Written for ENG 2220/THE 2220: Drama Literature. Indicates an understanding of dramatic work and canonical reading:

Public and private matters in Hamlet's soliloquies

            Hamlet is a study of ambiguities, each character playing several parts and the titular character never fully revealed as either mad or simply angry. We are forced to examine whether our public selves are close friends with our private identities, perhaps as extensions of who we believe ourselves to be, or perhaps they are wholesale inventions. It is given to believe that Hamlet's public persona is an affect. In Hamlet's dealings with other people in the play, he is pointed, aggressive and quick witted. Privately he falters time and again. The clearest way to delineate the public and private in Hamlet is to examine the dichotomy between Hamlet when alone and when he is in the presence of others. Shakespeare uses soliloquy to frame the private thoughts of Hamlet. When comparing the public actions of Hamlet to his private dialog, we see a second Hamlet which begs the examination of the Prince's madness. This public self is at odds with the secret revelations in his soliloquies. The private self, ideally the true self, is not quite designed for the revenge he is called to.

            Our first meeting with the Danish Prince comes after he has been chastised for his grief in Act 1, Scene 2. He is playing with his death, wishing to disappear. he is encountered as a man alone, a being revealing his thoughts to himself off of the public stage. In this shelter of his solitude he is a man of indecision. He lays out his situation before us and is inclined to retreat from a world that he considers an "an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed" (Shakespeare 1.2.134-135) and his words are a treatise on self doubt and impotence. By his telling, he is not the man his father was and his mother has hastily laid to bed the brother of a great man as quickly as she has laid to rest that great man's memory. In the face of this, his heart breaks though he must remain silent. This speech sets up the moat between the private man and the public man; between the human and the prince. This speech foreshadows the appearance of his father and the unfortunate call to action that will come.

            Always the noble son with some duty remaining to his office, Hamlet is welcoming, even garrulous when his friends arrive, outgoing enough to invite them for drinks, asking Horatio to "drink deep ere you depart." (1.2 175) It is an incongruent dialog, Hamlet swiftly moving from suicidal frustration to overtures of camaraderie. The contrast is striking as he bobs between his grief and his responsibility to the public. He will eventually disclose to Horatio his plans and considers Horatio his true friend, an extension of  his private identity, but for the moment he drops his sorrow and reverts to a political being.

            Hamlet is a public person by nature. He is a noble and is scrutinized as such. We hear the dulcet timbre of a speech borne of his breeding whether he is lonely or with audience. What we focus on in the end is the content of the words of both Hamlets, content that leads back to a central question of the play, the question of Hamlet's madness.  In questioning the rift between the outward and the inward Hamlet we cannot avoid the ambiguity of his state of mind. If his madness is pretend we must draw a thicker line between the two princes. If his madness is genuine, then the disparities between public and private Hamlet may not be contradictory. His public madness defies his private reason and is either accidental or a further appendage of his indecision. The other option is that his madness, whether real or affected, is necessary for Hamlet to face the task ahead of him.

            His madness recurs most famously in Act 3, Scene 1 when he contemplates killing himself again. In a recap of the opening of his first soliloquy, Hamlet expounds and discusses a fear of action where all choices are dubious. In the "to be or not to be", speech we see a return to the questions he touched on earlier, that it may well be a wiser choice to end our troubles and the world is corrupt wholly. He is paralyzed again, floating between an unjust world and unreachable solution, lamenting how "Conscience does make cowards of us all". (3.1. 83) When the fair Ophelia enters he finds his resolve. The uncertainty dissipates leaving only his anger.  

            Ophelia comes to smoke out his madness and Hamlet supplies. Within the maddening circles of conversation we hear him indict his mother and himself in his words to his love. He is decisive and forceful as he tells her "I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not bourne me". (3.1 122 - 125) The shift from the passive voice from his private musings is shocking. He turns the attack from self mutilation to a devastation of Ophelia . Quickly on the heels of his own pain, he takes solace in an attack on a damaged person. She believes he loves her, though he turns on love. Further he battles marriage - the sin of his mother - and curses Ophelia's own prospects with " If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny" (3.1. 135-137). He burns Ophelia as a sacrifice for the married woman he cannot damn.

            In a public arena Hamlet is aggressive, unaffected by his self doubt. He also appears quite mad and engages in a word salad dense with double meanings. He addresses his father as his mother and Polonius as a fish monger.  The private Hamlet is the truer of the two, seeking absolutes in world of final choices. He is struggling with the justification of his vocation.  

            The last soliloquy to consider occurs later in Act 3 as Hamlet encounters the opportunity to kill his Uncle. He would do it were he not in company with that unaccompanied mind that stalls all action. He talks himself out of the act with an "Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent", (3.3. 88) fearing that this killing will discharge his uncle to Heaven. Were it not for Hamlet's history of hesitation, we could believe him, but he doth protest too much, methinks. Rather, Hamlet retires to his mother's chambers for more of what the Dane does best, witty repartee cloaked in the affect of mental illness. Here, he kills, however. Insistently failing to be the aggressor, he kills in reaction. Nevertheless, he kills the wrong person.

            From here out he kills prolifically, though reflexively. For all of the talk of his intent, there was no hint of the numbers or the lack of bravado with which he goes about it. Polonius and Laertes are accidental. Ophelia is the collateral damage from misguided rage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern through treachery until finally the King, his uncle. His final act and the apex of the play. While deliberate it is an act in haste, reactionary as befits the prince, and as if the decision was finally made by his own inevitable death. We lay to rest Horatio's "noble heart" and "sweet prince" (5.2. 351-352) as a man too decent to coldly kill, even when it is demanded of him from past death and even when he devoutly believes it to be his calling. 

            Hamlet describes the lead up to the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in this way:

                      ... in my heart there was a kind of fighting

                      That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay

                      Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—

                      And praised be rashness for it: let us know

                      Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well

                      When our deep plots do pall, and that should teach us

                      There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

                      Rough-hew them how we will— (5.2. 4-11)

In his killing he takes on the indecision of his soliloquy. He lays the impetus in God's domain, as he may not be the man to claim this as his own. The dichotomy between our hero in his private and public life appears at first to be cowardice, but is ultimately decency. Regrettably it is a decency only Horatio indulges in and a decency that exists exclusively in words and intent while he allows God's divine arm to take his own and do the rougher work. There is an unbridgeable rift between his intent and his action that manifests in his dual dialogs.

  

Works Cited:

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Great Britain: HarperCollins, 1994. Anthology. pp 1079 - 1125