Name: ___________________________________ Period: ______

AP English Literature & Composition: Hamlet Unit: Hamlet’s Soliloquies

Directions:
You will complete and annotate the six of Hamlet’s soliloquies from the play. Please print out each of the soliloquies.
You must fully annotate each one, considering literary devices (tone, figurative language, symbolism, metaphor, etc)
and their importance to the soliloquy’s message/purpose.

➔ Consider the question of: How do each these soliloquies reflect Hamlet’s character? To facilitate our class discussion,
please make notes on the soliloquies covering the following: the context, figurative language, diction and tone.
When completing the chart below, be as specific and detailed as possible. Your chart should have well-thought
out ideas, not just small phrases without explanations. You must complete one chart per soliloquy.

Completion:
When you turn in the assignment, you must have the following:
- One completed chart per soliloquy, submitted to Turnitin.com
- A printed & completely annotated copy of each soliloquy and chart for a stamp
o Each chart should be stapled to its annotated soliloquy when you turn them in

If you are unsure as to how you should annotate the soliloquy, please ask for help.

You will receive credit for the quality of your annotations, not just marking the page with highlighter and underlined
words.
Soliloquy # _____

Context:
What happens in the
play before and after
the soliloquy? What
is the impact on this
moment?

Figurative
Language:
Note imagery,
metaphors, similes,
personification,
etc.
What effect does this
figurative language
have on the
soliloquy?

Diction & Tone:

How does
Shakespeare use
word choice to
create tone?
Identify the tone and
give specific words in
the quote as
evidence.

Characterization:
In what way is this a
reflection of Hamlet’s
character? State of
mind?
Soliloquy #1: Act 1, Scene 2, 129-158
O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into the dew
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah, fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this,
But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two.
Sop excellent a king, that was to this,
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother,
That he might not between the winds of heaven
Visit her fact too roughly. Heaven and earth,
Must I remember? Why she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on, and yet, within a month-
Let me not think on it. Frailty, thy name is woman –
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body
Like Niobe, all tears, why she –
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer – married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing of her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good
But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
Soliloquy #2: Act 1 Scene 5, 92 -111
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?

And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart,

And you, my sinews, grow not instant old

But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?

Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat

In this distracted globe. Remember thee?

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past

That youth and observation copied there

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain,

Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!

O most pernicious woman!

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!

My tables – meet it is I set it down

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.

So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word:

It is ‘Adieu, adieu. Remember me.’

I have sworn’t.
Soliloquy #3: Act II, Scene 2, 505-562
Now I am alone
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage waned;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like a John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,
Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie I’ th’ throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha, ‘swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should ‘a fated all the region kites
With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindles villain
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion! Fie upon ‘t! foh!
About, my brains. Hum – I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks.
I’ll tent him to the quick. If ‘a do blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T’ assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds
More relative than this. The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king
Soliloquy #4: Act III, Scene 2, 351-362 That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,

To be, or not to be, that is the question: When he himself might his quietus make

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, But that the dread of something after death,

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep – The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No more; and by a sleep to say we end No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks And makes us rather bear those ills we have

That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation Than fly to others that we know not of?

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep – Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub; And thus the native hue of resolution

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil And enterprises of great pitch and moment

Must give us pause. There’s the respect With this regard their currents turn awry

That makes calamity of so long life: And lose the name of action. Soft you now,

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The fair Ophelia – Nymph, in thy orisons

Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, Be all my sins remembered

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

Soliloquy #5: Act III, Scene 2, 351-362
‘Tis now the very witching time of night

When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out

Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,

And do such bitter business as the day

Would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother.

O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever

the soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.

Let me be cruel, not unnatural;

I will speak daggers to her, but use none

My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites:

How in my words somever she be shent,

To give them seals never my soul consent!

Soliloquy #6: Act IV, Scene 4, 32-66
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event –
A thought which, quartered, hath but me part wisdom
And ever three parts coward – I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do’,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puffed,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at stake. How stand I then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause
Which is tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
Soliloquy Chart Expectations

Before:

Context:
What happens in the After:
play before and after
the soliloquy? What
is the impact on this
moment?
Impact/significance?:

At least five examples. They can be multiples (i.e. three metaphors), but try to vary your
Figurative identification. Use quotes.
Language:
Note imagery, Analyze them!! Don’t just list and identify. Explain the effect.
metaphors,
similes,
personification,
etc.
What effect does this
figurative language
have on the
soliloquy?

Tone is the attitude of the speaker toward a subject. Tone is primarily created through diction
Diction & Tone: (word choice) and syntax (sentence structure, punctuation, verse line, etc). Close read at least
How does one quote from the soliloquy and identify specific words or phrasing that creates a tone. Pay
Shakespeare use attention to connotation.
word choice to
create tone? Be sure to note any SHIFTS!
Identify the tone and
give specific words
in the quote as
evidence.

This should be four to five sentences of character analysis.

Characterization:
In what way is this a
reflection of
Hamlet’s character?
State of mind?