Hamlet’s seven soliloquies are where he does his real work: in a play about a man who cannot act, the speeches he makes alone are his substitute for action, and the play stops giving him any once he is finally ready to act.
This guide takes the soliloquies in order, from his grief in Act 1 to his vow in Act 4. Each gets its key lines, what they mean in plain English, and what they show about Hamlet at that point in the story. For the plot and characters, see our full guide to Hamlet, and for the play’s famous lines beyond these speeches, see our Hamlet quotes.
At a Glance
Here are Hamlet’s seven soliloquies for quick reference.
What Makes a Soliloquy
A soliloquy is a speech a character makes alone on stage, thinking aloud. Other characters can’t hear it, so it is the one place where the audience learns what a character really thinks. That matters more in Hamlet than in any other play, because Hamlet spends most of his time in public pretending: playing mad, hiding his suspicions, and watching a court full of spies. Our guide to Shakespeare’s soliloquies explains how the device works across the plays.
Hamlet is not the only character who speaks alone. Claudius has a soliloquy in Act 3 as he tries to pray, and Ophelia speaks briefly alone after Hamlet leaves her, both covered in our guide to the Hamlet characters. But the seven speeches below belong to the prince, and together they trace the whole arc of his mind.
Act 1, Scene 2: O, That This Too Too Solid Flesh Would Melt
The first soliloquy comes right after the court scene where Claudius and Gertrude urge Hamlet to stop mourning. Left alone, he says what he could not say in front of them.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Hamlet wishes his body would simply dissolve, or that God had not forbidden suicide. The whole world seems to him like an “unweeded garden” gone to seed. Then the real cause pours out: his mother remarried within a month of his father’s death, to his father’s brother, a man as unlike his father as Hamlet is unlike Hercules. “Frailty, thy name is woman!” he says, turning his mother’s choice into a verdict on all women.
What stands out is that Hamlet doesn’t know about the murder yet. His despair comes from grief and disgust alone, which tells us his melancholy was there before the Ghost gave him a reason for it. The speech ends with “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” From the start, Hamlet is a man with more to say than he can say aloud.
Act 1, Scene 5: O All You Host of Heaven
The second soliloquy follows immediately after the Ghost reveals the murder and leaves with the words “remember me.”
Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records.
Hamlet is overwhelmed, calling on heaven, earth, and even hell. He promises to wipe his memory clean of everything he has ever learned, so that the Ghost’s command alone will live in “the book and volume of my brain.” Then he turns on Claudius: “O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!” He takes out his notebook, his “tables,” to write down a lesson: “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
It is a passionate vow, and a strange one. The Ghost has asked for revenge, and Hamlet’s first response is to take notes. The instinct to record and reflect, rather than act, shows up in the very moment he swears to act.
Act 2, Scene 2: O, What a Rogue and Peasant Slave Am I
The third soliloquy comes after a traveling actor weeps real tears while reciting a speech about Hecuba, the queen of Troy, watching her husband slaughtered.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
Hamlet is ashamed. The actor can summon real grief for a character in a story, “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?”, while Hamlet, with a murdered father, has done nothing. He calls himself a coward, then works himself into a rage against Claudius, and then catches himself at it: “Why, what an ass am I!” He is doing exactly what he despises, unpacking his heart with words.
Then the speech turns practical. Hamlet has heard that guilty people watching a play sometimes confess, and the Ghost might be a devil in disguise, so he needs proof. He will have the players perform a murder like his father’s and watch Claudius’s face. It ends in a famous rhyming couplet: “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
Act 3, Scene 1: To Be, or Not to Be
The fourth soliloquy is the most famous speech in English. Hamlet speaks it just before his meeting with Ophelia, not knowing that Claudius and Polonius are hidden nearby. For a closer look at the speech, see our guide to what “To be, or not to be” means.
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
Hamlet asks whether it is better to endure life’s pain or to end it. Death looks like a welcome sleep, until he thinks of what dreams might come in that sleep. Nobody would bear the injustices of life, “the law’s delay, / The insolence of office,” if they could end it all with a dagger, except that they fear “the undiscovered country” from which no traveler returns. That fear, he concludes, is what stops people from acting: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.”
The speech is remarkable for how general it is. Hamlet never mentions his father, Claudius, or revenge, and never once says “I” or “me.” He speaks of “us” and “we,” as if the question belonged to everyone. Here his private crisis becomes a question about human life itself, which is why the speech has lasted.
Act 3, Scene 2: ’Tis Now the Very Witching Time of Night
The fifth soliloquy follows the play scene. Claudius has stormed out, and Hamlet is sure of his guilt. Now his mother has summoned him.
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
It is midnight, the hour of witches and open graves, and Hamlet feels capable of anything, even drinking hot blood. But the violence he is working up to is not aimed at Claudius. He is on his way to his mother, and he warns himself not to go too far: “Let me be cruel, not unnatural: / I will speak daggers to her, but use none.”
This is the shortest of the seven, and one of the most revealing. Hamlet finally has the proof he wanted, and his first thought is to use words as weapons, on the wrong person.
Act 3, Scene 3: Now Might I Do It Pat
The sixth soliloquy is the one moment in the play when Hamlet has Claudius alone and defenseless. On his way to his mother, he finds the king on his knees, trying to pray.
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be scanned.
Hamlet draws his sword, then stops to think it through. If he kills Claudius while he is praying, Claudius’s soul will go to heaven, while Hamlet’s father was murdered with no chance to confess his sins. “Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge,” he says: it would be doing Claudius a favor. So he decides to wait for a moment when Claudius is drunk, raging, or sinning, so that his soul will go to hell. “Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent.”
The scene holds the play’s cruelest irony. Once Hamlet leaves, Claudius rises and admits that his prayer failed: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” Hamlet spared him for a reason that wasn’t true. Readers still argue whether his reasoning here is genuine, or one more way of putting the deed off.
Act 4, Scene 4: How All Occasions Do Inform against Me
The last soliloquy comes as Hamlet is being sent to England. On the way, he meets a captain from Fortinbras’s army, marching to fight over a patch of Polish ground that isn’t worth farming.
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Everything he sees seems to accuse him. God gave humans reason, Hamlet says, not to let it rot unused, and yet he does not know why he still only says “This thing’s to do” when he has “cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do’t.” Perhaps it is forgetfulness, or perhaps “thinking too precisely” on the outcome, a kind of thought that is one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.
Fortinbras shames him. Here is a young prince leading twenty thousand men to their deaths for a scrap of land, fighting “Even for an eggshell,” while Hamlet, with a father killed and a mother stained, lets everything sleep. The speech ends with a vow: “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” This soliloquy appears only in the Second Quarto of 1604 and is missing from the First Folio of 1623, so some productions cut it.
A Closer Reading: Words Instead of Deeds
Read in order, the seven soliloquies show Hamlet talking himself toward action and never arriving, and the play resolves this by taking his soliloquies away.
Look at how each one ends. The first ends with a refusal to speak: “I must hold my tongue.” The second ends in writing, as Hamlet copies a lesson into his notebook. The third ends with a plan to stage a play. The fourth dissolves into the observation that thought itself turns “the native hue of resolution” pale. The fifth promises to “speak daggers” but use none. The sixth puts the sword away. And the seventh, the most determined of all, still vows only that his thoughts will be bloody. Every soliloquy resolves in words, thought, or performance. None ends in a deed.
Hamlet knows this about himself. In the third soliloquy he mocks himself for having to “unpack my heart with words,” while doing precisely that for sixty lines. The soliloquies are where his energy goes. They are brilliant, and they are also a way of feeling the pressure to act and releasing it without acting.
Then, after Act 4, Scene 4, Hamlet never speaks alone again. When he returns to Denmark in Act 5, he talks only to others: to the gravediggers, to Horatio, to Laertes. He tells Horatio that “the readiness is all,” and when the moment comes in the final scene, he acts at once, without a speech first. The play has taken away the space where he used to think instead of act. His last words complete the arc that began in Act 1. The first soliloquy ended with a heart breaking because he had to hold his tongue. The last words he speaks are “The rest is silence.”
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Hamlet’s soliloquies, answered briefly.
How Many Soliloquies Does Hamlet Have?
Seven major soliloquies, in Act 1, Scene 2; Act 1, Scene 5; Act 2, Scene 2; Act 3, Scenes 1, 2, and 3; and Act 4, Scene 4. He has none in Act 5.
What Is Hamlet’s Most Famous Soliloquy?
“To be, or not to be,” in Act 3, Scene 1. In it Hamlet weighs whether it is better to endure life’s suffering or to end it, and concludes that fear of what comes after death makes people hesitate.
Why Doesn’t Hamlet Kill Claudius at Prayer?
He reasons that killing Claudius while he is praying would send his soul to heaven, which would not be revenge. He decides to wait until Claudius is sinning. Ironically, Claudius admits moments later that he couldn’t truly pray.
What Is Hamlet’s Last Soliloquy?
“How all occasions do inform against me,” in Act 4, Scene 4, where Fortinbras’s army shames him into vowing bloody thoughts. It appears only in the Second Quarto, not in the First Folio.
Why Does Hamlet Have So Many Soliloquies?
Because he spends most of the play pretending in public. The soliloquies are the only place where the audience hears what he really thinks, and they show the inner struggle that explains his delay.
Related Reading
Three pages that take Hamlet’s speeches further.