In Act III, scene i of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare, readers will come upon Ophelia’s soliloquy. After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have failed to find a reason as to why Hamlet is acting in a peculiar and mad way, Claudius is persuaded by Polonius that the reason for Hamlet’s madness is the broken romance between Hamlet and Ophelia. To prove this, Claudius and Polonius plan to spy on Ophelia’s meeting with Hamlet. During their conversation, Hamlet denies ever having loved her and curses her. Ophelia is left fretting over his sanity. In her soliloquy, she bemoans what she considers to be Hamlet’s descent into complete insanity. Along with William Shakespeare’s creative and meaningful plot, his way of writing and the inclusion of figurative language bring about a more interesting look to the text. For these first six lines of Ophelia’s soliloquy, Ophelia is describing Hamlet and how he has changed. She starts her soliloquy with “O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!—” In this line, the ecphonesis O is an exclamatory phrase that writers use in order to bring more emotion to the line. Assonance is present for the sound of the letter …show more content…
Although, end rhyme isn’t evident, there are masculine and feminine rhymes within each line which fall naturally into the iambs across the lines when spoken aloud. When reading works by William Shakespeare or specifically this soliloquy of Ophelia’s, emphasizing the stressed and unstressed syllables and the vowels within the each of the words will help establish the dejected and upset emotion from Ophelia. A soliloquy was a common device that the famous playwright, William Shakespeare, used to tell his stories. He has written many famous works which with literary analysis can help open the eyes of an actor or reader to the techniques and true meaning behind the