I have to choose a passage from Hamlet and write an analytical essay about that significant passage that develops and explains my thoughts about it....

I think any of 's
soliloquies would be incredibly appropriate for this assignment, especially because they are not
only significant to the text but because each one presents a development of an idea: often 's
conception of death.

The first such passage can be found in act 1, scene 2,
after Hamlet has requested permission from his uncle/stepfather to return to school in
Wittenbergfollowing the death of his father and the remarriage of his motherand he has been
denied. He begins by wishing that "this too, too sullied flesh would, / Thaw, and resolve
itself into a dew" (1.2.133€“134).

In this passage, he contemplates
suicide and its implications: namely, the fact that God prohibits it. He feels that the world
has become corrupt, "an unweeded garden" that is overgrown with things that are
"rank and gross in nature" (1.2.139, 140). It is as though, to him, Denmark used to be
a paradise, like Eden, but the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother to his uncle
has killed its innocence. This is the first of many allusions in the passage.

Hamlet thinks of his father, who he compares to "Hyperion," the Titan of
heaven's light, and how much he loved Hamlet's mother (1.2.144). He compares his uncle to a
satyr, a mythological creature that is half-goat and half-man, and he condemns his mother as the
embodiment of women's "frailty" due to her remarriage, both in terms of its haste and
in her choice of partner (1.2.150). He compares her to Niobe, a mythological Theban queen who
bragged about her large family only to see Apollo and Artemis kill all her children in
retribution for her pride; she, essentially, weeps forever as a result of this.seemed like Niobe
at first, "all tears," but her grief seemed to depart with alarming alacrity
(1.2.153).

Hamlet uses anotherto Greek mythology when he says that his uncle
is "no more like my father / Than I to Hercules" (1.2.157€“158). In addition to the
introduction and development of his ideas regarding his own lifehis father, mother, and
stepfather/uncleHamlet's use of allusions really makes this a meaty passage; they show, in part,
his extreme conception of these figures. His family members loom so large for him that they seem
mythic in his eyes; their dramas are all-consuming.