Soliloquy

5th Apr, 2025

Tonight’s entry has no particular purpose, aside from a general desire to form habits, and my everlasting compulsion to ramble on a little bit about the things that fascinate me.

Which is to say, it has plenty of purpose. Fuck you, productivity bias.

So without further ado; spoiler warning ahead for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, of all things.

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Hamlet is by far my favourite Shakespeare play, and a strong contender for my favourite play in general. There’s not any strong motivating reason for this; it’s pretty objectively an excellent piece of media, but it’s also full of plot holes and the flaws of its time and plenty of rather foolish moments. Regardless, I just enjoy it.

Even those of you who have relatively little conscious experience of Hamlet have probably heard quite a few lines from it - the most likely of which being the famous opening line of the guy’s most famous soliloquy:

“To be, or not to be - that is the question.”

Hamlet himself (being the titular character of his own play) spends a lot of fucking time during the course of the story debating who exactly he is, who he should be, and what the fuck he’s doing with his life.
This is obviously quite relatable content, apart from the fact that in his case, the answer to the third point is something along the lines of, “Attempt to murder the man who married my mother, who happens to be my uncle, mostly because the ghost of my dead dad told me to.”¹

And yeah, he predictably spends a lot of time talking himself into and out of this idea, because obviously it’s a bit crazy, but also he wants to be the kind of guy who has gumption and a go-getter attitude.

“To be or not to be” is not my favourite soliloquy of the play, however. In fact, though this may simply be my aversion to the well-travelled road, I find it to be one of the least interesting.

For me, the prize goes to the opening soliloquy, which from memory occurs at the end of Act One, Scene One, in which Hamlet is mostly being a grumpy little emo shit at the Danish royal court. Once upon a time I could recount almost the entire speech, word for word, and quite enjoyed doing so. Nowadays I’m limited to just the opening line:

“Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt
thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!”

While a little confusing to the uninitiated, you have to admit it’s rather evocative. And the idea of wanting to escape your flesh, this mortal form, to transcend and be something else even if it seems less desirable on the surface - well, it’s a relatively attractive one.
The speech goes on to some other, similarly interesting lines - I believe ‘incestuous sheets’ are mentioned, as well as comparisons to Heracles², and even a bit of general blaspheming.³ Overall, it’s mostly about how all this shit that’s been happening is a bit fucking unbearable, you guys, which is once again mood as fuck.

The thing I love about this scene in particular is that it established Hamlet as two things, right off the mark: Firstly, a really fucking depressed emo asshole who kinda hates everyone around him…⁴ but also, a quite intelligent and philosophical dude, one who does a lot of introspection, is eloquent and expressive, and who pays attention to the world around him (usually).

Anyway, then he wanders away outside and sees his dead dad, and everything goes even more to shit.

My serious introduction to Hamlet was roughly 4 years ago, when it was the topic of my grade 12 English Literature class I was re-taking at the time. I did not precisely have high hopes for the module, since until this point I had found Shakespeare to be rather dry when I encountered it.⁵

So yeah, I was pleasantly surprised when I found the whole thing philosophically stimulating and absolutely packed with homoromantic intent. This is where I get to briefly ramble about Horatio.

Horatio is Hamlet’s absolute best friend. I believe the canon is that they attended the 1500’s⁶ Danish Nobility equivalent of highschool together, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Horatio is the perfect foil to Hamlet - where our prince is flamboyant, emotional, and frequently found tearing at his beautiful hair in distress, Horatio is oft the voice of reason and kindness in the story, perfectly equal parts wise advisor and loyal supportive friend.

If you read between the lines a bit here, it becomes obvious that they’re also so totally fucking, or at least want to be.⁷

Myself and the small handful of the other English Lit queers found this speculation greatly amusing, going so far as to cut out every relevant section and line of all our notes to combine into the glorious collage of Homoerotic Evidence.
Our English teacher, who was a straight white cis man in his 40’s and loved to make us study literature by other straight white cis men, did not find it quite as amusing. Especially not when I ignored all the ‘’’suggested’’’ essay topics and decided to write several pages of this speculation, to which he had to grudgingly bestow me a C+. I was so willing to take that one for the team.

...

Alas, dear reader - at this stage I do find myself getting quite tired. It’s past 2am, after all.

I meant to write substantially more - about the nature and purpose of soliloquies as a medium of communication with your audience, and about a fascinating conversation I had with a friend the other day that caused me to become aware of their potential use (and more importantly, relative non-efficacy) in videogame narrative design - among other things.

I meant to write about Polonius - perhaps the most annoying and self-important character of the play, and yet perhaps also the victim of it who least deserved his fate - which of course meant he was one of the first to die horribly.

Polonius is the sort of character who delivers many insightful and genuinely impactful pieces of advice throughout the play⁸… and just as many that are total bullshit he made up on the spot to sound wise, if you stop and examine them for a moment. He has all the substance and depth of a wet piece of fettuccine, but nevertheless his role in the play and the effect of his lines fascinate me.

Hamlet might take the prize for single most well-known line of dialogue in a play, but Polonius gets the trophy for total number of lines most frequently quoted. Often incorrectly, or hilariously out of context.⁹

Nevertheless, I think I really must wrap up here. Hamlet is a wonderful piece of work (and yes, I do mean that with subtle derogatory meaning.) Perhaps I will actually revisit it some time and then come write a Part Two™.

In the meantime, look forward to more of this style of entry, I think. Or don’t, I’ll never know the difference <3

Either way; goodnight, sweet readers. Let us sleep, perchance to dream pleasant dreams; till the morn in russet mantle clad doth hecking wake us all up tomorrow.

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