RALPH:  Sarah, I’ve been thinking: although I’m fascinated by this monologue, I can imagine that someone coming to it for the first time might not be so impressed.

SARAH:  Why’s that Ralph?

RALPH:  For starters, they might agree with T.S. Eliot – and think that Hamlet is overreacting. So his mother remarried his uncle — is that a bummer? Sure. A reason to kill yourself?  Maybe not!

SARAH:  But Ralph, Hamlet sees this marriage as a kind of incest!  You remember the Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles?

RALPH:  Sure, there’s a prophecy that Oedipus will grow up to sleep with his mother and kill his father, and although everything is done to stop it, he ends up doing it, and he doesn’t even know it when he does.

SARAH:  And when he finds out the truth, he gouges his eyes out, and his mother hangs herself in despair.  That’s an extreme response, but incest is a shocking crime.

RALPH:  I see your point:  while a modern audience might see Gertrude’s marriage with Claudius as merely off-putting, an Elizabethan audience would have considered this kind of relationship incestuous, and they might have been horrified, just as Hamlet is.  Or at least understood his disgust and depression.

SARAH:  Exactly. But I think there’s another aspect of Hamlet’s strong reaction that is easier for us to identify with now.  And that’s the feeling that life isn’t worth living, that the world is dull and grey and pointless — this is an intense form of depression, a kind of existential angst. And, to someone who doesn’t feel the same way, it’s hard to understand how any particular event could make you feel that way.  In other words, there’s always a sort of disproportion between these intense feelings and the causes that provoke them.

RALPH:  So you’re saying that it’s precisely the fact that Hamlet’s reaction is so excessive that makes it meaningful?

SARAH:  Exactly, Ralph.  Hamlet’s existential doubts in this tragedy have real, material causes, but they also propel him into a world of emotion and reflection that seem to have little to do with those initial causes.

RALPH:  Nice point, Sarah.  This aspect to Hamlet’s soliloquy is something that can potentially touch us all. But I don’t know… 

SARAH:  Yes, Ralph?

RALPH:  Well, I’m just imagining again a first-time listener or reader of this soliloquy.  And imagining them saying to themselves, Hamlet just doesn’t sound realistic; it’s not how someone would actually talk out loud.

SARAH:  This can indeed be an obstacle to appreciating Shakespeare, Ralph.  We are accustomed to the natural sounding dialogue of modern film and TV, whereas Shakespeare’s characters often speak in a very refined, poetical language, which was typical of the theater from that period.  But once you get accustomed to this, something magical happens — you appreciate the beauty of the language while retaining the impression that the character speaking these lines is a real person.

RALPH:  That is a kind of magic. And there’s a benefit to this refined, poetic speech — it conveys so much depth and complexity in relatively few words — this gives Hamlet’s speeches a power and a level of insight that’s well worth the effort we put in to understand them.

SARAH:  As we conclude, we’ll leave you with some questions that are still unresolved from our discussion, that you might try and resolve for yourself.

RALPH:  What’s really making Hamlet so depressed in this soliloquy?

SARAH:  Is it is father’s death, his mother’s hasty remarriage, or the fact that she’s marrying Hamlet’s uncle, which is a kind of incest?  Or is it more general, something about the nature of life itself?

RALPH:  Is Hamlet’s reaction excessive, or over the top, or does it make sense given what he’s going through?

SARAH:  And what about Hamlet’s mother Gertrude? Is she really so awful for remarrying Claudius? I mean, she’s the queen of Denmark, and she may well have good reason to make sure the country has a strong King as well.  And who knows, maybe she and Hamlet’s father didn’t get along quite as well as Hamlet thought they did…

RALPH:  Sarah!  You heard what Hamlet said about them!  It’s shocking that she remarried so soon!  I mean, it’s been two months!  Not even two months since her husband died!

SARAH:  But Ralph you have — we have — no idea of what Gertrude’s situation is, there are all kind of reasons, and not simply political, that would cause…. 

RALPH AND SARAH: [Both talking over one another]