How to Write a Literary Essay That Moves Beyond Paraphrase
Hamlet’s soliloquies are the most closely studied passages in the English literary canon — which creates a specific problem for your essay. Every student arrives knowing that “To be or not to be” is about life, death, and inaction. That familiarity is the obstacle. An essay that paraphrases what Hamlet says in soliloquy and then states that he is conflicted has not started the analytical work. Literary analysis of the soliloquies means arguing how Shakespeare uses the form of the soliloquy — its position in the scene, its verse structure, its rhetoric, its imagery — to do specific dramatic work at specific moments in the play. This guide maps exactly what a strong essay needs to do, and precisely where most submissions fall short.
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Get Expert Help →What This Essay Is Actually Testing — and Why Familiarity With the Soliloquies Works Against Most Students
Hamlet’s soliloquies have been so thoroughly absorbed into literary culture — quoted in philosophy seminars, psychology textbooks, and popular media — that most students arrive treating them as self-explanatory windows into Hamlet’s psychology. That is the main obstacle. An essay that paraphrases “To be or not to be” and concludes that Hamlet is indecisive is not performing literary analysis — it is performing comprehension. Literary analysis of the soliloquies requires you to argue how Shakespeare uses the form: the verse structure, the rhetorical organisation, the imagery, the position in the scene and act, the audience’s dramatic position relative to the character. What is Hamlet’s thinking doing at this specific point in the play? What does the verse register signal about his mental state? What does the imagery in this soliloquy argue that the imagery in the previous one complicates? These are the questions a strong essay answers. The content of the soliloquies is your evidence; the form is your analytical object.
The essay also tests your command of soliloquy as a specific dramatic device with a specific set of functions and conventions. A soliloquy is not simply a speech delivered alone on stage — it is a formal mechanism that creates a particular relationship between character and audience, and that creates dramatic irony by giving the audience information no other character has. Your essay needs to demonstrate that you understand what the device can do and then argue what these specific soliloquies do with it, rather than treating the form as a neutral container for Hamlet’s thoughts.
A third demand is engagement with the play’s textual instability. Hamlet exists in three substantially different early texts — the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604–05), and the First Folio (F1, 1623) — and the soliloquies differ significantly between them. The version of “To be or not to be” you are most likely to read is a conflated editorial text, not any single historical document. Knowing this shapes how you handle textual evidence: citing from a scholarly edition that specifies its source text is necessary for any serious essay, and the differences between versions are sometimes analytically relevant.
Use a Scholarly Edition — and Engage With the Textual Variants
The Cambridge University Press New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, edited by Philip Edwards, provides full textual apparatus, variant readings, and critical commentary and is widely used in undergraduate courses. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series edition (edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor) publishes all three early texts separately, which is invaluable if your essay engages with the textual question. Cite the edition you use, specify the act, scene, and line numbers in your parenthetical references, and check your institution’s house style for citing verse drama. Secondary scholarship in the journals Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Survey (both peer-reviewed) is the standard citation base for academic essays on the play; search JSTOR or your library database for recent critical work on the soliloquies.
The Soliloquy as a Dramatic Device — What the Form Does Before You Analyse the Content
Before you can write a strong essay on Hamlet’s soliloquies, you need a precise account of what a soliloquy does as a formal device — because the choices Shakespeare makes within each soliloquy only make sense against that background. The form creates specific relationships, specific privileges, and specific ironies that are not available in dialogue, and your analysis must engage with those formal properties rather than treating the soliloquy as simply a speech that happens to be delivered alone.
What the Soliloquy Form Produces — and What Each Property Means for Your Essay
Each formal property of the soliloquy creates a specific analytical question. Identify which ones your essay must address before you draft.
Privileged Audience Access
- The soliloquy convention grants the audience access to a character’s consciousness that no other character on stage shares — the audience and Hamlet are in a unique relationship of shared knowledge throughout the play
- This creates structural irony in every scene that follows a soliloquy: the audience knows what Hamlet knows, thinks, and fears; Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, and Polonius do not
- Your essay should address what Shakespeare does with this asymmetry — whether the audience is positioned to sympathise, to judge, or to feel something more unsettled than either
Convention of Truthfulness
- Early modern theatrical convention holds that characters tell the truth in soliloquy — that the soliloquy is the one form in which performance for other characters is stripped away
- Hamlet complicates this convention: his soliloquies are not simple truth-telling; they are performances of thinking that are themselves subject to self-deception, rhetorical inflation, and sudden collapse
- Your essay should address whether the soliloquies are reliable accounts of Hamlet’s interior — and if not, what that unreliability argues about the play’s treatment of self-knowledge
The Soliloquy’s Structural Position
- Where a soliloquy occurs in an act and scene is never accidental — Shakespeare places them at moments of maximum dramatic pressure, transition, or ironic contrast
- “To be or not to be” follows Hamlet’s instruction to the players and precedes the Mousetrap; “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” immediately follows the First Player’s controlled emotional performance
- Your essay must address the structural context of any soliloquy it analyses — what has just happened, what is about to happen, and how the soliloquy sits between those events as a moment of consciousness that the action surrounds
Verse as Characterisation
- Shakespeare uses verse form — regular or irregular iambic pentameter, caesura, enjambment, feminine endings, verse collapsed into prose — as a direct index of a character’s mental state
- The metrical regularity or breakdown of a soliloquy’s verse is not decorative — it enacts what is happening to Hamlet’s thinking at the level of the line
- Every essay on the soliloquies must include at least one passage of verse analysis: not what the line means but what the metre, the breaks, and the stress patterns do in the context of that moment
Soliloquy as Dramatic Irony Generator
- Once the audience has received information in soliloquy, every subsequent scene involving the characters who lack that information is structured by dramatic irony — the audience watches knowing what they do not know
- Hamlet’s disclosure of his plan to “put an antic disposition on” (1.5) means that every subsequent scene in which Claudius tries to read Hamlet’s madness is ironised by the audience’s knowledge
- Tracing how a specific soliloquy generates the dramatic irony that operates in a subsequent scene is a strong analytical move that demonstrates engagement with the play’s structure, not just its content
Development Across Soliloquies
- Hamlet’s seven soliloquies track a trajectory — but what that trajectory is (development, deterioration, paralysis deepening, or resolution) is one of the most contested questions in Hamlet scholarship
- Reading the soliloquies as a sequence, rather than in isolation, reveals what changes across them and what does not — and that comparative reading is what allows your essay to make a claim about Hamlet’s character as the play constructs it
- Your essay should take a specific position on the arc the soliloquies trace, supported by evidence from at least three soliloquies compared at the level of language and imagery
Always Establish the Structural Context Before the Close Reading
Every analytical paragraph on a soliloquy should begin with one or two sentences of structural context: where in the play this soliloquy falls, what has immediately preceded it, and what it is positioned before. Without this context, the close reading floats. The reason “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” is analytically rich is not only because of what it says but because it immediately follows a professional actor’s controlled, passionate performance of grief for a fictional character — and Hamlet knows it. The contrast is the point. Your close reading of the imagery and rhetoric in that soliloquy should always work outward from that structural context, not in isolation from it.
The Seven Soliloquies — What Each One Does and Which Questions Each One Raises
Most essay prompts on the soliloquies either address all of them comparatively or focus on one or two in depth. If you are writing a comparative essay, you cannot cover all seven at equal length — you need to select and justify. If you are writing a close reading of one soliloquy, you need to place it within the sequence to demonstrate that you understand what the others do and why this one is most productive for your argument. The table below maps each soliloquy’s dramatic function, its key analytical features, and the question your essay needs to answer about it.
| Soliloquy | Location | Core Dramatic Function | Key Analytical Features | Question Your Essay Must Answer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| “O that this too too solid flesh” | 1.2.129–159 | Establishes Hamlet’s psychological condition before the ghost’s revelation — his disgust at the world, his grief for his father, and his revulsion at Gertrude’s remarriage. This is the play’s first direct access to Hamlet’s consciousness, and it sets the emotional and thematic register for everything that follows. | The “solid/sullied/sallied” textual crux (Q2 reads “sallied,” F1 reads “solid” — both are analytically significant); the garden imagery of corruption and weeds; the structural suppression (“But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue”) that anticipates the tension between thought and action; the comparison of Claudius to Hyperion and a satyr. | What does this soliloquy establish about Hamlet’s relationship between feeling and speech — and how does the command to hold his tongue at its close set up the formal problem the rest of the soliloquies explore? |
| “O all you host of heaven” | 1.5.92–112 | Hamlet’s immediate response to the Ghost’s revelation and command. This is his vow of revenge — and critically, the only moment in the play when he appears to commit to action without qualification. It includes his decision to “put an antic disposition on,” which structures the play’s dramatic irony for the next three acts. | The invocation of heaven and earth; the memory metaphor (wiping the “table” of his mind clean); the rapid, emotionally uncontrolled verse rhythm that contrasts sharply with the measured rhetoric of later soliloquies; the fact that this commitment to revenge is never fulfilled without massive delay. | What does the contrast between the emotional intensity of this commitment and the failure to act that follows it argue about the relationship between feeling and will in Hamlet’s psychology — and how does Shakespeare use the verse rhythm to make that contrast visible? |
| “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” | 2.2.550–605 | Hamlet watches the First Player perform grief for Hecuba with convincing emotional intensity — on behalf of a fictional figure who means nothing to him. He then turns on himself: if a player can feel so much for nothing, why can he feel nothing enough to act for everything? The soliloquy ends with the plan to use the Mousetrap play to confirm the Ghost’s account. | The theatrical self-comparison — Hamlet measuring himself against a professional performer and finding himself worse; the escalating self-accusation that suddenly collapses into self-questioning (“Am I a coward?”); the shift from emotional excoriation to rational planning at the soliloquy’s end; the question of whether the Mousetrap plan is genuine action or displacement of action. | Is the Mousetrap plan that concludes this soliloquy a genuine turn toward action, or is it another form of delay — replacing the act of revenge with the act of verification? How does the verse register the shift between the soliloquy’s emotional first half and its apparently rational second half? |
| “To be or not to be” | 3.1.56–90 | The play’s most famous soliloquy — and the one most frequently misread. It is not, primarily, a speech about suicide. It is a philosophical enquiry into whether action of any kind is possible for a consciousness that thinks too precisely on the event. The argument moves from death to suffering to thought to inaction, and ends not in resolution but in the dissolution of resolve. Its placement immediately before the Mousetrap scene is dramatically significant. | The opening binary that the soliloquy immediately complicates; the extended metaphor of sleep and death; the list of human suffering used to argue against action; the arrival at “conscience” and “resolution” sicklied over with thought; the abrupt ending on “soft you now, the fair Ophelia” — which contextualises the entire soliloquy as occurring in the presence of a staged encounter. | Why is this soliloquy placed here — after the commitment to the Mousetrap plan and before its execution? And what does the play do by staging “To be or not to be” as a performance witnessed by Claudius and Polonius from behind the arras — does that surveillance change what the soliloquy means? |
| “Tis now the very witching time of night” | 3.2.388–399 | A short, formally controlled soliloquy immediately after the success of the Mousetrap. Hamlet’s language is at its most violent and unqualified — he says he could drink hot blood. This is one of the few moments in the play where he approaches something like the conventional revenger’s disposition. | The brevity and control of this soliloquy contrasted with the emotional sprawl of earlier ones; the violent imagery (“drink hot blood”); the immediate qualification in the same speech (“But I will speak daggers to her but use none”); the purpose it serves — not reflection but preparation. | What does this soliloquy’s brevity and relative emotional control argue about the relationship between the success of the Mousetrap and Hamlet’s readiness to act — and why does he immediately pull back from violence in the same speech? |
| “Now might I do it pat” | 3.3.73–96 | Hamlet discovers Claudius at prayer and has the opportunity to kill him. He declines — reasoning that killing a man in prayer would send him to heaven, not hell, and therefore would not constitute revenge. Critics have debated for centuries whether this reasoning is genuine or a rationalisation of paralysis. | The casuistical logic of the reasoning — working out whether killing Claudius now would count as adequate revenge; the fact that Claudius’s prayer is immediately revealed (in a soliloquy of his own) as insincere, which means Hamlet’s reasoning is also factually wrong; the dramatic irony of proximity — the audience watches Hamlet decide not to act while holding the instrument of action. | Is Hamlet’s reasoning in this soliloquy a genuine theological argument or a rationalisation that reveals the same structural incapacity for action that every other soliloquy demonstrates? How does the placement of Claudius’s own soliloquy immediately before or after this one affect its interpretation? |
| “How all occasions do inform against me” | 4.4.32–66 | Hamlet’s final soliloquy, delivered after watching Fortinbras’s army march to fight and die for a worthless patch of land. He compares Fortinbras’s purposive, unquestioning action with his own paralysis and arrives at what sounds like a final resolution: “from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.” This is his last soliloquy in the play — he does not soliloquise again. | The Fortinbras contrast — a figure who acts without philosophical reflection, whose action Hamlet simultaneously admires and cannot emulate; the final couplet that announces resolution but is never dramatised as action in any subsequent scene; the fact that after this moment Hamlet is exiled, returns transformed, and kills Claudius almost incidentally. | What does it mean that Hamlet’s final soliloquy resolves into a declaration of bloody purpose that the play then largely sets aside — that he kills Claudius not in the act of deliberate revenge but in the impulsive reaction to Gertrude’s poisoning? Is the soliloquy’s resolution genuine, or does the play’s ending ironise it? |
Do Not Attempt to Cover All Seven at Equal Depth
An essay that mentions all seven soliloquies in sequence — summarising each one, noting its themes, and moving to the next — is not a literary analysis essay. It is an annotated list. Your essay needs a thesis, and a thesis requires selection: choose the two or three soliloquies that most directly support your argument and analyse them at the level of verse, rhetoric, and dramatic structure. Reference others to establish your argument’s broader scope or to address counterevidence. The depth of one well-analysed soliloquy is worth more marks than a survey of all seven that stays at the level of content summary.
The Central Analytical Problem — Action, Inaction, and What Your Essay Argues About Both
Every essay on Hamlet’s soliloquies must address the play’s central critical question: why does Hamlet not act? The soliloquies are the play’s primary evidence for this question — they are where Hamlet’s thinking is most directly accessible — and your essay needs to take a specific, defensible position on what the soliloquies reveal about the relationship between thought and action in this play. “Hamlet delays because he is indecisive” is not a thesis. It is a paraphrase of the play’s surface. Your essay needs to argue which mechanism the soliloquies reveal as the cause of that delay, and why.
The soliloquies do not show Hamlet deciding not to act. They show a consciousness in which the capacity to commit to action is repeatedly undermined by the act of thinking itself — and that is a different argument entirely.
— The distinction your thesis must work with| Position | Core Claim | Strongest Supporting Evidence | Counterevidence Your Essay Must Address |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thought paralyses action — the philosophical reading | The soliloquies demonstrate that Hamlet’s capacity for philosophical reflection is itself the mechanism of his inaction: thinking too precisely on consequences, he cannot commit to any act because the act is always overwhelmed by the weight of its implications. The famous formulation from “To be or not to be” — “the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” — is the play’s own articulation of this reading. | “To be or not to be” explicitly connects “conscience” (consciousness/thought) with the failure of resolution; the “O what a rogue” soliloquy contrasts the player’s unconsidered emotional action with Hamlet’s over-considered paralysis; the “Now might I do it pat” soliloquy produces a reason not to act from what appears to be an opportunity for action; in each case, thought produces delay. | Hamlet does act in the play — he kills Polonius, engineers the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and ultimately kills Claudius. The philosophical paralysis reading needs to account for these acts: are they different in kind from the revenge? Are they impulsive rather than deliberate? Does the fact that Claudius is finally killed in a moment of reactive violence rather than deliberate revenge support or complicate the thesis? |
| Uncertainty about the Ghost’s reliability drives the delay | Hamlet cannot act because he cannot be certain the Ghost is telling the truth: it may be a devil exploiting his melancholy. The soliloquies reveal a consciousness that is epistemologically stranded — it needs certainty before it can commit, and certainty is precisely what the play’s supernatural premise withholds. This reading focuses less on philosophical temperament and more on the specific evidentiary problem the Ghost creates. | “O what a rogue” ends with the plan to use the Mousetrap as a verification mechanism — “I’ll have grounds / More relative than this” — which is explicitly an epistemological problem, not a psychological one; the First Quarto’s version of the soliloquies leans more heavily on the Ghost’s uncertainty; Hamlet never simply accepts the Ghost’s account as sufficient grounds for action. | The Mousetrap confirms Claudius’s guilt, yet Hamlet still does not act immediately — the “Now might I do it pat” soliloquy occurs after verification. If the delay were purely about epistemic uncertainty, confirmation should resolve it. Your essay needs to account for the continuation of delay after the Mousetrap, which the epistemological reading alone cannot explain. |
| The soliloquies reveal Hamlet’s awareness of his own performance of thought | The soliloquies are not transparent windows into Hamlet’s psychology — they are performances of thinking that Hamlet delivers to an audience he is aware of, even in apparent solitude. His self-consciousness about his own internal drama — “I am pigeon-livered,” he calls himself; he compares himself to an actor manqué — means the soliloquies are partly theatrical self-examination rather than unmediated interiority. The theatrical context of the play — players arrive, a play is staged within the play — makes Hamlet’s position as audience and performer of himself analytically legible. | The theatrical imagery throughout the soliloquies — Hamlet comparing himself to an actor, commenting on his own performance of grief or resolve — is self-referential in ways that other characters’ speeches are not; the “O what a rogue” soliloquy explicitly uses theatrical terminology to assess his own failing; the play-within-the-play structure gives this a formal dimension that performance analysis can exploit. | Reading the soliloquies as theatrical performance risks making Hamlet seem manipulative or self-dramatising in a way that undercuts sympathy — and the play clearly positions the audience to care about him. Your essay needs to argue how the theatrical self-consciousness coexists with genuine suffering or genuine moral weight, rather than replacing it. |
Key Thematic Frameworks — How to Use Themes Without Listing Them
Most essay prompts on the soliloquies are framed thematically — mortality, corruption, revenge, performance, gender — and most student essays respond by identifying the theme in each soliloquy and noting that it is significant. That is not thematic analysis. Thematic analysis requires you to argue what the soliloquies collectively or individually claim about the theme — what position they take, how that position develops or shifts across the play, and what specific language or verse choices carry the argument. Identifying that mortality appears in “To be or not to be” requires no engagement with the text at all. Arguing that Shakespeare uses the sleep-death metaphor to collapse Hamlet’s apparent binary into a single condition — that “to be” is already a kind of death, given what living in Elsinore requires — is thematic analysis.
Mortality — What the Soliloquies Actually Argue About Death
Mortality appears across the soliloquies in multiple registers: as release (the wish for death in 1.2), as philosophical abstraction (the sleep metaphor in 3.1), as operational question (kill Claudius now or later in 3.3), and as physical proximity (the gravedigger scene’s aftermath). Your essay should identify which register a given soliloquy uses and argue what it claims through that register — not simply that Hamlet thinks about death. The critical move is to track how the soliloquies use the same thematic material differently across the play, and what that variation argues about the development or deterioration of Hamlet’s thinking.
Corruption — The Body Politic and the Physical Body
From the garden imagery of “O that this too too solid flesh” onward, the soliloquies repeatedly figure corruption in physical and bodily terms: weeds, rot, diseased flesh, infection. Your essay should argue what Shakespeare does with this sustained figurative system — whether it argues that Hamlet himself is corrupted by the world he is trying to diagnose, whether the imagery spreads from Denmark outward to human nature as a whole, and what the consistency of the corruption imagery across the soliloquies argues about the play’s vision of the political world Hamlet cannot act within. Do not simply list examples of corruption imagery; argue what the pattern claims.
Performance and Authenticity — Who Is Hamlet When He Soliloquises?
The soliloquy convention promises authenticity — unperformed interiority — but Hamlet’s soliloquies are full of theatrical imagery, self-conscious role-playing, and comparison of himself to actors and their performances. Your essay should take a position on what this self-theatricalisation does to the claim that soliloquy reveals the “real” Hamlet: whether it argues that authentic selfhood is unavailable in a corrupt court, whether it reflects Hamlet’s particular intellectual habit of analysing his own experience from outside, or whether it is the play’s formal acknowledgement that the soliloquy convention is always already a performance for an audience.
Revenge — What the Soliloquies Reveal About the Revenge Ethic
Hamlet was written for an audience familiar with the revenge tragedy genre, and its manipulation of genre expectations is part of its argument. The soliloquies are where Shakespeare’s revenger most conspicuously fails to fulfil the genre’s requirements — and that failure is not simply Hamlet’s psychological failing but the play’s formal argument about the revenge ethic. Your essay should address what the soliloquies reveal about why revenge is difficult for this particular consciousness: whether it is moral scruple, epistemological uncertainty, or something the play presents as a structural problem with the revenge motive itself. The “Now might I do it pat” soliloquy is the most direct evidence for this question and requires careful close reading rather than summary.
Gender and Sexuality — What the Soliloquies Say About Gertrude and Ophelia
Gertrude’s remarriage is the emotional trigger of the first soliloquy, and she recurs across the others in ways that shape Hamlet’s thinking about action, corruption, and sexuality. Your essay should address what the soliloquies reveal about Hamlet’s relationship to female figures — whether they function as symptoms of the world’s corruption, as displaced objects of grief and rage, or as the play’s way of encoding Hamlet’s understanding of the court’s moral condition. The language Hamlet uses about women in soliloquy — “Frailty, thy name is woman” — has generated significant critical debate, and your essay should engage with it as a formal and thematic choice, not as a psychological character note.
Connect Theme to Verse Form — This Is the Move That Distinguishes the Highest-Graded Essays
The most analytically powerful essays on the soliloquies connect thematic argument to verse form: not just what Hamlet says about mortality but how the metre carries that argument, how an irregular or broken line enacts the collapse of thought it describes, how a feminine ending leaves a line unresolved in the same way the soliloquy’s argument is unresolved. If your essay on the corruption theme does not include at least one passage where the physical corruption imagery is analysed in terms of the verse register — how the sound of the lines carries or contradicts the sense — you have left the most significant evidence untouched. Thematic commentary and verse analysis are not separate operations. In Shakespeare, they are the same operation performed at different scales.
Language, Verse, and Rhetoric — Where the Real Analysis Lives
The most important analytical work in any essay on the soliloquies happens at the level of language. Not at the level of themes or dramatic function — those are frameworks for analysis — but at the level of specific words, specific metrical choices, specific rhetorical figures. Essays that paraphrase the argument of a soliloquy and then state that Hamlet seems troubled have not analysed the language. Every quotation you include must be followed by analysis of the specific words, rhythms, or figures that make it significant for your argument. The verse form is not decoration around the meaning — in Shakespeare, it is the meaning’s primary vehicle.
Verse Analysis — What to Look for and How to Write About It
Iambic pentameter — the base metre of Shakespeare’s verse — sets up a rhythmic expectation that Shakespeare exploits by violating it at moments of dramatic or emotional intensity. A hypermetric line (one with more syllables than the metre strictly accommodates), a trochaic inversion at the start of a line (stress-unstress instead of unstress-stress), a mid-line pause (caesura) that breaks the expected flow, or a feminine ending (an unstressed syllable after the tenth) — each of these is a deviation from the norm, and each carries expressive weight. Your close reading paragraph must name the deviation, locate it in the specific line, and argue what it does at that moment in the soliloquy’s argument.
Verse Features to Analyse — and What Each One Does
- Trochaic inversion at line opening: opening a line with stress-unstress reverses the expected pattern and creates a forward thrust — “To BE or NOT to BE” vs. “WHETHER ’tis nobler” — the stress pattern performs the speech’s rhetorical structure
- Caesura (mid-line pause): a pause inside the line creates a break in thought that the metre holds together; in the soliloquies, caesurae frequently mark the point at which Hamlet’s argument turns against itself or collapses into self-questioning
- Feminine endings: a line that ends on an unstressed syllable sounds unresolved — it does not land firmly; Hamlet’s soliloquies have a high proportion of feminine endings, and each one is a formal enactment of the inconclusiveness of the thought it closes
- Enjambment vs. end-stopped lines: end-stopped lines (where sense and line coincide) create controlled, deliberate statements; enjambment (where sense runs over the line ending) creates urgency or instability; tracking which type predominates in which section of a soliloquy tells you something about the thinking’s emotional temperature at that point
Rhetorical Figures — and How to Identify Their Function
- Anaphora (repeated opening): “Whether ’tis nobler… / Or to take arms” — the parallel structure creates a false equivalence that the soliloquy then spends thirty lines dissolving; anaphora creates rhetorical order that the argument undermines
- Extended metaphor: the sleep-death metaphor in “To be or not to be” runs for twelve lines; analyse what work the extension does — what it adds that the initial comparison cannot carry — rather than simply noting its presence
- Apostrophe: the address to absent figures or abstractions (“O that this too too solid flesh would melt”; “O cursed spite”) — who Hamlet addresses in soliloquy tells you what he treats as an audience for his suffering
- Antithesis: the pairing of opposites throughout the soliloquies (“To be or not to be,” “Whether ’tis nobler… / Or to take arms”) — antithesis creates the appearance of a choice between alternatives; arguing that Hamlet’s antitheses always collapse into equivalence is a strong analytical move
Pre-Writing Checklist — Before You Draft the Essay
- You have read the complete play — not just the soliloquies — in a scholarly edition that specifies its source text (Q2 or F1 conflated)
- You have a thesis that specifies what the soliloquies argue collectively or what a specific soliloquy argues — not just what themes they contain
- You have identified two or three specific passages you will analyse at the level of verse and rhetoric, not just use as illustrations of a theme
- You know what is structurally significant about the placement of each soliloquy you analyse — what precedes and follows it, and why that context matters
- You have a position on the action-versus-inaction question and can locate the specific line or passage in the soliloquies that most directly supports your reading
- You have read at least one piece of secondary scholarship (from Shakespeare Quarterly or Shakespeare Survey) and can identify what critical debate your essay is entering
- You can identify the strongest counterargument to your thesis and have a passage-level response to it drawn from the play
- You have checked the textual variant for at least one significant word — the “solid/sullied” crux in 1.2, or the Q1 version of “To be or not to be” — and have noted which text your edition uses
Strong vs. Weak Analytical Responses — What the Difference Looks Like on the Page
The gap between these paragraphs is the gap between most student submissions and the highest-graded ones. The strong paragraph identifies a specific metrical feature, analyses what it does at the level of the line, and connects it to an argument about the soliloquy’s rhetorical structure. The weak paragraph identifies a theme’s presence and describes the character. Every paragraph in your essay should be the first kind. If you find yourself writing “Shakespeare uses X to show Y” without identifying which specific line, which specific word, which specific metrical choice is doing the showing, stop. That is where the analysis must start.
The Most Common Essay Errors on the Soliloquies — and What Each One Costs
| # | The Error | Why It Costs Marks | The Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paraphrasing the soliloquy instead of analysing it | “In this soliloquy, Hamlet wonders whether it is better to live with suffering or to end his life” is paraphrase. It tells the marker that you have read the soliloquy. It does not tell them anything about how the soliloquy works — what its verse structure does, how its rhetoric is organised, what its imagery argues. Paraphrase is the most pervasive error in student essays on Shakespeare, partly because the language is unfamiliar and students feel they need to show they have understood it before they can analyse it. Demonstrating comprehension through paraphrase and then analysing is the wrong sequence. Your essay should assume comprehension and go directly to analysis. | Remove every sentence in your essay that explains what Hamlet means and replace it with a sentence that analyses how a specific word, line, or figure produces that meaning. The test: could this sentence have been written by someone who had only read a plot summary? If yes, it is paraphrase. Cut it and start at the specific language. |
| 2 | Treating “To be or not to be” as the only soliloquy | Most essays that address “Hamlet’s soliloquies” in the plural spend eighty percent of their analysis on “To be or not to be” and mention the others in passing. This is partly because it is the most culturally familiar and partly because students are more confident analysing familiar material. But it produces an essay that is structurally unbalanced and analytically limited: “To be or not to be” in isolation cannot support arguments about development across the play or about how the soliloquies track Hamlet’s psychological trajectory. | Identify your essay’s three most productive soliloquies for its specific argument and give them roughly equal analytical attention. “To be or not to be” is almost certainly one of them — but “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” and “Now might I do it pat” are more analytically productive for most arguments about action and delay, because they are more directly concerned with Hamlet’s relationship to the specific act of revenge rather than to philosophical abstraction. |
| 3 | Invoking the “fatal flaw” (hamartia) without engaging with it critically | The Aristotelian concept of hamartia — sometimes translated as “fatal flaw” — is applied to Hamlet so routinely that it has become a placeholder for actual analysis. “Hamlet’s fatal flaw is his indecision” is a claim that has been made in student essays since the nineteenth century. It is not wrong, exactly, but it is not an analytical argument — it is a label that names the phenomenon without explaining it. More importantly, it is disputed: many critics argue that what looks like indecision is better understood as scrupulousness, epistemological caution, or moral intelligence. Your essay should engage with the actual evidence — the specific soliloquies — rather than the label. | If you use hamartia or “fatal flaw” as a framework, define it precisely, acknowledge the debate about whether Hamlet’s delay constitutes a flaw or a form of moral scruple, and then argue which reading the specific language of the soliloquies supports. The framework is only useful if it generates a question your close reading answers. If it merely generates a label for what the soliloquies demonstrate, cut it. |
| 4 | Ignoring the structural context of each soliloquy | Essays that analyse a soliloquy without specifying where in the play it falls, what has just happened, and what is about to happen are missing the analytical dimension that distinguishes literary analysis from linguistic analysis. A soliloquy does not mean the same thing in isolation and in context. “To be or not to be” delivered by a man who is about to execute a brilliant plan to expose a murderer is a different argument from “To be or not to be” delivered by a man who is simply failing to act. Its structural position — after the Mousetrap plan and before its execution — is part of what the soliloquy means. | Every close reading paragraph should begin with two sentences establishing the structural context: where in the play, what has preceded it, what follows. Then move to the language analysis. The context is not preamble — it is the frame that makes the language analysis mean something specific rather than something general. |
| 5 | Treating the soliloquies as biographical evidence about Shakespeare | “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet’s soliloquies to express his own feelings about mortality and loss” conflates the author with the character and the play with autobiography. There is no reliable evidence about Shakespeare’s personal beliefs, and using the soliloquies as windows into his psychology is a critical methodology that was discredited in the twentieth century. The intentional fallacy — the error of treating the author’s presumed intention as the text’s meaning — produces essays that cannot be argued from because biographical claims about Shakespeare cannot be verified from the text. | Attribute arguments and choices to Shakespeare the dramatist — the craftsman making specific formal decisions for specific dramatic effects — not to Shakespeare the man. “Shakespeare positions this soliloquy here because…” is a valid claim about dramatic craft. “Shakespeare wrote this because he was experiencing…” is biography without evidence. The distinction matters for the evidential standard your essay must meet. |
| 6 | Concluding with contemporary relevance | Closing paragraphs that assert the soliloquies are “still relevant today” because people still face questions about life, death, and action add nothing to the essay’s argument. A literary analysis essay concludes by consolidating its specific argument about what the soliloquies do as formal and dramatic constructions — not by endorsing the play’s cultural longevity, which no essay needs to establish. Relevance conclusions are read by markers as evidence that the student has run out of analysis and reached for something to fill the paragraph. | Your conclusion should specify what your analysis has revealed about the soliloquies’ formal design and what that design argues about Hamlet’s consciousness, the play’s treatment of action, or the specific thematic question your essay has addressed. If your essay has argued that the soliloquies trace not the development of Hamlet’s resolve but its systematic dissolution, your conclusion should articulate what that dissolution argues about the play’s vision of the revenger’s task — not that this is a question audiences today still grapple with. |
FAQs: Hamlet’s Soliloquies — Analysis Essay
What a Strong Submission Looks Like When It Is Done
A strong essay on Hamlet’s soliloquies does four things consistently. It commits to a specific argument about what the soliloquies do as a formal sequence — about how they construct Hamlet’s consciousness, track its trajectory, or use verse and rhetoric to argue something about the relationship between thought and action — and states that argument in a thesis that requires textual evidence to defend. It supports that argument with close reading of specific verse features, specific rhetorical figures, and specific structural positions, not with paraphrase or thematic commentary alone. It engages with the counterarguments — the soliloquies that complicate its reading, the critical positions it needs to acknowledge and address — using evidence from the text. And it situates its argument in the critical conversation: what Bradley argued, what the play’s textual variants mean for the reading, how Eliot’s “objective correlative” problem applies or does not.
The soliloquies’ cultural familiarity is the main obstacle. Every student arrives with an interpretation of “To be or not to be” already in place — formed by school, popular culture, or simple common knowledge. The essay task is to break that prior interpretation open: to treat the speech as a formal construction whose specific choices are not inevitable but deliberate, and whose meaning is not in the content but in the method. That requires reading the verse line by line, accounting for specific words and their specific effects, and building an argument from those observations rather than bringing an argument to the text and finding quotations that fit it.
If you need professional support developing your essay on Hamlet’s soliloquies — working through your thesis, building verse analysis evidence, structuring your argument, or integrating secondary sources — the team at Smart Academic Writing works with students on literary analysis essays, research papers, and academic writing at every level. Visit our literary analysis essay service, our research paper writing service, our editing and proofreading service, or our citation help service. You can also read how our service works or contact us directly with your assignment brief and deadline. For related analysis guides, see our essay on how to write a literary essay on 1984 by George Orwell and our guide on analysing Raymond Carver’s “The Calm.”