The Chaos of the Mind Hamlet, although a revenge play by nature, is clearly highly entwined with psychological aspects. This is clearly characterized in the first of Hamlet’s soliloquies (Hamlet I.ii 129-159) portraying the occurrences in the state of Denmark as seen through the eyes of Hamlet, giving the audience a window into his soul and the mechanism of his thoughts.
Hamlet begins the passage by cursing himself for what is happening around him. He wishes that he did not exist any longer. He desires that he did not have to live in a world that would allow what is happening to occur. He craves for his body to dissolve into nothing, wishing that he could will his body to “thaw and resolve itself into dew”. Unfortunately, he cannot melt and though he would consider suicide the Christian God whom he holds as “the Everlasting” is against such notions, having “fix’d his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!”
Hamlet feels that things are falling apart around him. He uses the allusion of an un-weeded garden to refer to his surroundings. In this garden there are things growing such as seeds of “things rank and gross in nature” and flowers of treachery and pain. The weeds are the evil King, Queen and the others who follow them without considering their malevolent deeds. This allusion can be considered applicable to the state of Hamlet’s mind as well as to the State of Denmark (being that Hamlet sees the State of Denmark as falling to ruin in the hands of Claudius). Hamlet sees Claudius as a gross insult to Denmark after his father had been “so excellent a king” to its’ people.
He compares Claudius and his father as a “Hyperion to a Satyr”. His father being like Hyperion, one of the Titans, an allusion to the Greek myth, they were the children of Uranus and Gaea. Claudius was in the satyr, which is a creature from Greek myth, which lived in the forest and mountain