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Hamlethas none of the single-minded blood lust of the earliest revengers. It is notbecause he is incapable of action, but because the cast of his mind is sspeculative, so questioning, and so contemplative that action, when it finallycomes, seems almost like defeat, diminishing rather than adding to the statureof the hero.
Trappedin a nightmare world of spying, and apparently bearing the intolerable burdenof the duty to revenge his father’s death, Hamlet is obliged to inhabit ashadow world, to live suspended between fact and fiction, language an action.His life is one of constant role playing, examining the nature of action onlyto deny its possibility for he is no sophisticated to degrade his nature to theconventional rule of a stage revenger.
Forsuch a figure, soliloquy is a natural medium, a necessary release of hisanguish; and some of his questioning monologues poses surpassing power andinsight, which have survived centuries of being torn from their context.
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