Soliloquy Essay - Theatre and Language in the Soliloquies of Shakespear

Theatre and Language in the Soliloquies of hamlet The firstly Folio is prefaced with an address to the reader to Read him again and again. In terms of words and recreateion, settlement is the most self conscious sportswoman about its own theatricality. Words and actions throughout the work on are inextricably linked, as is the notion of philandering a part. From the outset of the play we find evidence of the external disposition compared with the underlying candor. In Act One, Hamlets linguistic communication to Gertrude (Nay seems...etc) shows us the Prince talking about actions that a man might play and also about what is inside him which passes show. (NB Action in Elizabethan definition meant acting) Throughout the play we see inner reality beneath the surface performances of not only Hamlet, but other characters, too. Hamlet has only one-liners at the beginning of the play until we hear his first soliloquy, which is an campaign to look at that within, which passes show. The soliloquies create a bond amidst the character and the audience and were a dramatic convention inherited from Hellenic drama. By the time of Shakespeare they had moved away from commentaries on the plot and events of the play and had become illustrative of the inner thoughts of the character. In the soliloquy the character tells the fair play as he perceives it, although truth is subjective and can have contrasting meanings for different characters. In Hamlet we have seven soliloquies, five major(ip) and two smaller ones, and Hamlets character is revealed through them as the play progresses. Hazlitt - This is that Hamlet the Dane...whom we remember...but all whose thoughts we know as well as we know our own..Reality is in the readers mind..It is we who are Ham... ...so to the grave. Hamlet describes himself as Crawling between earth and heaven. Shakespeares audience would have had a physical picture of this before them, which added outstanding weight to the imagery of his text, as of course would the scuffle over Ophelias corpse. At the end of the play Hamlet stops musing and the language becomes truly direct and simple, there is a divinity.. the readiness is all. In the final exam scene Hamlet acts in all senses of the word, and theatre takes over. The final speeches are terse and contain references to the theatricality of the occasion. he refers to the mutes (extras on stage) and the audience to this act. Fortinbras commands him to be carried to the stage, perhaps a last comment on a play which is characterised so much as actors playing to actors in a kind of Chinese box puzzle of outward show and inner secrets.