comedy in hamlet

Hamlet Close Read In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Hamlet’s first soliloquy exemplifies his feeling after he goes through a series of traumatic events including his father’s premature death, his mother’s hasty marriage and his loss of the throne to his uncle Claudius and new step father. Shakespeare uses this soliloquy to help shape Hamlet’s character as overly emotional but proving to be very intelligent when establishing the theme of the play through the conflict of a man’s emotions and reason. Hamlet begins the soliloquy by portraying clearly a vision of taking his own life to exemplify the dramatic state he is left in after losing his father. He uses imagery to depict his dying wish and show his depression when wishing that his “flesh, would melt/thaw, and resolve itself in to a dew!”(Act 1.Scene 2.Line 129-130). Hamlet is so down in the dumps that he is hoping that he will metaphorically melt out of his depression. He first uses the harsher word “melt” which would literally liquefy the body, then the more kind word” thaw”, and lastly the depiction of Hamlet “resolving.” Shakespeare creates a pattern of brutal diction to a more softened tone in his imagery to show Hamlet’s rollercoaster emotions as he has an initial outburst then calms himself down. This characterizes the passage from the beginning as Hamlet first makes hyperbolic assertions then understates his previous statement in order to make his imagery more emotional to the reader, but still expresses his frustration with outlandish remarks. Hamlet continues this pattern when explaining his world, his Denmark with an extended metaphor to a garden full of weeds. In Hamlet’s eyes his life “tis’ an unweeded garden, that grows to seed” (Act 1. Scene 2. Lines 135-136). Hamlet views his new life like this because he is so unhappy with the way things
Reed 2 now are that his father is deceased that he compares it to a disregarded garden, which is very much how he feel s everyone has been treating his