RALPH:  Sarah, this is a real actor’s soliloquy – first of all, it’s got all kinds of exciting changes of tone and pacing as Hamlet goes from idea to idea – it’s a real challenge to perform.  But the content makes it an actor’s soliloquy, too - it’s all about the theatre, all about roles and acting, - we haven’t even mentioned that the whole play seems to be an extended pun on the word “acting” – right?  Acting in a play, and taking action? Anyhow, this soliloquy brings all this out into the open.

SARAH:  That’s certainly true, Ralph. It begins with this comparison between this player’s amazing speech about Hecuba, and Hamlet’s own pitiful lack of action, and then it comes back around at the very end to be about the power of the theater to cause confessions in criminals.

RALPH:  And these are just the parts of the monologue which are explicitly about the theatre.  But in fact, for me, the whole speech is about performance.  Hamlet’s self-reflection – his constant tendency to stand back and examine what he’s doing – is as if he’s his own audience, as if he’s watching himself on stage.

SARAH:  So, when he asks himself part-way through “Am I a coward, Who calls me villain…” it’s as if Hamlet’s watching himself onstage being challenged and insulted by some opponent -

RALPH:  That’s right, Sarah, and yet Hamlet never forgets what’s really happening – he knows that he’s not actually being taunted by someone, but his little imaginary scenario has helped him see that his actual situation – living under Claudius’s rule, putting up with his mother’s shocking new marriage – well that’s even more shameful, and it makes him out to be even more cowardly.  Hamlet uses his own monologues as a kind of mirror – he’s showing us what he’s thinking about, sure, but he’s also holding that mirror up to himself.

SARAH:  That reminds me of what Frank Kermode, a wonderful Shakespeare critic, said about this soliloquy – he called it a “small wilderness of mirrors”

Ralph What a great phrase!  And it’s true – the monologue is not that long, and yet it’s easy to get lost within it.

SARAH:  Ralph, at the beginning of our discussion of what critics have said about this scene, you mentioned someone who said the play changes from a 'tragedy of revenge' to a 'tragedy of delay'. It seems to me that it changes instead to a psychological tragedy. It’s with this monologue that you realize that the real conflicts of this play are not going to be resolved with swords and daggers, but with emotional exploration and philosophical reflection, and that the main protagonists are not members of the Danish court, but rather different currents of thought in Hamlet’s own mind.

RALPH:  True enough, Sarah – and frankly, that’s good news for all of us.  After all, we don’t have much in common with a Renaissance prince who was passed over for the throne, nor do most of us relate directly with someone whose father was murdered, and whose mother has remarried the murderer. And yet we can all empathize with Hamlet’s internal conflicts.

SARAH:  We can imagine being torn between loyalty to family and obeying the law; choosing whether to forgive someone who’s harmed us or to seek retribution; deciding to wait to see if the system will bring justice or to take matters into our own hands; do we go with our emotions or override them with our reasoning?

RALPH:  We can also all relate to the terrible feeling we have when we know that something difficult must be done, and yet we haven’t done it.  Hamlet’s self-accusations and self-punishment are familiar to us, and yet they are given a depth and a noble dimension here because of the magnitude of what Hamlet must do.

SARAH:  I think we could all make the same observation Coleridge did after hearing this soliloquy, “I have a smack of Hamlet myself.”

RALPH:  A “smack of Hamlet”?

SARAH:  That’s right – you know, smack – the taste or flavor of something.

RALPH:  No, I know what the word means, it’s just… that was the name of my heavy metal band in junior high – Smack of Hamlet.  [disappointed]  I thought I was the first to say that…

SARAH:  Oh – you poor thing.