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The First Player's Speech From The Aeneid

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Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, focuses on Prince Hamlet and his actions, or lack thereof, after the treacherous murder of his father and unwitting marriage of his mother to the very murderer—her brother. In Act II, Scene ii of the play, Hamlet begins a soliloquy from Aeneas’s tale to Dido, representing a play within a play, known by the French term “mise en abyme”, in which the First Player finishes the story of Priam’s death from Virgil’s Aeneid (Merriam Webster) (Britannica). The speech acts as a foreboding allegory to foreshadow Hamlet’s fate as a tragic hero by highlighting his inaction and unnatural tendency towards brash, thoughtless violence.
On a contextual basis, the First Player’s speech from the Aeneid comes with Hamlet’s newly-hatched plan to showcase the guilt of …show more content…

The speech draws important parallels between Shakespeare’s characters and those of the Trojan War. Particularly, the end of the speech focuses on the Queen of Troy, Hecuba, and her sorrow which creates a clever dichotomy between her, the archetypal mourning widow, and Gertrude. Proclaiming that “the instant burst of clamor that she made” upon seeing Priam’s slaughter by Pyrrhus, the First Player conveys both the depth with which Hecuba mourns, and via his energetic diction, the involuntary suddenness with which her grief “bursts” from within her (Shakespeare 2.2.509). Further, Hecuba seems to be driven almost mad with her grief so that she goes “barefoot up and down, threatening the flames” with such woe that her grief has the power to suade “passion in the gods” (Shakespeare 2.2.498-512). Darkly, the First Player conjures an image of a wife grief stricken to ruin such that her predicament would sadden any onlooker. He also unwittingly criticizes Gertrude in doing so by essentially expressing that a wife should

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