the story.

Yes, the most famous speech-soliloquy in the English language could all have been an act on Hamlet's part, like the Phyrrus and Hecuba speech, but the sentiments expressed in it are very real. 

If a suicidal Hamlet might have relieved Claudius, that relief would be short lived. His concern over his stepson would rekindle in a moment after Hamlet's brutal encounter with Ophelia, 

At this point, Claudius decides to send Hamlet off to England on a "diplomatic mission." He tells Polonius that maybe the trip would do him good. 

Claudius ends the scene with this:

...It shall be so,
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.  (III, i, 202-203)

Next comes the real turning point of the play but I think by now I've reached the unofficially sanctioned length limit for blog posts. Ok I probably reached that limit a while ago. I know I promised you a tetrology but I think since we have three more soliloquies and a few speeches to go, we'll have to make this a Hamlet pentology. Five's a good number don't you think?

The last soliloquy is indeed a doozy, for my money the most powerful of them all so it's definitely worth the wait, as is what takes place in the last act of the play when Hamlet experiences both literally and figuratively a sea change.

If you're still reading, thank you for your patience!

 NOTES:

* Prior to his father's death, Hamlet attended university in Wittenberg, Germany. This in itself is greatly significant to the story as Wittenberg is inextricably tied to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. It sets up yet another conflict in the play which was a burning issue in England at the time of its writing, that between Catholicism and Protestantism. I told you this play has a lot of moving parts.    

One prine example of this conflict is the ghost who tells Hamlet that he is: 

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.   (I, v, 15-18)

This tells us the ghost is spending time in Purgatory, an inherently Catholic concept that was rejected by the Protestants, This perhaps more than anything leads Hamlet to question the authenticity of the ghost's testimony. It should be noted that while Shakespeare himself was baptised into the Anglican Church, his family had strong roots and sympathies toward the Catholic Church, which likely caused great conflict within his own life.

** Note in the film scenes used to illustrate the action of the speech. the cameo performances of two great Shakespearean actors, both of whom played Hamlet, John Gielgud as Priam and Judi Dench as Hecuba. 

*** Because the soliloquy doesn't refer to the immediate action surrounding it, producers feel it can be placed in different parts of the play to serve their purposes. When this is done much is lost, especially the notion that Hamlet might be aware that he is being spied upon. In the movies, we often see him very much alone, reciting the speech with only the sea as his witness.

**** The brilliant 1964 Grigory Kozintzev adaptation has the speech moved to its own scene after the "get thee to a nunnery" conflict. In the subtitled translation English from the Russian, the translator was obviously taking his cues directly from the play and not paying attention to what was actually coming out of the mouth of Hamlet (played by Innokenty Smoktunovsky), as the last line of the soliloquy in the translation concludes with "Soft you now", when Hamlet realizes Ophelia is in the room with him. Of course in the scene as presented, Ophelia is nowhere to be found!

***** Some productions make Hamlet's discovery of Polonius and Claudius spying on him clear. In the Kenneth Branagh version it's pretty obvious he knows from the get go as the two are hiding behind a two way mirror and Branagh as Hamlet stares into the mirror without breaking his gaze toward them for the entire speech. Some other's have him make the discovery right before he asks Ophelia where her father is.