Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark, who is seeking revenge for his father’s death. The ghost of the King, Hamlet’s father, tells Hamlet to “ . . . revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” . Since his father asked him, he finds it his duty to do as he says. In this essay, I am going to prove that Hamlet puts off what he has to do until a future time, which leads him to his depression. He builds things up inside of him until the point that he is not able to handle anything, or lacks courage, skill, and will to do something.

In his first soliloquy, “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt . . .” , Hamlet talks about the first thing that has made him melancholy, or sad. He says that his mother barely mourned her husband’s death and a month later she remarried. To try and make himself feel better, Hamlet makes a joke about it when he tells Horatio, “The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables”. Everyone else knows how much the remarriage of his mother has bothered him. The soliloquy in act one scene two shows how upset he is at his mother and himself. He believes he is better off

Johnson, Samuel The Plays of William Shakespeare volume eight London J&R Tunson, 1765

Shakespeare, William Hamlet ed. Alan Durband U.S. edition: Barrons Educational Series, Inc. 1986

dead because no one seems to understand what he is feeling. He shows that he is upset at his mother because she got married in such a hurry. It makes him think that maybe his uncle and his mother had an affair before King Hamlet died. He says that his father used to treat her like she was everything and she degraded herself by marrying someone whom treats her as if she was nothing. For example, King Claudius, Hamlet’s stepfather always asks Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother to do things for him. Claudius tells her to talk to Hamlet so he can listen in on their conversation, without even asking Gertrude if she is willing to do that. When the play begins, the King is already dead so we do not know how he treated Gertrude. What we do know is that when the ghost of the king came back to talk to Hamlet and tell him about the situation, he tells Hamlet that he should leave Gertrude alone and to try as best as he can no to get her involved. Not only in this soliloquy, but also in other ones in this play, Hamlet talks about dying. In his soliloquy in the third act, Hamlet talks about dying so he will not have to face the human suffering that everyone had to go through in life. Hamlet, at this point, believes that everything he is living for is gone. The one person that he looked up to is now dead and he does not have a male figure he can look up to and set an example for himself of how he wants to be. His mother is blind and does not see the way Claudius has been treating and she is also blind because she does not realize that Claudius is the one that killed her husband. The last reason that he is upset, and the one thing that does occur during the play was when Ophelia started to neglect Hamlet. Hamlet loves Ophelia and after everything started going downhill for him, he began losing the one person he cared so much about. Hamlet gave hints during the play that he wanted to die and that he is depressed, even to people that he did not trust, like Polonius. Polonius asks him to come out of the air and Hamlet’s response was to go into his grave. When Rosencrantz and Guilderstern first visit Denmark, Hamlet refers to it as a “prison”, because he does not like being there anymore. He is having problems with everyone around him and he would rather be alone but at the same time have someone he can talk to and trust. Two other people that Hamlet did not trust were Rosencrantz and Guilderstern. He tells them that he has lost all his “mirth . . . and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this godly frame the earth seems to me as sterile promontory” . Hamlet realizes that they were sent for to take care of Hamlet in his time of need, and he tells them that he has lost any sort of energy he had within him. Not only does Hamlet have these problems but he has others to worry about. Everything came all at once and he is having a difficult time dealing with everything. The one thing that ends up confusing him a lot is Ophelia because one minute they are talking and being all nice to each other and then the next she is ignoring him. He does not seem to understand why.

“ . . . From this time forth have you so slander any mo

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Approximate Word count = 2284
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)