Hamlet

1. 1“O that this too too solid flesh would melt” Hamlet's first wish is not for revenge, which he knows nothing of yet, but to dissolve, to stop existing. Check your own copy: this edition follows the Folio's “solid”, while the Second Quarto prints “sallied”, which many editors read as sullied, so in some editions the flesh is not heavy but stained.
2. 2“His canon ’gainst self-slaughter” A canon is a church law. Only God's prohibition of suicide holds him back, which introduces the religious fear of what comes after death that returns in “To be, or not to be” and in the argument over Ophelia's burial in Act 5, Scene 1.
3. 3“’tis an unweeded garden” The world, and by implication Denmark, becomes a neglected garden taken over by rank weeds. It is the first of the play's images of rot and disease, and it gains a sharper edge in Act 1, Scene 5, when the Ghost reveals that he was murdered while sleeping in his orchard.
4. 4“Hyperion to a satyr” Hyperion is a Titan of Greek myth, the father of the sun and sometimes a name for the sun itself; a satyr is a lustful woodland creature, by Shakespeare’s time pictured as part man and part goat. The comparison makes the dead king divine and Claudius bestial, and shows how Hamlet thinks in extremes. An audience may wonder whether any real man could live up to the father Hamlet describes.
5. 5“Frailty, thy name is woman!” The apostrophe turns his mother's remarriage into a verdict on all women, and the misogyny does not stay in soliloquy: it resurfaces in his treatment of Ophelia in Act 3, Scene 1. The line is personal grief hardening into a general contempt.
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The question: Explore the significance of this soliloquy in relation to Shakespeare's presentation of Hamlet's state of mind, in Act 1 and in the play as a whole.

1. 1“To be, or not to be, that is the question” The antithesis is stark, but the question is left open: to be or not to be what, or to do what? One reading is that he is weighing suicide; another is that he is weighing action, since taking arms may mean certain death. The speech never uses the word I, so a private crisis becomes a question about everyone.
2. 2“Or to take arms against a sea of troubles” The mixed metaphor is deliberate in effect, whatever its origin: no one can fight the sea with weapons. Resistance is pictured as heroic and hopeless at once, which is exactly how revenge against a king looks to Hamlet at this point.
3. 3“ay, there’s the rub” A rub is a difficulty, and in the game of bowls an obstacle that knocks a bowl off its course. The image fits: his reasoning runs smoothly towards death as sleep, then is deflected by the thought of dreams, of what might follow.
4. 4“this mortal coil” Coil here means noise, turmoil and bustle, not a spiral. To shuffle off this mortal coil is to get free of the troubled business of human life, and the phrase makes life sound like a heavy garment that could simply be shrugged away.
5. 5“The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn” Death is a country with a boundary no traveller crosses back over. Yet the audience has seen a traveller return: the Ghost. Some readers take the line as a sign of Hamlet's renewed doubt about the Ghost, which he has just decided to test; others see it as the speech reaching past the plot to a universal fear.
6. 6“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all” Conscience can mean moral scruple, and in Shakespeare's English it could also mean consciousness or thought. Both senses are alive here: knowing too much, and fearing judgement, turn potential heroes into cowards. It is Hamlet's own diagnosis of his delay, and the rest of the play tests it.

The question: Explore the significance of this soliloquy in relation to the presentation of thought and action in the play as a whole.

1. 1“Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.” For the first time since the Mousetrap proved Claudius guilty, the King is alone and defenceless. The plain monosyllables and the repeated “now” give the line urgency, and an audience might expect the play to end here.
2. 2“That would be scann’d” To scan is to examine closely, as a scholar examines a text. The second half of this line is where the speech turns: the student from Wittenberg stops to analyse, and the moment for action passes while he reasons.
3. 3“this is hire and salary, not revenge” Revenge is imagined as a transaction that must balance, and his “audit” a few lines later continues the language of accounts. Killing Claudius at prayer would reward him rather than repay him, so Hamlet refuses a revenge that does not match the crime exactly.
4. 4“He took my father grossly, full of bread” The father died with his sins upon him, as the Ghost complained in Act 1, Scene 5 (“Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’d”), so he is suffering in fires. Hamlet wants Claudius's death to be at least as spiritually disastrous, which draws on Catholic ideas of the afterlife, such as Purgatory, that the Church of England had officially rejected.
5. 5“And that his soul may be as damn’d and black” He wants not only death but damnation, which the Ghost never asked for. Some readers find this the most shocking speech in the play. It makes it hard to accept the view that Hamlet delays because he is too gentle; here his thinking produces a crueller revenge, not a kinder one.
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The question: Explore the significance of this extract in relation to the presentation of revenge in the play as a whole.