A soliloquy is a comprehensive and unremitting dialogue spoken by a single person. The speaker is presenting his or her thoughts audibly, thus providing a forthright, outspoken, unremitting, and uninterrupted flow of thought, which channels his or her consciousness directly to the audience. Shakespeare uses soliloquies to present the characters of Macbeth and Hamlet in speckled ways; the soliloquies define the thoughts and feelings of the character’s at the time. They also give the spectators a personality identification of the character’s involved as well as a dept and narrow focus of the imagination of the characters. In the following essay I will provide a thorough analysis and explanation as to how Shakespeare’s soliloquies present the characters of Macbeth and Hamlet.
The openings of the plays show the characters of Hamlet and Macbeth to be incredibly dissimilar. Hamlet appears discouraged with life; he comes across very melancholy and theatrical. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has recently died, and his mother, Queen Gertrude, has married the new king, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius. Hamlet is dejected, astringent, and sceptical, full of hatred for his uncle and disgust at his mother for marrying him. This is very contradictory to the first portrayal of Macbeth. At the begging of the play, Macbeth is shows as an energized, forceful, and premeditated warrior. He is seen as the bravest of them all and faithful to his King Duncan. He does not have any hatred to his king, but pure adulation and reverence, unlike Hamlet, who has very bitter feelings for King Claudius.
The foremost soliloquy of Hamlet falls in the Act 1, Scene II. Hamlet refers the world as an ‘unweeded garden’ in which rank and coarse things grow in profusion. In the first soliloquy, Hamlet bemoans the fact that he cannot commit suicide. He wishes that his physical self might cease to exist,