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Hamlet's Second Soliloquy Essay

Decent Essays

HAMLET’S SECOND SOLILOQUY

Coming immediately after the meeting with the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, Shakespeare uses his second soliloquy to present Hamlet’s initial responses to his new role of revenger. Shakespeare is not hesitant in foreboding the religious and metaphysical implications of this role, something widely explored in Elizabethan revenge tragedy, doing so in the first lines as Hamlet makes an invocation to ‘all you host of heaven’ and ‘earth’. Hamlet is shown to impulsively rationalize the ethical issues behind his task as he views it as a divine ordinance of justice, his fatalistic view reiterated at the end of scene 5 with the rhyming couplet ‘O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right’. These ideas are …show more content…

Most significantly though, is some absolute contrasts displayed here with Hamlet earlier on and with his first soliloquy. He declares all the ‘books’, ‘forms’ and ‘pressures’ of his childhood and education as ‘baser matter’ despite having desired to go back to study at Wittenberg beforehand. Hamlet makes it clear that ‘[the Ghosts] commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of [his] brain’ (the alliteration of ‘book’ and ‘brain’ adding a pronounced determination to his tone), the religious allusions presenting a complete displacement from the humanistic Christian values expressed in his comments on ‘the Everlasting’ fixing his ‘canon ‘gainst self-slaughter’ in his first soliloquy, where he also condemns his flesh as ‘too too solid’, the same ‘sinews’ that he now calls upon to ‘bear [him] stiffly up’.

One of the Ghosts most poignant effects on Hamlet is pointed out by L.C. Knights in Hamlet and Death, where he explains that “Hamlet’s exclusive concentration upon things rank and gross and his consequent recoil from life as a whole determine his attitude to death, which also is purely one of negation”. While Hamlet declares the Ghost’s commandment will live in his brain ‘unmixed with baser matter’, he immediately switches to a vicious verbal assault on Gertrude as a ‘most pernicious woman!’ and Claudius as a

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