Monday, December 17, 2012

O that this too too solid flesh would melt



Our dear Hamlet, the most emo kid on the block--who actually has very legitimate reasons for being so emo--is the master of soliloquizing, and he lays down his first track with uncompromising skill. He's pissed at his mom for marrying his uncle so soon after King Hamlet died, an event so hastily and thriftily executed that "the funeral-baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables." In this speech, he praises his father to the sky, compares his seemingly grief-proof new "parents" to beasts, calls them incestuous, and then laments that he must keep his trap shut... a self-imposed rule which he proceeds to ignore for five acts.

Hamlet is THIS distraught even BEFORE Horatio conveys the sighting of the king's ghost. And later, Polonius fucks up his love life by berating Ophelia, basically calls her a whore, and forbids her to hang out with Hamlet anymore. Then Claudius and Gertrude set two of Hamlet's flunkies to spy on him because they have no idea why Hamlet is so upset.

This whole family needs an intervention. Or a year's supply of Xanax. Or both.

This soliloquy, for me, is one of the easiest to remember. Its emotion is embedded in the text so deeply and clearly, and the context so plain in its resentment and bemusement that you can't help but begin to chew the scenery as you speak it aloud. Also, I just play Sir Kenneth Branagh's performance of it through my head and it comes naturally. 

Hamlet, Act I, Sc. II
Hamlet: O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd 
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.
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!
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't! 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, even she
(O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourn'd 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 in 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! 

No comments:

Post a Comment