Hamlet is a well known character in the body of works of Shakespeare. The soliloquy signifies the derailed and arguments of a wearied soul trying to explain life and the consequences of hardships of thoughts’ impacts on decision makings throughout life which end with the beginning of death and the realm beyond.
Is it true that thoughts could carry us out of the limited universalities of words? Whether we speak or drink words or act them, is it not possible that they could encapture us in their meanings and what we intend to reflect upon our needs and desires to know and what we intend to become consequently? Aren’t thoughts the breed of daughters which flirt with our minds and cause us to be playful or upset? Aren’t they what everything is to a soliloquist? Has it any severe impact on him or her who soliloquizes? Hamlet explains his philosophy throughout it.
HAMLET: To be, or not to be–that is the question:
It is a phase which links us with our adolescence age when we grow up: why do we exist? For what? Why me and insignificant? What is the purpose that should be given to my life? This question also flows into worlds of thoughts that one decides to ponder on. Hamlet continues:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
This reflection is a proper continuation of the question because it realizes and makes him aware of the realization of the fact how fragile man is compared to the world he lives in. Hamlet has been put down by Ophelia’s death and wonders what death is, the mystery behind which lies either rest or catastrophe depending on how we figure death out (either too late(by dying) or by pondering on its characteristics).
To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to.
Another spontaneous mode of death is heartaches and painstaking questions in the mind. Hamlet uses death as a metaphor to describe what he is going through emotionally. He is depressed and frustrated and finds no way to empty his thoughts out but to improvise a speech on his opinions of the world due to the facts he has been through and what he has gained from experiences solely for the unpleasant cause of his mother’s marriage to his uncle after a week from the father’s death. The soliloquy continues on to carry out entertaining thoughts to face the disaster from the point of view of a desperately in need of an acquisition to an internal power to guide him through his dilemmas and misfortunes outside him.
‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
Hamlet ponders and anticipates death to be the answer to all his miseries. Life is too short and decision making is crucial in every minute passing. Hamlet is practicing ‘democracy of dialog and dictatorship of opinion.’ Which means the surveillance of his feelings through stating his opinion (which in this case he does not or cannot escape to more relieving and more friendly atmospheres of thoughts).hamlet continues to ponder on the uselessness of his thoughts to his will to act and to his ability to execute a straightforward plan to end his misery and exceed his expectations of himself and to himself by himself and others who spoke to him whom he rejected and added that they all are ‘allies against him’ (i.e, Ophelia).
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
After denoting the words of the previous, Hamlet moves on to morbidly introspect into the meaning of life when opposed to death: is death something to be overcome or befriended to do along with in life as a fact? Is death the measure of existence, that it is the death of those who do not see into the moralities of others sympathized with and the life of others who could not get enough for a decent living grade in life among others? Is life just and is there a Natural Law that governs us all or is it the law of the ‘survival for the fittest’? Thus he argues with himself in the fact about death in shadow of living a deathly life.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
Hamlet finds soothing thoughts in the fact that it is fair to go through this being someone who is not able to act properly to avenge his father’s death and family’s honor in the disgraceful marriage done by his mother and uncle. He lastly conceives on final thought into death as a sympathetic fondness of Ophelia due after her death and finally humanely finds her fine and unlike what he has thought of her. The final lines are a conciliation of her death being his fault, that praying for her or wishing her a restful peaceful rest is all he could do in his ‘temporary’ state(which we know of now until the end of the soliloquy) of inability of acting further than his thoughts could convey to him(hamlet does not want to act but philosophize and awaits an external action to spring him into action(foreshadowing of the soliloquy).thus he continues:
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! — Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.
In a movie –black and white- of the 1970s by the name of ‘hamlet’ based on the Shakespearean play, the actor showed acceptance into what seemed to be called throughout philosophies and religions as ‘fate’. The actor playing hamlet shows the bizarreness of reality to a fragile man who cannot add up or interpret why these calamities face him. He is dazed, shook, outraged internally(which is only seen through his eyes when he jumps into the grave to hug Ophelia’s body) and trying to relate to the madness of the world through being the ‘grownup’ in a majority of ‘child playing’ ‘mature’ adults in the scene of life. The shots of such action were moving and emotionally tense. The actor played hamlet as if he was hamlet and was enabling the viewer to see the forces of fate turn him up and down to suit his position and where he’ll be in life, afterwards, after the scene of jumping into the grave –the remarkable end of hamlet by the sword—a treachery of innocence in a mad world.
Bibliography:
Hamlet, works of Shakespeare, volume two, the twentieth century programmed classics, 1986.
