Hamlets First Soliloquy

                In Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet is the son of a king who recently passed away. His mother did not spend much time mourning before she married Hamlets Uncle Claudius, the king’s brother, and Claudius became King. Although the death of a beloved king is usually a big deal, the wedding of the queen and Claudius seemed to end the mourning of the country rather quickly, leaving Hamlet the only person still sad with no one to talk to about it. Until Hamlet’s first soliloquy very little is known about Hamlet’s personality and his view points about the world and the people around him. Once Hamlet is alone and able to vocalize his feelings for a brief moment, he manages to summarize all the events that happened and gives in depth imagery about the situation he has been put in and how it makes him feel.

                As the soliloquy begins it is very obvious that Hamlet is in a state of depression while he mourns for his father. He begins venting by saying he wishes “that the Everlasting had not fixed/ his canon against self-slaughter”. The “Everlasting” in this line is a reference to god who has made it a sin to commit suicide. The wish to commit suicide reveals that Hamlet, does not feel that life is worth living any more, possibly because the entire world has moved on from his father’s death and he has no one to relate to or look up to. Hamlet has very poor relationships with the people around him and sees the world as “stale, flat, and unprofitable”, or in other word useless to him. He does not wish to build relationships with the people around him because he sees the world as an “unweeded garden” which could allude to the Garden of Eden and the impure people are the weeds. This means that the impurities of the world have yet to be rid of, just like the unbeautiful weeds in a garden are not picked and cover the beautiful flowers. Hamlet states that “Things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely”. This further relates to the world being an unweeded garden because weeds are “rank and gross” and yet seem to take over the every place it reaches. This is also a play on woods because “rank and gross” also describe people who are high in class or in government positions. When you put the pun together it could mean that all people of rank are truly bad people. From the first half of the soliloquy we can already see many of Hamlets views on the worlds. He does not believe that life is worth willing because everyone in the world seems to be morally bad, especially those with rank.

                In the second half of the soliloquy Hamlet expresses his problems with women and his mother. He describes how strong and protecting his father was and then said his mother “would hang on him/ as if increase of appetite had grown”. This shows the ever growing dependency of his mother and connects this dependency to why she married his uncle so quickly and unexpectedly. This is when Hamlet says one of his most famous quotes, “frailty thy name is women” which shows that he believes all women are as dependent and weak as his mother. So from this short speech by Hamlet we have discovered that Hamlet has many emotional feelings hitting him at once at this point in the play. He feels anger towards his mother and all women, and is disgusted with the world because everyone seems to be morally bad. Not only that but he is confused about how all this happened at once and is deeply depressed about his father.