Hamlet and his soliloquies In Shakespeare's Hamlet the reader finds a chain of soliloquies, seven in total, which involve the protagonist and extend from the beginning to the end of the play. In this essay we examine the approach to soliloquy used by the hero. Harry Levin comments on Hamlet's penchant for soliloquies in the General Introduction to The Riverside Shakespeare: Similarly, Hamlet has been reproached – or, perhaps more often, sentimentalized – for a supposed inability to make up his mind. In fact, both the evidence about him and his extreme heroism show that his hesitations are unusual. It is a measure of the disconcerting situation in which he finds himself that the native color of resolution is faded by the pale tinge of thought (III.i.84) If Hamlet's personality seems particularly elusive, if his different interpreters can endow him with characteristics so widely different, it is because his part is presented subjectively, much of it confided to us through soliloquies. (24) The first soliloquy, or “act of speaking to oneself, both silently and aloud” (Abrams 289), occurs when the hero is left alone after the royal social meeting in the state room in the castle of Elsinore. He is dejected by his mother's “hasty marriage” to his uncle less than two months after Hamlet's father's funeral (Gordon 128). Her first soliloquy emphasizes the fragility of women - an obvious reference to her mother's hasty and incestuous marriage to her husband's brother: Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt and resolve itself into dew! Or that the Eternal had not adjusted his canon 'against himself-... middle of paper... An impulsive but serious young aristocrat." Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardò. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999 Rpt. from The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1995. http://www.chemicool.com /Shakespeare/hamlet/full.htmlWest, Rebecca. “A Court and a World Infected with the Disease of Corruption.” Readings on Hamlet. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. Wright, Louis B. and Virginia A. LaMar. "Hamlet: A Man Who Thinks Before He Acts." Ed. Don Nardò: Greenhaven Press, 1999 . Rpt. from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar. Paperbacks, 1958.