Hamlet_Soliloquy_Impersonation

Hamlet Soliloquy Love, Love is the most heinous of things. It infects thy soul and rots thy heart ‘til its barer is left riddled with pain. It is a poison on humanity, a knowledge for which I would choose ignorance, a fruit which has fallen rotten to deceit and now decays with betrayal. It is a complication on the simplest of lives and though with it I once felt amity, at this point I stand, I dare not juggle with such a seed tampered with by the blackest devil. What I once felt for that girl is now diminished for I fear the honesty and innocence is tainted in her too. His poison likely flows through her veins as despise doth mine. Her love for me equal to all other, fathoms a quench for more than companionship and devotion, but rather favours a love more intricately set to a cunning disposition. Love bares no part of me now. My every thought is filled with disgust that it now burdens my compassion. Betrayal is too rife for one to consider both the love for and that of another. A victim of deceit from ones own mother, she is the reason for my turmoil. A love between brothers betrayed for greed, a love for a husband abandoned without thought before breath. And love for a son, disregarded for selfish needs. I will take no lover for wish to avoid second pain. No one should be convinced of such falseness, of such a facade. And those who act within such a cruel theatre will be cast from blessing as she is cast from mine. For that deed, that dark incestuous deed that doth set my skin a quiver each night, that damns her through sin and that drags her from me, clumps the blood that we share in my veins like infection. The same infection that drills to the core of my sanity and crumbles the mind. For every part of me that lives is repulsed by her treachery, though with every breath I am drawn to her fuelled by ardour and covet. He does not love, no! Does not possess the qualities to love. Born a poisoned man, born to embitter the world, to spread pain and disruption. Filled in every pour with venom, He lends that foul poisonous tongue to the ear of my mother, dripping sedition and perfidy into her every crevice in the same way that brought the death of my father. He is a serpent, spawn of the delinquent angels. He can claim no love over me, can claim no mercy. I wish not to merely take murder as revenge he does not deserve such kindness. He must be damned eternally like the fallen angel from which he draws his evil. A coward carries poison, for they know that in battle the scales would not tilt in their favour. Victimise the innocent, rather than attack the strong. He has not the valour that he holds himself so highly upon. Satan’s Soliloquy How can he deny me of my right, my calling' Me, the mightiest and strongest of the angels, overlooked for the very position that I was sculpted to fit. A role that would see me appreciated for my commitment and loyalty. A role that would show praise for all that I have accomplished, that would value my significance in command. And now, hurled down from heaven, cast forth into the shadow for standing against such treachery that I was conceived to fight against. Given free will only to be condemned for speaking and acting freely. But no, overlooked, cast aside, disregarded. I loved, but twas not a love reciprocated. Loved my father for his grace and glory, loved him and felt that in his presence I was loved in return. But he see’s me as no son but as mere presence. And that glory and grace is really a façade for his trickery. Concealed his strength to persuade and tempt an attempt to overdo him. All a ploy to shape our fall whilst crushing our heart through his false parental pretence. Well now my loves grows bitter. Poisoned by the pain of rejection, darkened by the shadow that I was cast into. I see that I have committed no reason to receive such malice. Well my superiority will not be overlooked any more. I will ensure that he regrets his decision to repudiate me. I will see that he endures my wrath and my pain is shared for his incompetence. I will poison his creation of humanity so that they feel the pain I feel. Love will become tainted, commitment will be burned by betrayal and treachery as it was for me. Hope will be diminished through hurt and innocence will decay with knowledge. I will venture to paradise and persuade Adam and Eve to subconsciously betray him. I will burden humanity with death and dishonesty, corruption and betrayal that has been inflicted upon me and love will have no purity. It is not love that keeps him watching over us, it is but mere amusement. He hath no compassion, no care for us, we are just puppets to a theatre. Tormented with false hope and tantalised with false illusions only to be jerked back by the strings of deceit that hide the reality of our conditioned existence. And now condemned to this hell this wretched place, but it does not nearly resemble the desolate hell that burdens my soul. Heaven is not all that grandeur. It is a curtain, a distraction from the treachery and deviousness backstage. It is the embodiment of love. Commentary Although both texts seem to have an abundance of hatred through the characters Hamlet and Satan, this is fuelled through a disappointment with love. The two soliloquies focus on this matter, expressing the emotion of the two characters. Satan’s soliloquy begins by confessing his disgust at being over looked for the position of second in command. The soliloquy reveals a truer character of Satan allowing the reader to gain understanding into his hurt rather than the façade he puts on to others. In an essay by Arnold Stein he states that when Satan speaks in soliloquy it is the solitary self speaking, still capable of despair and pity. Painted as the innocent victim as he paints himself through the poem, the soliloquy shows how Satan has become subject to his own lies believing that God deliberately schemed in order to bring about his downfall. He claims that God appeared weak, knowing that his hunger for power would drive him in an attempt to overtake him, and when he did, he enacted his full powers throwing Satan into hell. Satan’s tone within the soliloquy is one of anger and blame. As his strength of character slips his pride leaves him unable to understand his own culpability and thus passes the blame to God. His slide in strength of character is resembled by his slide in stature. He then grows sinister saying that he will retaliate and seek revenge on God. The theme of the soliloquy is based upon Satan’s offer to poison humanity. The process of choosing which elements of love should be part of the poison, such as loyalty and commitment reminded me of the Robert Browning poem ‘The Laboratory’, mirroring the idea of conjuring a poison from Satan’s own personal pain. Furthermore, Just as ‘The Laboratory’ see’s the speaker disguised in a mask, Satan similarly disguises himself on his way to earth as a cherub in order to slip past Uriel. Satan vows to poison humanity so that they feel pain in love in the same way that he has felt by his dismissal by God. The Hamlet Soliloquy attempts to encapsulate Hamlet’s inner turmoil over love. Although usually very contemplative throughout the play, the soliloquy focuses on Hamlet’s emotion rather than intellectual position. It is a revelation of his hurt and disappointment rather than an attempt to find reason. The tone of Hamlets soliloquy echoes that of his tone recurrent within the play, a tone of disgust and disappointment with humanity. The tone of the soliloquy helps to add tension and evoke a sense of drama. As the disgust thickens and the tone of the soliloquy grows some what aggressive, it entices a sense that an act of irrationality is to come which we know that Hamlet is capable of. Hamlet paints himself a victim of betrayal from his mother’s new relationship with Claudius. He expresses his disgust at their relationship and that ‘dark incestuous deed’, yet speaks of her as a lover himself and even confesses a desire for her. This solidifies an inkling which resounds throughout the play, specifically in act 3 scene 4, where he confronts his mother and tells her of his disgust. The syntax of the soliloquy flutters from short and choppy sentences which mirror his internal struggle, to longer, broken up sentences which emulate his disrupted trail of thought. The jumps in subject show his scattered thought due to his frustration and turmoil. The abundance of dark and decay imagery, specifically bodily corruption, such as a rotting heart, helps to both deliver Hamlet’s darkened emotion and emulate his usually sinister speech throughout the play. For example, “O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew” (Shakespeare 29). Furthermore utilisation of such imagery helps to reiterate how vastly the contagion of Satan’s corruption has spread. The soliloquy reveals Hamlets reasoning for scorning Ophelia. He suspects that she is helping Claudius maintain his power and hide the truth, and furthermore bring about the downfall of Hamlet himself. Hamlet expresses that he will not allow himself to fall in love after he has witnessed the betrayal of his mother to both his father and himself. Hamlet also expresses his desire to not just murder Claudius but to ensure that he damned eternally. Nigel Alexander states that ‘Hamlet is a man who hates the king with such determined and implacable loathing that he becomes an avenger who hopes to reach beyond the grave and damn his enemy’s soul to eternal hell’. Hamlet’s revenge is primarily centred upon convicting Claudius in the eyes of the nation. ‘If Hamlet had simply slain his uncle and then proclaimed, without a shred of supporting evidence that he had done it to avenge a fratricide, the nation would infallibly have cried out upon him, not only for murdering his uncle to seize the throne himself, but also for selfishly seeking to cast an infamous slur on the memory of a man who could no longer defend his honour’. The theme of poison is reoccurring throughout both of the texts. In the same way that Claudius’ words could be described as poison being poured in the ear, the same method he used to murder hamlets father, Satan’s fraudulent speeches could be described in the same way. Therefore the poison theme which can be seen to link the two texts is similarly used to link the two soliloquies with the poison that Satan insists upon humanity being felt by Hamlet. The two soliloquies also draw parallels in terms of content. Utilisation of names is kept to a minimal, primarily to create the effect of inner thought, in that the speaking character knows whom they are speaking of, but furthermore, the lack of names is deliberately used so that certain lines could be said by either character. For example the line ‘No one should be convinced of such falseness, of such a facade’ in Hamlets soliloquy could be used by Satan to describe God’s love. This creates the affect that the feeling that Satan felt is successfully passed through to humanity subsequent to his poisoning. This is further apparent in both Satan’s denial of God’s love, and Hamlet’s denial of Claudius’, thus further showing a shared feeling. Another connection between the two soliloquies could be seen in Hamlet’s description of Claudius. ‘born to embitter the world, to spread pain and disruption. Filled in every pore with venom, he lends that foul poisonous tongue’. Hamlet’s soliloquy is saturated in references to the first disobedience and to Satan himself. Specifically much of how he describes Claudius could be used to similarly describe Satan. Hamlet describes Claudius as a serpent and places him as a coward for targeting the innocent, for example King Hamlet in his sleep and subsequently a mourning Gertrude, in the same way that Satan targeted the innocent Eve. There is also reference to the scales of justice that God presents in the fourth book and reference to the first disobedience, ‘a knowledge for which I would choose ignorance, a fruit which has fallen rotten to deceit and now decays with betrayal’, as a metaphor for love.