Major Characters and their speech

1
Hamlet, a primer

• Major Characters and their speech

2
Hamlet

• Heir apparent to the throne of Denmark
• Son of Gertrude
• A student prone to dark moods, not the least of
  which because his mother has remarried rapidly
  after his fathers death.

3
Hamlet

• O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
• Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
• This is not the last of Hamlets suicidal
  thoughts. He obviously sees the flesh as the
  opposite of the spirit. Throughout the play hell
  be seeing the flesh as weak. The tendency of a
  corpse to liquefy and of the dew to ascend to
  heaven is part of this metaphor.

4
Diction

• Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
• His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!
• God! God!How weary, stale, flat and
  unprofitable,Seem to me all the uses of this
  world!
• What is the purpose of choosing self-slaughter
  instead of suicide? Why have four adjectives in a
  row to describe the ways the world uses a person?

5
Imagery note the metaphor

• Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
• That grows to seed things rank and gross in
  nature
• Possess it merely.
• If he sees the world as a garden that is
  untended, how does it fit his present situation
  with his mother and Claudius?
• Why the general picture of things rather than
  specific weeds?

6
Rhetorical devices

• That it should come to this!
• But two months dead nay, not so much, not two
• So excellent a king that was, to this,
• Note again that we have vagueness. That and
  this are not clear and Hamlet chooses to make a
  statement and then attenuate it. Note as well
  that Hamlet connects the divine, his father, to
  the disgusting, his uncle by the th sound. Note
  that he begins with that and this and ends
  with them.

7
Analogy

• So excellent a king that was, to this, Hyperion
  to a satyr so loving to my mother
• Hyperion son of heaven and Earth Titan
• That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
• Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!

8
Analogy continued and Paradox

• Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
• As if increase of appetite had grown
• By what it fed on
• Here we have a seeming contradiction in that one
  is sated by feeding. The image of her hanging on
  Hamlet (sr.) is a very physical one.

9
Imagery

• and yet, within a month
• Let me not think on't
• Frailty, thy name is woman! (adage)
• A little month, or ere those shoes were old
• With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
• Note the contrast to hanging.. Shoes

10
Allusion and comparison

• Like Niobe, all tears--why she, even she--O,
  God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
• Niobe was turned to a weeping stone.
• Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,

11
Analogy

• My father's brother, but no more like my father
• Look as well at how the forms are reversed, a
  common structure in Hamlet.
• Than I to Hercules within a month

12
Diction and imagery

• Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
• Here he is playing upon salt.
• Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
• Galled means irritated and this is again a play
  on words.
• She married.

13
Metaphor and Imagery

• O, most wicked speed, to post
• A comparison of her to a postal messenger.
• With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
• It is not nor it cannot come to good

14
Rhetorical end

• But break, my heart for I must hold my tongue.
• Apostrophe, synecdoche, reversal.