Soliloquy Essay - Famous Soliloquies in Shakespeares Hamlet

The Famous Soliloquies in Hamlet  Ã‚        Ã‚  Ã‚   This essay goes into the Who, the How and the Why of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet.    Samuel Taylor Coleridge comments on the hero’s first soliloquy:    Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment : it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels this; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks upon external things as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy -    "O! that this too too solid flesh would melt," &c.    springs from that craving after the indefinite - for that which is not - which most easily besets men of genius; and the self-delusion common to this temper of mind is finely exemplified in the character which Hamlet gives of himself :-    "It cannot be But I am chicken liver'd, and lack gall To make oppression bitter."    He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them, delays action till action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and accident. (345)    Gunnar Boklund in â€Å"Judgment in Hamlet† expresses his interpretation of the hero’s situation in the first soliloquy:    Let us then first clarify Hamlet’s initial situation, as it is presented to us in the first great soliloquy â€Å"O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.† It is a statement that is unusually easy to understand. The death of his father has shaken Hamlet so profoundly that he refuses to accept it as natural, and he takes the same attitude to the remarriage of his mother, which to us would seem to belong to a different category. If this is what goes ... ...Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.    Mack, Maynard. â€Å"The World of Hamlet.† Yale Review. vol. 41 (1952) p. 502-23. Rpt. in Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996.    Maher, Mary Z.. â€Å"An Actor Works at Connecting with His Audience.† Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies. Iowa City: University of Iowa P., 1992. p.71-72.    Rosenberg, Marvin. â€Å"Laertes: An Impulsive but Earnest Young Aristocrat.† Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware P., 1992.    Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos.