Hamlet is the first play we are reading as a class. This is a big one, everyone has heard of Hamlet, everyone knows "To be or not to be..." and the general plot, but who knows much more than that?
I have read Hamlet before, but it's been a while. I remember basically who the characters are, what's going on and why, but it is nice to reread this play and pay attention to the language. Particularly the amazing soliloquies. My favorite, even more so than the famous "To be or not to be", and coming in just ahead of "What a piece of work is man", is the soliloquy of Hamlet's in Act One, Scene Two.
What I find very interesting is what this speech tells us about Hamlet. At the beginning he is wishing that he could die, that his flesh would melt, or that God had not commanded against suicide so that he could kill himself without guilt. And all because of the sorrow he feels at his father's death, and what he perceives as his mother's betrayal.
And then we begin to see the madness of Hamlet, his rationalizing his hatred of his uncle by exaggerating the details of his sin. At first it is "But two months ... nay, not so much, not two", and then it becomes "within a month" and "a little month". In the next couple of lines after this speech, when Horatio is there, he says, "The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables", implying that the wedding was so soon after his father's death that they could use the same food, it had not yet had time to spoil, which would indicate a matter of days rather than weeks. He keeps pushing up the time-frame, and since he is the only character to ever mention the time between the king's death and the queen's remarriage, aside from Horatio's quick line, "it followed hard upon", we, as readers, are left without a specific, definite date. We don't know how long it was, all we know is how long it felt to Hamlet -- not very long at all.
One other thing that I really want to mention, just throwing this out there, is the way in which Shakespeare reuses ideas. There are lines in different plays that are very similar. I'm not saying that he was lazy and was reusing his old stuff, but I think that he was contemplating themes and they came out in much the same way in different plays.
In Hamlet, Act One,Scene 5, line 113, he says, speaking of his uncle, "That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." In this, I immediately recognized a quote about Richard III, from King Henry VI part 3, Act 3, Scene 2, line 186 "Why, I can smile, and murder while I smile."
It seems that Shakespeare is dealing with villains who do not appear to be villainous on the outside. How easy life would be if we could easily tell who was good and who was not. But no, there are many who smile, "and murder while [they] smile." I find it fascinating to see these two, almost identical lines in plays written about ten years apart.
