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The primary function of the first soliloquy is to reveal to the audience Hamlet’s profound melancholia and the reasons for his despair. Hamlet explains, with an outpouring of disgust, anger, sorrow, and grief that everything in his world is either futile or contemptible. Hamlet speaks these lines after an unpleasant scene at Claudia and Gertrude court, when he was asked by his mother and stepfather not to return to his studies at Wattenberg but to remain in Denmark.
Hamlet thinks for he first time about suicide (desiring his flesh to “melt,” and wishing that God had not made “self-slaughter” a sin), 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 religion. Before that, Hamlet also says that God is everlasting, which juxtaposes to Hamlets death. God’s body is eternal which contrasts to thaw, resolving itself into a dew. Which Hamlet desires to become. His speech is saturated with suggestions of rot and corruption, as seen in the usage of words like “rank” (138) and “gross” (138), and uses a metaphor to associate the world with “an unwedded garden. ” In the line ‘So excellent a king; that was, to this, / Hyperfine too satyr; so loving to my mother’ Hamlet uses an allusion to compare his father to his uncle, as well as criticizing his uncle at the same time: Hyperfine is the Titan god of light in reek mythology whilst Satyrs are half man/half beast.
This shows Hamlet’s view of the new kings lechery (excessive or offensive sexual desires). Hamlet then goes on to describe the causes of his pain, specifically his Intense disgust at his mother’s marriage to Claudia. He describes the haste of their marriage, noting that the shoes his mother wore to his father’s funeral were not worn out before her marriage to Claudia. He compares Claudia to his father (his father was “so excellent a king” while Claudia Is a bestial “satyr”).
As he runs through his description of their marriage, he touches upon the Important motifs of misogyny (hatred/deedless of women), crying, “Frailty, thy name Is woman”; Incest, commenting that his mother moved “[w]lath such dexterity to Incestuous sheets”. Here, Hamlet uses personification to characterize her mother and her uncle’s relationship. Hamlet then uses a simile to compare himself and his uncle, to his father. “My father’s brother, but no more Like my father, than I to Hercules,” refers to Greek mythology.
Hamlet Is admiring the goodness of his father as “so excellent a king” while cringingly himself and his uncle. In the end, Hamlet uses melons, (to make something smaller) or an understatement to end his soliloquy, stating that all this cannot come to good which Is a mild statement In comparison to the rest of his speech. Hamlet also quotes “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue”… “Let Is not, nor It cannot come to good. ” This Is stating that Hamlet has to deal with the circumstances whether In favor or not.