Explore the Ways in Which Shakespeare Presents Changing Characters in 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet', Focusing on the Use of Soliloquy

Explore the Ways in Which Shakespeare Portrays the Characters Changing in Macbeth & Hamlet, Focusing On the Use of Soliloquy

In this essay, I will be comparing the characters of’ Macbeth’ and ‘Hamlet’ and how their characters change during the plays by focusing on the use of soliloquy. What separates Hamlet from other Shakespeare plays, is that the action we expect to see, particularly from Hamlet himself, is continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certain knowledge about what he is doing. Hamlet poses many questions that other plays would simply take for granted. Can we have certain knowledge about ghosts? Is the ghost what it appears to be, or is it really a misleading fiend? Does the ghost have reliable knowledge about its own death, or is the ghost itself deluded? Only in the soliloquies is Hamlet’s true self revealed to the audience and we begin to develop a better understanding of his complex character; soliloquies give a voice to Hamlet’s thoughts. When he speaks, he sounds as if there’s something important he’s not saying, maybe something even he is not aware of.
Macbeth’s main theme is the destruction wrought when ambition goes unchecked by moral constraints. Macbeth is a courageous Scottish commander who is naturally murderous as his job requires in a patriotic way; however, this patriotic murderous side of him gradually transforms into a mad, disturbed, murderous man who is not naturally inclined to commit evil deeds, yet deeply desires power and advancement. Killing Duncan against his better judgement leaves Macbeth to become paranoid and stew in his guilt. Toward the end of the play, he descends into a frantic, boastful madness that eventually leads to his death. We understand this change in mentality through his important use of soliloquy allowing the audience to hear the inner thoughts of the character. Lengthy soliloquies, offstage deaths, and poetic speeches are not meant to capture reality but to reinterpret it in order to evoke a certain emotional response from the audience.
I have studied four soliloquies from each of the plays and will focus on the way that these soliloquies express the changing character as the plays progress.

The first soliloquy that I will analyse from Hamlet is in act 1, scene 2, Hamlet’s first important soliloquy. Hamlet speaks after enduring the unpleasant scene at Claudius and Gertrude’s court, then being asked not to return to his studies at Wittenberg but to remain in Denmark, presumably against his wishes. Here, Hamlet thinks for the first time about suicide saying that the world is “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” In other words, suicide seems like a desirable alternative to life in a painful world; but Hamlet feels that the option of suicide is closed to him because it is forbidden by the sixth commandment as a divine law when he says, ‘His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!’.
His intense disgust at his mother’s marriage to Claudius is clearly described as his most prevalent pain. He compares Claudius to his father; his father was “so excellent a king” while Claudius is a bestial “satyr”. As he runs through his description of their marriage, he touches upon the important motifs of misogyny, crying, “Frailty, thy name is woman”; incest, commenting that his mother moved “with such dexterity to incestuous sheets. Hamlet’s hatred towards the ‘incestuous’ couple is continuously repeated throughout the play and festers inside of him constantly. Some may believe that Hamlet’s obsession of his mother’s new marriage is due to the Oedipus complex which was around in that era. Hamlet may have wanted his mother for himself after his father died, but Claudius took advantage of her situation and offered her his hand instead.

This second soliloquy is spoken by Hamlet in Act III, scene 1. Hamlet explaining the most logical and powerful theme of the moral legitimacy of suicide in an unbearably painful world. He poses the problem of whether to commit suicide as a logical question: “To be, or not to be,” that is, to live or not to live. Is it nobler to suffer life, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” passively or to end one’s suffering? He compares death to sleep and thinks of the end to suffering, pain, and uncertainty it might bring. Hamlet immediately reconfigures his metaphor of sleep to include the possibility of dreaming; saying that the dreams that may come in the sleep of death are daunting, that they “must give us pause.”
In this way, this speech connects many of the play’s main themes, including the idea of suicide and death, the difficulty of knowing the truth in a spiritually ambiguous universe, and the connection between thought and action. This speech is important for what it reveals about the quality of Hamlet’s mind; his deeply passionate nature is complemented by a relentlessly logical intellect, which works furiously to find a solution to his misery. He has turned to religion and found it inadequate to help him either kill himself or resolve to kill Claudius. Here, he turns to a logical philosophical inquiry and finds it equally frustrating.

In the third soliloquy I have chosen to analyse in act 3, scene 1, Hamlet slips quietly into the room of prayer and steels himself to kill the unseeing Claudius. But suddenly it occurs to him that if he kills Claudius while he is praying, he will end the king’s life at the moment when he was seeking forgiveness for his sins, sending Claudius’s soul to heaven. Hamlet poses his desire to damn Claudius as a matter of fairness: his own father was killed without having cleansed his soul by praying or confessing, so why should his murderer be given that chance? But Hamlet is forced to admit that he doesn’t really know what happened to his father, remarking “how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?”. The most he can say is that “in our circumstance and course of thought / ’Tis heavy with him”.
Is Hamlet using his speculations about Claudius’s soul to avoid thinking about something in this case? Perhaps the task he has set for himself—killing another human being in cold blood—is too much for him to face. Whatever it is, the audience may once again get the sense that there is something more to Hamlet’s behaviour than meets the eye.

In the final soliloquy of the play in act 4, scene 4, Hamlet is astonished by the thought that a bloody war could be fought over something so insignificant, he marvels that human beings are able to act so violently and purposefully for so little gain. By comparison, Hamlet has a great deal to gain from seeking his own bloody revenge on Claudius, and yet he still delays and fails to act toward his purpose. Disgusted with himself for having failed to gain his revenge on Claudius, Hamlet declares that from this moment on, his thoughts will be bloody.
Earlier, Hamlet was amazed by the player’s evocation of powerful feeling for Hecuba, a legendary character who meant nothing to him. Now, he is awestruck by the willingness of Fortinbras to devote the energy of an entire army; Hamlet considers the moral ambiguity of Fortinbras’s action, but more than anything else he is impressed by the forcefulness of it, and that forcefulness becomes a kind of ideal toward which Hamlet decides at last to strive. “My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” he declares.

Now I will analyse the soliloquies from Macbeth; I have chosen another four to analyse from this play.

During act 1, scene 2, Macbeth has just encountered the witches for the first time and is on shock of what they have prophesised as his future. Banquo, Ross and Macduff continue to talk about the news of recent while Macbeth ignores his companions and speaks to himself, ruminating upon the possibility that he might one day be king. Contemplating the possibility of becoming King, he wonders whether the reign will simply fall to him or whether he will have to perform a dark deed in order to gain the crown. His patriotic nature comes back to him and at last he shakes himself from his reverie and the group departs for Forres. This soliloquy foreshadows the evil that will come to be during the rest of the play as it gives the audience their first sight of Macbeth’s more sinister side.

This second soliloquy in act 1, scene 7, is of particular importance because it is the audience’s first in-depth insight into Macbeth’s mind. During this speech, the audience is shown a side to Macbeth that contradicts our first impression of him, as a brave and fearless warrior. This soliloquy gives us a glimpse of the vulnerability of Macbeth and how neurotic he can be.
Macbeth finds himself fighting with his conscience over whether or not he should attempt to murder Duncan in order to become king. When he lists Duncan’s noble qualities, he “hath borne his faculties so meek”, and the loyalty that he feels toward his king, “I am his kinsman and his subject”, we are reminded of just how grave an outrage it is for the couple to slaughter their ruler while he is a guest in their house. At the same time, Macbeth’s fear that:

“We still have judgement here, that we but teach Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th’ingredience of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips.”

foreshadows the way that his deeds will eventually come back to haunt him. The imagery in this speech is dark as we hear of “bloody instructions,” “deep damnation,” and a “poisoned chalice, suggesting that Macbeth is aware that murder would open the door to a dark and sinful world. At the same time, he admits that his only reason for committing murder (‘ambition’) seems an insufficient justification for the act. This conveys that Macbeth is still uncertain of his actions and has a schizophrenic attitude towards the idea of treachery.

The third soliloquy in act 3, scene 1, starts once the servant has gone and left Macbeth alone, he begins a soliloquy. He muses on the subject of Banquo, reflecting that his old friend is the only man in Scotland whom he fears. He notes that if the witches’ prophecy is true, his will be a “fruitless crown,” by which he means that he will not have an heir. The murder of Duncan, which weighs so heavily on his conscience, may have simply cleared the way for Banquo’s sons to overthrow Macbeth’s own family.
After his first confrontation with the witches, Macbeth worried that he would have to commit a murder to gain the Scottish crown. He seems to have gotten used to the idea, as by this point the body count has risen to alarming levels. Now that the first part of the witches’ prophecy has come true, Macbeth feels that he must kill his friend Banquo and the young Fleance in order to prevent the second part from becoming realized. But, as Fleance’s survival suggests, there can be no escape from the witches’ prophecies.

During the final soliloquy, his character takes a sharp and abrupt turn from falsely over-confident to despair and futility. Macbeth’s failure to respond to Lady Macbeth’s cry shows to the reader that Macbeth’s sense of emotion have become numb as Macbeth says himself he no longer feels the ‘taste of fear’. The most probable trigger of sudden grief is due to the passing of his wife.
The vocabulary in this soliloquy expresses deep depression and desperation. Words like ‘shadow’, ‘no more’ and ‘nothing’ convey the futility that Macbeth feels in his career as a king, and perhaps even his entire existence. Much of the dictions used in this soliloquy are extremely depressing; every line is wreaked with Macbeth’s depression as Macbeth said life is but a pointless tale told by an ‘idiot’, referring to himself. Darkness is an important imagery in ‘Macbeth’ as most of the scenes happen at night. Although, when taking into account that the murder of Duncan also happens at night, darkness seems to be the archetype of evil. However, in this particular passage, darkness represented by ‘life is but a walking shadow’, coupled with ‘brief candle’ imply the briefness and insignificance of Macbeth’s life. Macbeth dismisses the light and desires for darkness in ‘out out, brief candle!’. The image of a dead King’s dusty body presents the audience a vivid visual of how hopeless and abandoned Macbeth feels.

Shakespeare gives an account of two very different personalities in Macbeth that seem to merge. The first being a steadfastly loyal servant to the throne, who holds his friends close to his heart and would never do anything morally wrong; the second being a conceited tyrant whose actions directly benefit himself and bring unthinkable suffering to others. Macbeth had much to look forward to as Thane of Cawdor, but he wanted more. His greed led him to murder and theft, thus causing guilt and fear. His fear led to chaos which ultimately, was his downfall. Macbeth is, at various stages, heroic, such as in battle with the traitorous Macdonald and, to some extent, at the end when facing Macduff in his last battle. Although his fall from nobility was a result of persuasion from his evil wife and the witches; his hamartia was his ambition. Macbeth’s behaviour vastly deteriorates from the beginning of the play as being far more heroic, patriotic and noble, to dying as a deceitful, greedy, disturbed coward.
Shakespeare presents the character of Hamlet in numerous ways. In one perspective his role progresses from one who follows a moral order in life to one who is mad, and full of revenge and sin. In contrast he presents his character as sane as well. Shakespeare also conveys distinctive elements in Hamlet such as his antiheroism and conscientiousness. Without soliloquies, we would know nothing of Hamlet’s intellect, how he plans to get revenge, and what his real personality is. Only in soliloquy are the audience able to see the real Hamlet, whether he is truly mad, or simply feigning his madness. The lack of trust in people is due to the death of his father. They show how he takes it upon himself to reveal the truth about his father’s death and also reflects the tension in his mind; he resists the outside ideas while continuing his own ideas in his mind.
One of Hamlet's downfalls is that he takes a long time to seek the revenge he promised his father's ghost. He tends to overthink matters. Macbeth, on the other hand, tends to act very quick and rash. Hamlet is a generally likeable character and dies a heroic death having finally fulfilled the promise to his father's ghost. Macbeth however, dies a far less noble death as he is considered a murderous tyrant by the end of the play. Both Macbeth and Hamlet fight and ultimately are killed, but only one is honourable-- Hamlet. While Macbeth kills many people in pursuit of becoming King, Hamlet delays killing his Uncle because of philosophical concerns and doubts about what is the right thing to do and how to do it. Hamlet finally is able to avenge his father's death, but dies honourably in the process. Hamlet is acting the part to deceive Claudius, while Macbeth has truly gone mad in his lust for power. Macbeth also dies, and although he does die in battle on the battlefield it cannot be called an honourable death as he has caused the deaths of so many other people purely for his own potential benefit.
Shakespeare uses soliloquies very effectively in both plays as they can easily be interpreted by the audience to convey the emotions running through both characters.