The purpose of a soliloquy is to outline the thoughts and feelings of a certain character at a point in the play. It reveals the innermost beliefs of the character and offers an unbiased perspective as it is merely the character talking to the audience, albeit not directly, and not to any other characters who may cause the character to withhold their true opinions. Therefore, Hamlet's first soliloquy (act 1, scene 2) is essential to the play as it highlights his inner conflict caused by the events of the play. It reveals his true feelings and as such emphasises the difference between his public appearance, his attitude towards Claudius in the previous scene is less confrontational than here where he is directly insulted as a "satyr", and his feelings within himself. In this essay, I will outline how Shakespeare communicates the turmoil of Hamlet's psyche.

Hamlet's despair stems from his mother's marriage to his uncle and it is this that is the driving force behind what is communicated. His constant repetition of the time in which it took the two to get married, "But two months dead...yet within a month...A little month...Within a m

The distressed nature of Hamlet's mind is also communicated well by the imagery that is used throughout the soliloquy. At the start, Hamlet says that he wants his "too too solid flesh" to "...melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew". This goes alongside the later lines, "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world", where the build up of adjectives, one after the other, serves to highlight just how difficult it is for Hamlet to live in the world. It is as if Hamlet cannot deal with or, indeed, stand the physical side of life anymore; he needs to get rid of his body to be able to deal with the inner conflict going on in his head. The poetry of these lines and the image that is expressed serve to reveal not only the tragic nature of his problem, also highlighted by his allusions to suicide, but also create a link between him and the audience. In fact, the entire soliloquy establishes a connection between the audience and Hamlet, a concept that is essential in the play.

Another good example of imagery in the soliloquy is that of the "unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank...in nature". This image represents the something that is "...rotten in the state of Denmark". It is a simile for the state of his society, as in it used to be nice but now is "gross". The language of the description also emphasises this as it suggests images of things that are unprofitable and nasty. These images all serve to hi

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 976
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)