Notes

The first soliloquy of Hamlet falls in the Act 1, Scene II, after the King Claudius and the Queen Gertrude urges Hamlet in the open court to cast off the deep melancholy which, as they think, has taken possession of his mind as a consequence of his father’s death. In their opinion, Hamlet has sufficiently grieved for his father’s death already. Prior to the soliloquy, the King Claudius and Queen Gertrude makes announcement to their marriage, as according to them, the court could not afford excessive grief, which further saddens Hamlet.
Hamlet refers the world as an ‘unweeded garden’ in which rank and gross things grow in abundance. In the first soliloquy, Hamlet bemoans the fact that he cannot commit suicide. He wishes that his physical self might cease to exist. He says:
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!”
Though saddened by his father’s death, the larger cause of Prince Hamlet’s misery is Queen Gertrude’s disloyal marriage to his uncle, barely in a month of his actual father’s death. He scorns his mother by saying:
“Frailty, thy name is woman!”
Prince Hamlet mourns that even ‘a beast would have mourned a little longer’. Hamlet considers this marriage of his mother, to be an incestuous affair.
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This soliloquy shows Hamlet’s deep affection with his beloved father. It also puts light on the character of the dead King that he was a loving husband and a respected father. This soliloquy also enlightens the fact in the haste in which Queen Gertrude decides to marry with the dead King’s brother, without mourning for a respectable period of time.
Hamlet’s second soliloquy occurs in Act 1, Scene 5, right after the ghost of the dead King, Hamlet’s father, leaves having charged Hamlet with the duty of taking the revenge upon the murderer of his father:
“foul and most unnatural murder”
The ghost of the dead king tells Hamlet that as he slept in his garden, a villain poured poison