The Dane’s Dilemma
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The “O, that this too too sallied flesh would melt” soliloquy of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is unique because it is the only monologue in the play when we see Hamlet before being confronted by the ghost of his father. The reader is allowed to see the young prince before his personality is altered with the obligation of revenge. It is through this raw, unadulterated emotion that Shakespeare foreshadows the events to come and the two major themes of the play: moral integrity and Hamlet’s struggle to avenge his father’s murder.
In his first soliloquy Hamlet clearly states that he’d rather be dead than alive. He wishes God had not condemned suicide: “that the Everlasting had not fixed/His cannon ’gainst self slaughter” (131-132). Nothing in the world will raise his spirits. The reason for his feeling how he does is that his father, King Hamlet, has been dead for less than two months and his mother has remarried to his uncle, Claudius: “…tis an unweeded garden/That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely…” (134-136). Hamlet has little respect for his uncle and compares him to a Satyr, a sexually promiscuous devil who assumes the appearance of a faun. He can’t believe that his mother would do this after all the love that Hamlet’s father showed her.
According to his son, King Hamlet was so loving towards his wife that he would not allow: “the winds of heaven/Visit her face too roughly…” (141-142). Hamlet had assumed that his mother felt the same way and shows this feeling when he recalls how the queen would hang on his father: “As if increase of appetite had grown/By what it fed on…” (144-145). It was to Hamlet as though his mother had just forgotten about King Hamlet entirely: “Frailty, thy name is woman” (146).
What’s plaguing young Hamlet’s mind the most is his mother’s apparent disregard towards the memory of his father. Queen Gertrude remarried in the course of a month or before: “those shoes were old/With which she followed my poor fathers body” (148). Hamlet says that a beast who lacks the ability to reason would have mourned longer.
The other factor is the hasty marriage to his uncle, who Hamlet feels was no more like his father than himself to Hercules. So the haste in which the queen remarried and the fact that she came to “incestuous sheets” are the fuel behind Hamlet’s melancholy. He knows that no good can come from their domestic union and wishes he could say something, all the while knowing he can not.
Hamlet is a play about moral integrity and the struggle to achieve justified revenge. From the start of the play and Hamlet’s first soliloquy, Shakespeare makes clear that Hamlet wants justice as a result of the injustice that has resulted from the conjugal relationship between Gertrude,