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Hamlet's Depression
Context and Language Videos
Act 1,
Scene 2
Lines 129-142

A discussion of Hamlet's depression in Act 1, Scene 2 of myShakespeare's Hamlet.

myShakespeare | Hamlet 1.2 Hamlet's Depression

Hamlet 

Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! Oh God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! Oh fie 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 –
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Video Transcript: 

RALPH: Well, Sarah, Hamlet seems clearly depressed — he just wants to melt away and disappear; he would even commit suicide — "self-slaughter" as he calls it — if it weren't against Biblical commandments. And like most depressed people, he sees the world as grey and useless; everything is "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable".

SARAH: True enough, Ralph. I should add that the monologue begins with strong visual imagery to help us see the world as bleakly as Hamlet is seeing it: first, Hamlet's wish that his solid flesh would melt away into an almost immaterial liquid; and then, the metaphor of the world as an unweeded garden, gone to seed, and overrun by stinking plants. Both give us a sense of Hamlet's despair that God has abandoned his material creations.