hamlet to be or not to be analysis essay

To be, or not to be from Hamlet

By William Shakespeare

“To be, or not to be,” the opening line of Hamlet’s mindful soliloquy, is one of the most thought-provoking quotes of all time. The monologue features the important theme of existential crisis.

William Shakespeare

His plays and poems are read all over the world.  

Poem Analyzed by Sudip Das Gupta

First-class B.A. Honors Degree in English Literature

The “To be, or not to be” quote is taken from the first line of Hamlet’s soliloquy that appears in Act 3, Scene 1 of the eponymous play by William Shakespeare ( Bio | Poems ) , “Hamlet”. The full quote, “To be, or not to be, that is the question” is famous for its open-ended meaning that not only encompasses the thoughts raging inside Hamlet’s mind but also features the theme of existential crisis. Digging deeper into the soliloquy reveals a variety of concepts and meanings that apply to all human beings. For this reason, the quote has become a specimen for understanding how Shakespeare thought.

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Explore To be, or not to be

• 3 Structure
• 4 Literary Devices
• 5 Detailed Analysis
• 6 Historical Context
• 7 Notable Usage
• 9 Similar Quotes

In Act 3, Scene 1, also known as the “nunnery scene,” of the tragedy , “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare ( Bio | Poems ) , this monologue appears. Hamlet, torn between life and death, utters the words to the audience revealing what is happening inside his mind. It is a soliloquy because Hamlet does not express his thoughts to other characters. Rather he discusses what he thinks in that critical juncture with his inner self.

Before reading this soliloquy, readers have to go through the plots that happened in the play. In the previous plots, Hamlet has lost his father. He is broken to know the fact that his uncle Claudius killed his father treacherously and married his mother, Gertrude. Having a conversation with the ghost of his father, he is torn between perception and reality.

In such a critical situation, Hamlet feels extremely lonely as there are no other persons to console him. Besides, Ophelia is not accepting his love due to the pressure from her family. For all the things happening in his life, he feels it is better to die rather than living and mutely bearing the pangs that life is sending him in a row. Being engrossed with such thoughts, he utters this soliloquy, “To be, or not to be.”

“To be, or not to be” by William Shakespeare ( Bio | Poems ) describes how Hamlet is torn between life and death. His mental struggle to end the pangs of his life gets featured in this soliloquy.

Hamlet’s soliloquy begins with the memorable line, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” It means that he cannot decide what is better, ending all the sufferings of life by death, or bearing the mental burdens silently. He is in such a critical juncture that it seems death is more rewarding than all the things happening with him for the turn of fortune.

Death is like sleep, he thinks, that ends this fitful fever of life. But, what dreams are stored for him in the pacifying sleep of death. This thought makes him rethink and reconsider. Somehow, it seems to him that before diving deeper into the regions of unknown and unseen, it is better to wait and see. In this way, his subconscious mind makes him restless and he suffers in inaction.

The full quotation is regarded as a soliloquy. Though in the plot , Ophelia is on stage pretending to read, Hamlet expresses his thoughts only to himself. He is unaware of the fact that Ophelia is already there. Being engrossed in his self-same musing, he clarifies his thoughts to himself first as he is going to take a tough decision.

Therefore, this quote is a soliloquy that Shakespeare uses as a dramatic device to let Hamlet make his thoughts known to the audience, addressing them indirectly.

In the earliest version of the play, this monologue is 35 lines long. The last two lines are often excluded from the soliloquy as those lines contain the mental transition of the speaker , from thoughts to reality.

The overall soliloquy is in blank verse as the text does not have a rhyming scheme . Most of Shakespeare’s dramas are written in this form. Besides, it is written in iambic pentameter with a few metrical variations.

For example, let’s have a look at the metrically scanned opening line of the soliloquy:

To be ,/ or not / to be ,/ that is / the quest(io)n :

The last syllable of the line contains an elision .

Literary Devices

The first line of the speech , “To be, or not to be, that is the question” contains two literary devices. These are antithesis and aporia . The following lines also contain aporia.

Readers come across a metaphor in, “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” This line also contains a personification . Another device is embedded in the line. After rereading the line, it can be found that there is a repetition of the “r” sound. It’s an alliteration .

There is another metaphor in the phrase, “sea of troubles.” In the next two lines, Shakespeare uses enjambment and internally connects the lines for maintaining the speech’s flow.

Readers can find a use of synecdoche in the line, “That flesh is heir to.” They can find an anadiplosis in the lines, “To die, to sleep;/ To sleep, perchance to dream.” Besides, a circumlocution or hyperbaton can be found in this line, “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”

After this line, the speaker presents a series of causes that lead to his suffering. These lines collectively contain a device called the climax . Using this device, Shakespeare presents the most shocking idea at the very end. He uses a rhetorical question , “With a bare bodkin?” at the end to heighten this dramatic effect.

There is an epigram in the line, “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.” The following lines contain this device as well.

Detailed Analysis

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

The first line of Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be, or nor to be” is one of the best-known quotes from all the Shakespearean works combined. In the play, “Hamlet” the tragic hero expresses this soliloquy to the audience in Act 3, Scene 1. As the plots reflect, Hamlet is facing an existential crisis after coming across the harsh reality of his father’s death and his mother’s subsequent marriage with his uncle, Claudius, the murderer of King Hamlet. Everything was happening so quickly that it was difficult to digest their effect.

The truth, like arrows bolting directly toward his mind, made him so vulnerable that he was just a step behind madness or death. It is not clear whether Hamlet’s deliriously spoke this soliloquy or he was preparing himself to die. Whatsoever, through this dramatic device, Shakespeare projects how Hamlet’s mind is torn between life and death.

The first line of his soliloquy is open-ended. It is a bit difficult to understand what the question is. “To be, or not be” is an intellectual query that a princely mind is asking the readers. This antithetical idea reveals Hamlet is not sure whether he wants to live or die. If readers strictly adhere to the plot, they can decode this line differently. It seems that the hero is asking whether it is right to be a murderer for the right cause or be merciful for saving his soul from damnation.

Firstly, if he chooses to avenge his father’s death, it will eventually kill the goodness in him. Secondly, if he refuses to submit to his animalistic urges, the pain lying deep in his subconscious mind is going to torture his soul. For this reason, he is going through a mental crisis regarding which path to choose. This question is constantly confusing his mind.

Lines 2–5

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.

From these lines, it becomes clear what questions are troubling the tragic hero, Hamlet. He is asking just a simple question. Readers should not take this question at its surface value. They have to understand what is going on in his mind. He asks whether a noble mind like him has to suffer the metaphorical “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” In this phrase, Shakespeare compares fortune to an archer who releases arrows and hurts Hamlet’s mind.

The speaker talks about the events happening in his life for his misfortune . Those situations not only make his mind bruised but also make him vulnerable to the upcoming arrows. In such a critical mental state, a single blow of fortune can end his life. But, he has not submitted himself to fate yet. He is ready to fight against those troubles and end them all at once.

The phrase, “sea of troubles” contains hyperbole . It also contains a metaphor. The comparison is between the vastness of the sea to the incalculable troubles of the speaker’s life. It is important to mention here that the speaker just wants an answer. He badly wants to end the troubles but he thinks by choosing the safest path of embracing death, he can also finish his mental sufferings.

Lines 5–9

To die—to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d.

In this section of the soliloquy, “To be, or not to be” Hamlet’s utterings reflect a sense of longing for death. According to him, dying is like sleeping. Through this sleep that will help him to end the mental sufferings, he can get a final relief. The phrase, “No more” emphasizes how much he longs for this eternal sleep.

This path seems more relieving for Hamlet. Why is it so? Hamlet has to undergo a lot of troubles to be free from the shackles of “outrageous fortune.” While if he dies, there is no need to do anything. Just a moment can end, all of his troubles. It seems easier than said. However, for a speaker like Hamlet who has seen much, the cold arm of death is more soothing than the tough punches of fortune.

For this reason, he wants to take a nap in the bosom of death. In this way, the heartache and shocks will come to an end. The speaker refers to two types of pain. One is natural that troubles every human being. While another pain is inflicted by the wrongs of others. The sufferer cannot put an end to such suffering. However, death can end both of these pains.

There are thousands of natural shocks that the human body is destined to suffer. What are these shocks? It includes the death of a loved one, disease, bodily impairment, and many more. In Hamlet’s case, losing his dear father tragically is a natural shock. But, the cause of the death increases the intensity of the shock. The subsequent events, one by one, add more burdens on Hamlet’s mind.

To end this mental tension, Hamlet devoutly wishes for the “consummation” that will not only relieve him but also end the cycle of events. Here, Shakespeare uses the word “consummation” in its metaphorical sense. The final moment when all the sufferings come to an end is death. So, it’s a consummation that is devoutly wished.

Lines 9–14

To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause—there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life.

Again, Shakespeare uses the repetition of the phrase, “To die, to sleep.” It is the second instance where Hamlet uses these words. If readers closely analyze the lines, it will be clear that Hamlet uses this phrase to mark a transition in his thoughts. Besides, it also clarifies what the dominant thought of his mind is. Undoubtedly, it is the thoughts of death. Not death, to be specific. He sees death as sleeping. How he thinks about death, reveals the way he thinks about life.

According to him, life means a concoction of troubles and shocks. While death is something that has an embalming effect on his mind. Therefore, he values death over life. When does a person think like that? Just before committing suicide or yielding to death wholeheartedly, such thoughts appear in a person’s mind.

From the next lines, there is an interesting transition in Hamlet’s thinking process. Previously, death seems easier than living. But, when he thinks about the dreams he is going to see in his eternal sleep, he becomes aware of the reality. From his thought process, it becomes clear. According to him, when humans die, they are not aware of what dreams will come in their sleep. It makes them stretch out their sufferings for so long.

Lines 15–21

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin?

In this part of the “To be, or not to be” quote, Hamlet’s subconscious mind reminds him about his sufferings. The situations mentioned here have occurred in others’ lives too. Let’s see what Hamlet is saying to the audience.

According to him, none can bear the “whips and scorns” of time. Readers have to take note of the fact that Hamlet is referring to “time” here. Whereas in the first few lines, he talks about “fortune.” So, in one way or another, he is becoming realistic.

The sufferings that time sends are out of one’s control. A person has to bear whatever it sends and react accordingly. There is nothing more he can do to change the course of time as it is against nature. Not only that, Hamlet is quite depressed by the wrongs inflicted upon the innocents by the haughty kings.

The insults of proud men, pangs of unrequited love, delay in judgment, disrespectful behavior of those in power, and last but not least the mistreatment that a “patient merit” receives from the “unworthy” pain him deeply. He is mistreated in all spheres, be it on a personal level such as love, or in public affairs. In all cases, he is the victim. He has gone through all such pangs while he can end his life with a “bare bodkin.” Bodkin is an archaic term for a dagger.

In this way, Hamlet is feeling death is the easiest way to end all the pains and mistreatment he received from others. These lines reveal how the mental tension is reaching its climax.

Lines 21–27

Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?

The first two lines of this section refer to the fact that none choose to “grunt and sweat” through the exhausting life. In the first line, “fardels” mean the burdens of life. According to the narrator , life seems an exhausting journey that has nothing to offer instead of suffering and pain. To think about life in this way makes the speaker’s mind wearier than before.

From the following lines, Hamlet makes clear why he cannot proceed further and die. He is not sure whether life after death is that smooth as he thinks. It is possible that even after his death, he will not be relieved. He knows death is an “undiscovered country.” Only those who have already gone there know how it is. Besides, nobody can return from death’s dominion. A living being cannot know what happens there.

Such thoughts confuse the speaker more. It puzzles his will to do something that can end his mental pain. Therefore, he has to bear the ills of life throughout the journey than flying to the unknown regions of death. In the last line, Shakespeare uses a rhetorical question to make readers think about what the speaker is trying to mean.

At this point of the whole soliloquy, it becomes crystal clear that Hamlet is not ready to embrace death easily. He is just thinking. At one point, he gives the hint that death seems easier than bearing life’s ills. On the other hand, he negates his idea and says it is better to bear the reality rather than finding solace in perception.

Lines 28–35

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.—Soft you now, The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered.

The last section of the soliloquy, “To be, or not to be” begins with an epigrammatic idea. Here, the speaker says the “conscience doth make cowards of us all.” It means that the fear of death in one’s awareness makes him a coward. In Hamlet’s case, his aware mind makes him confused regarding the happenings after death. Not knowing a solid answer, he makes a coward of himself.

Alongside that, the natural boldness metaphorically referred to as “the native hue of resolution ,” becomes sick for the “pale cast of thought.” In “pale cast of thought,” Shakespeare personifies “thought” and invests it with the idea of casting pale eyes on a person. It means that when Hamlet thinks about death, his natural boldness fades away and he becomes a coward.

In the following lines, he remarks about how he suffers for inaction. According to him, such thoughts stop him from taking great action. It should be taken in a moment. In that place, the currents of action get misdirected and lose the name of action. It means that Hamlet is trying to take the final step but somehow his thoughts are holding him back. For this reason, the action of ending his sufferings loses the name of action.

The last few lines of the soliloquy present how Hamlet stops his musings when he discovers his beloved Ophelia is coming that way. He wishes that she may remember him in her prayers.

Historical Context

The text of “To be, or not to be” is taken from the Second Quarto (Q2) of the play, “Hamlet” which was published in 1604. It is considered the earliest version of the play. William Shakespeare ( Bio | Poems ) wrote, “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” best-known as only “Hamlet” sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is the longest play of Shakespeare containing 29,551 words.

Shakespeare derived the story of Hamlet from the legend of Amleth. He may also have drawn on the play, “Ur-Hamlet,” an earlier Elizabethan play. Scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote this play and later revised it.

Before the 18th century, there was not any concrete idea regarding how the character of Hamlet is. After reading his soliloquies such as “To be, or not to be,” it became more confusing for the scholars to understand what category this Shakespearean hero falls in. Later, the 19th-century scholars valued the character for his internal struggles and tensions.

Through this soliloquy, readers can know a lot about Hamlet’s overall character. Firstly, he is consciously protestant in his thoughts. On the other hand, he is a philosophical character. His monologue, “To be, or not to be, that is the question” expounds the ideas of relativism, existentialism , and skepticism.

Notable Usage

The quote, “To be, or not to be” is the most widely known line and overall Hamlet’s soliloquy has been referenced in several works of theatre, literature, and music. Let’s have a look at some of the works where the opening line of Hamlet’s soliloquy is mentioned.

• The plot of the comedy , “To Be or Not to Be” by Ernst Lubitsch, is focused on Hamlet’s soliloquy.
• Charlie Chaplin recites this monologue in the comedy film A King in New York (1957).
• The line, “To be or not to be” inspired the title of the short story , “2 B R 0 2 B” by Kurt Vonnegut.
• Black liberation leader Malcolm X quoted the first lines of the soliloquy in a debate in Oxford in 1963 to make a point about “extremism in defense of liberty”.
• The sixth movie of Star Trek, “Undiscovered Country” was named after the line, “The undiscover’d country, from whose borne…” from the soliloquy.

Let’s watch two of the notable actors portraying the character of Hamlet.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Benedict Cumberbatch performed Hamlet at the Barbican Centre in London in 2015. Let’s see how our on-screen “Sherlock” performs Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” onstage.

Andrew Scott

At the Almeida, Andrew Scott played Hamlet under the direction of Robert Icke in 2016. It’s interesting to know how “Moriarty” delves deeper into the character through this soliloquy.

In William Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet,” the titular character, Hamlet says this soliloquy .

“To be, or not be” means Hamlet’s mind is torn between two things, “being” and “not being.” “Being” means life and action. While “not being” refers to death and inaction.

The greatest English writer of all time, William Shakespeare wrote: “To be, or not be.” This quote appears in his tragedy Hamlet written sometime between 1599 and 1601.

In Act 3, Scene 1 of the play, Hamlet seems to be puzzled by the question of whether to live or die. He is standing in such a critical situation that life seems painful to bear and death appears to be an escape route from all the sufferings. In this existential crisis, Hamlet utters the soliloquy , “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”

In Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet,” the central figure asks this question to himself. It is the first line of Hamlet’s widely known soliloquy .

This soliloquy is all about a speaker ’s existential crisis. In the play, Hamlet is going through a tough phase. He is torn between life and death, action and inaction. On both the way, he is aware of the fact that he is destined to suffer.

In Act 3 Scene 1 of “Hamlet,” Polonius forces Ophelia to return the love letters of Hamlet. In the meanwhile, he and Claudius watch from afar to understand Hamlet’s reaction. They wait for Ophelia to enter the scene. At that time, Hamlet is seen walking alone in the hall asking whether “to be or not to be.”

The opening line of Hamlet’s soliloquy , “To be, or not to be” is one of the most-quoted lines in English. The lines are famous for their simplicity. At the same time, the lines explore some of the deeper concepts such as action and inaction, life and death. Besides, the repetition of the phrase, “to be” makes this line easy to remember.

In Act 3 Scene 1, Hamlet is seen walking in the hall and musing whether “To be, or not be” to himself. It is a soliloquy that Hamlet speaks directly to the audience to make his thoughts and intentions known to them.

This soliloquy is 33 lines long and contains 262 words. It takes up to 4 minutes to perform.

Similar Quotes

Here is a list of some thought-provoking Shakespearean quotes that are similar to Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘To be, or not to be” . Explore the greatest Shakespearean poetry and more works of William Shakespeare .

• All the World’s A Stage from As You Like It – In this monologue, the speaker considers the nature of the world, the roles men and women play, and how one turns old.
• Is This A Dagger Which I See Before Me from Macbeth – This famous soliloquy of Macbeth describes how he is taken over by guilt and insanity. His imagination brings forth a dagger that symbolizes the impending murder of Duncan.
• The quality of mercy is not strained from The Merchant of Venice – In this monologue of Ophelia, Shakespeare describes how mercy, an attribute of God, can save a person’s soul and elevate him to the degree of God.
• Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow from Macbeth – In this soliloquy, the speaker sees life as a meaningless one that leads people to their inevitable death.

You can also read these heartfelt poems about depression  and incredible poems about death .

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Good morning, I had a few questions.

• What is the language style of shakespeare in this solliluquy?
• What is the language technique of shakespeare in this solliluquy?
• What is the language structure in this solliluquy?
• Please explain all the literary devices used in here, I am very confused about them.
• What is the significance of the points presented in the soliloquy?
• Explain the modern day relevance as well

I am struggling with these questions, if you could reply as fast as possible, it would have been very helpful. Explain them perfectly, please.

This is a lot of questions! Have you read the article? It has a section on the structure and the techniques used which should answer many of these. So once you have had a read. If you still have a couple of pressing questions I will gladly help you out

Please help me, I know the answers, but how do I explain them?

Have you read the article? As I said to you the answers to most of your questions are in the article. I’m going to assume these questions are for a piece of homework. If that is the case then it’s really important to be able to read and synthesise information. Copying and pasting may get you out of an awkward situation but it won’t help you learn. So with that in mind, if you answer three of these questions (the answers are in the article) I will help you with the others. I don’t mind if the answers aren’t quite right. Do your best. If you head into an exam and right nothing you get no marks. If you give an answer you give yourself the potential to score some marks even if you’re unsure.

You attribute ‘The quality of mercy …’ to Ophelia (similar quotes, supra) when it should be attributed to Portia.

Thank you for highlighting this.

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Gupta, SudipDas. "To be, or not to be from Hamlet". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/william-shakespeare/to-be-or-not-to-be/ . Accessed 30 August 2024.

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To Be or Not to Be: Analyzing Hamlet's Soliloquy

General Education

"To be, or not to be, that is the question."

It’s a line we’ve all heard at some point (and very likely quoted as a joke), but do you know where it comes from and the meaning behind the words? "To be or not to be" is actually the first line of a famous soliloquy from William Shakespeare’s play Hamle t .

In this comprehensive guide, we give you the full text of the Hamlet "To be or not to be" soliloquy and discuss everything there is to know about it, from what kinds of themes and literary devices it has to its cultural impact on society today.

Full Text: "To Be, or Not to Be, That Is the Question"

The famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy comes from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (written around 1601) and is spoken by the titular Prince Hamlet in Act 3, Scene 1. It is 35 lines long.

Here is the full text:

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? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.—Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd.

You can also view a contemporary English translation of the speech here .

"To Be or Not to Be": Meaning and Analysis

The "To be or not to be" soliloquy appears in Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In this scene, often called the "nunnery scene," Prince Hamlet thinks about life, death, and suicide. Specifically, he wonders whether it might be preferable to commit suicide to end one's suffering and to leave behind the pain and agony associated with living.

Though he believes he is alone when he speaks, King Claudius (his uncle) and Polonius (the king’s councilor) are both in hiding, eavesdropping.

The first line and the most famous of the soliloquy raises the overarching question of the speech: "To be, or not to be," that is, "To live, or to die."

Interestingly, Hamlet poses this as a question for all of humanity rather than for only himself. He begins by asking whether it is better to passively put up with life’s pains ("the slings and arrows") or actively end it via suicide ("take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?").

Hamlet initially argues that death would indeed be preferable : he compares the act of dying to a peaceful sleep: "And by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to."

However, he quickly changes his tune when he considers that nobody knows for sure what happens after death , namely whether there is an afterlife and whether this afterlife might be even worse than life. This realization is what ultimately gives Hamlet (and others, he reasons) "pause" when it comes to taking action (i.e., committing suicide).

In this sense, humans are so fearful of what comes after death and the possibility that it might be more miserable than life that they (including Hamlet) are rendered immobile.

Inspiration Behind Hamlet and "To Be or Not to Be"

Shakespeare wrote more than three dozen plays in his lifetime, including what is perhaps his most iconic, Hamlet . But where did the inspiration for this tragic, vengeful, melancholy play come from? Although nothing has been verified, rumors abound.

Some claim that the character of Hamlet was named after Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet , who died at age 11 only five years prior to his writing of Hamlet in 1601. If that's the case, the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, which explores themes of death and the afterlife, seems highly relevant to what was more than likely Shakespeare’s own mournful frame of mind at the time.

Others believe Shakespeare was inspired to explore graver, darker themes in his works due to the passing of his own father in 1601 , the same year he wrote Hamlet . This theory seems possible, considering that many of the plays Shakespeare wrote after Hamlet , such as Macbeth and Othello , adopted similarly dark themes.

Finally, some have suggested that Shakespeare was inspired to write Hamlet by the tensions that cropped up during the English Reformation , which raised questions as to whether the Catholics or Protestants held more "legitimate" beliefs (interestingly, Shakespeare intertwines both religions in the play).

These are the three central theories surrounding Shakespeare’s creation of Hamlet . While we can’t know for sure which, if any, are correct, evidently there are many possibilities — and just as likely many inspirations that led to his writing this remarkable play.

3 Critical Themes in "To Be or Not to Be"

• Doubt and uncertainty
• Life and death

Theme 1: Doubt and Uncertainty

Doubt and uncertainty play a huge role in Hamlet’s "To be or not to be" soliloquy. By this point in the play, we know that Hamlet has struggled to decide whether he should kill Claudius and avenge his father’s death .

Questions Hamlet asks both before and during this soliloquy are as follows:

• Was it really the ghost of his father he heard and saw?
• Was his father actually poisoned by Claudius?
• Should he kill Claudius?
• Should he kill himself?
• What are the consequences of killing Claudius? Of not killing him?

There are no clear answers to any of these questions, and he knows this. Hamlet is struck by indecisiveness, leading him to straddle the line between action and inaction.

It is this general feeling of doubt that also plagues his fears of the afterlife, which Hamlet speaks on at length in his "To be or not to be" soliloquy. The uncertainty of what comes after death is, to him, the main reason most people do not commit suicide; it’s also the reason Hamlet himself hesitates to kill himself and is inexplicably frozen in place .

Theme 2: Life and Death

As the opening line tells us, "To be or not to be" revolves around complex notions of life and death (and the afterlife).

Up until this point in the play, Hamlet has continued to debate with himself whether he should kill Claudius to avenge his father. He also wonders whether it might be preferable to kill himself — this would allow him to escape his own "sea of troubles" and the "slings and arrows" of life.

But like so many others, Hamlet fears the uncertainty dying brings and is tormented by the possibility of ending up in Hell —a place even more miserable than life. He is heavily plagued by this realization that the only way to find out if death is better than life is to go ahead and end it, a permanent decision one cannot take back.

Despite Hamlet's attempts to logically understand the world and death, there are some things he will simply never know until he himself dies, further fueling his ambivalence.

Theme 3: Madness

The entirety of Hamlet can be said to revolve around the theme of madness and whether Hamlet has been feigning madness or has truly gone mad (or both). Though the idea of madness doesn’t necessarily come to the forefront of "To be or not to be," it still plays a crucial role in how Hamlet behaves in this scene.

Before Hamlet begins his soliloquy, Claudius and Polonius are revealed to be hiding in an attempt to eavesdrop on Hamlet (and later Ophelia when she enters the scene). Now, what the audience doesn’t know is whether Hamlet knows he is being listened to .

If he is unaware, as most might assume he is, then we could view his "To be or not to be" soliloquy as the simple musings of a highly stressed-out, possibly "mad" man, who has no idea what to think anymore when it comes to life, death, and religion as a whole.

However, if we believe that Hamlet is aware he's being spied on, the soliloquy takes on an entirely new meaning: Hamlet could actually be feigning madness as he bemoans the burdens of life in an effort to perplex Claudius and Polonius and/or make them believe he is overwhelmed with grief for his recently deceased father.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that Hamlet is an intelligent man who is attempting to grapple with a difficult decision. Whether or not he is truly "mad" here or later in the play is up to you to decide!

4 Key Literary Devices in "To Be or Not to Be"

In the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, Shakespeare has Hamlet use a wide array of literary devices to bring more power, imagination, and emotion to the speech. Here, we look at some of the key devices used , how they’re being used, and what kinds of effects they have on the text.

#1: Metaphor

Shakespeare uses several metaphors in "To be or not to be," making it by far the most prominent literary device in the soliloquy. A metaphor is when a thing, person, place, or idea is compared to something else in non-literal terms, usually to create a poetic or rhetorical effect.

One of the first metaphors is in the line "to take arms against a sea of troubles," wherein this "sea of troubles" represents the agony of life, specifically Hamlet’s own struggles with life and death and his ambivalence toward seeking revenge. Hamlet’s "troubles" are so numerous and seemingly unending that they remind him of a vast body of water.

Another metaphor that comes later on in the soliloquy is this one: "The undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns." Here, Hamlet is comparing the afterlife, or what happens after death, to an "undiscovered country" from which nobody comes back (meaning you can’t be resurrected once you’ve died).

This metaphor brings clarity to the fact that death truly is permanent and that nobody knows what, if anything, comes after life.

#2: Metonymy

A metonym is when an idea or thing is substituted with a related idea or thing (i.e., something that closely resembles the original idea). In "To be or not to be," Shakespeare uses the notion of sleep as a substitute for death when Hamlet says, "To die, to sleep."

Why isn’t this line just a regular metaphor? Because the act of sleeping looks very much like death. Think about it: we often describe death as an "eternal sleep" or "eternal slumber," right? Since the two concepts are closely related, this line is a metonym instead of a plain metaphor.

#3: Repetition

The phrase "to die, to sleep" is an example of repetition, as it appears once in line 5 and once in line 9 . Hearing this phrase twice emphasizes that Hamlet is really (albeit futilely) attempting to logically define death by comparing it to what we all superficially know it to be: a never-ending sleep.

This literary device also paves the way for Hamlet’s turn in his soliloquy, when he realizes that it’s actually better to compare death to dreaming because we don’t know what kind of afterlife (if any) there is.

#4: Anadiplosis

A far less common literary device, anadiplosis is when a word or phrase that comes at the end of a clause is repeated at the very beginning of the next clause.

In "To be or not to be," Hamlet uses this device when he proclaims, "To die, to sleep; / To sleep: perchance to dream." Here, the phrase "to sleep" comes at the end of one clause and at the start of the next clause.

The anadiplosis gives us a clear sense of connection between these two sentences . We know exactly what’s on Hamlet’s mind and how important this idea of "sleep" as "death" is in his speech and in his own analysis of what dying entails.

The Cultural Impact of "To Be or Not to Be"

The "To be or not to be" soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the most famous passages in English literature, and its opening line, "To be, or not to be, that is the question," is one of the most quoted lines in modern English .

Many who’ve never even read Hamlet (even though it’s said to be one of the greatest Shakespeare plays ) know about "To be or not to be." This is mainly due to the fact that the iconic line is so often quoted in other works of art and literature ⁠— even pop culture .

And it’s not just quoted, either; some people use it ironically or sarcastically .

For example, this Calvin and Hobbes comic from 1994 depicts a humorous use of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy by poking fun at its dreary, melodramatic nature.

Many movies and TV shows have references to "To be or not to be," too. In an episode of Sesame Street , famed British actor Patrick Stewart does a parodic version of the soliloquy ("B, or not a B") to teach kids the letter "B":

There’s also the 1942 movie (and its 1983 remake) To Be or Not to Be , a war comedy that makes several allusions to Shakespeare’s Hamlet . Here’s the trailer for the 1983 version:

Finally, here’s one AP English student’s original song version of "To be or not to be":

As you can see, over the more than four centuries since Hamlet first premiered, the "To be or not to be" soliloquy has truly made a name for itself and continues to play a big role in society.

Conclusion: The Legacy of Hamlet ’s "To Be or Not to Be"

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the most popular, well-known plays in the world. Its iconic "To be or not to be" soliloquy, spoken by the titular Hamlet in Scene 3, Act 1, has been analyzed for centuries and continues to intrigue scholars, students, and general readers alike.

The soliloquy is essentially all about life and death : "To be or not to be" means "To live or not to live" (or "To live or to die") . Hamlet discusses how painful and miserable human life is, and how death (specifically suicide) would be preferable, would it not be for the fearful uncertainty of what comes after death.

The soliloquy contains three main themes :

It also uses four unique literary devices :

• Anadiplosis

Even today, we can see evidence of the cultural impact of "To be or not to be," with its numerous references in movies, TV shows, music, books, and art. It truly has a life of its own!

What’s Next?

In order to analyze other texts or even other parts of Hamlet effectively, you'll need to be familiar with common poetic devices , literary devices , and literary elements .

What is iambic pentameter? Shakespeare often used it in his plays —including Hamlet . Learn all about this type of poetic rhythm here .

Need help understanding other famous works of literature? Then check out our expert guides to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , Arthur Miller's The Crucible , and quotations in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird .

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Hannah received her MA in Japanese Studies from the University of Michigan and holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California. From 2013 to 2015, she taught English in Japan via the JET Program. She is passionate about education, writing, and travel.

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A Summary and Analysis of Shakespeare’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy from Hamlet

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’: perhaps one of the most famous lines in all of English literature, but arguably also one of the most mysterious – and one of the most misread. Hamlet’s soliloquy from William Shakespeare’s play is rightly celebrated for being a meditation on the nature of life and death, but some interpretations of the soliloquy serve to reduce the lines to a more simplistic meaning. So what does ‘To be or not to be’ really mean?

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

Virtually everyone knows the line, ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question’. Whether we hear Laurence Olivier reciting them, or erroneously picture some other great Shakespearean actor pronouncing these words while holding a skull (which actually belongs in the later gravedigger scene), ‘To be or not to be’ is one of the most famous six-line phrases from all of English literature.

But interestingly, in the first printing of  Hamlet , the lines were quite different (see the image from the Quarto, below right): ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question’ was instead ‘To be, or not to be, I there’s the point’ (this version may have been actors or audience-members misremembering the lines from the play and trying to reconstruct them from memory).

Yet the precise meaning of these words, and the lines that follow, is often analysed in a way that not only reduces the ambiguity of the lines to a simple and straightforward narrative (Hamlet is pondering whether to kill himself or not) but also risks losing sight of the broader context in which they appear, namely the play Hamlet viewed as a whole.

For if there is one thing that marks Hamlet (and the character, Hamlet), it is his supposed vacillation, his indecision, his delaying: and his dilatoriness centres on his failure to take revenge on his uncle, Claudius, for the murder of his father, Old Hamlet.

What makes ‘To be or not to be’ such a cryptic utterance is that the lines telegraph, and even actively elide, the full thought which Hamlet is mulling over. Should ‘To be or not to be’ be silently completed by us as ‘To be alive or not to be alive’ (the ‘suicide’ interpretation), or as ‘To be an avenger or not to be an avenger’ (bringing in the revenge plot of the play)?

The problem is that the lines which follow, far from being specifically about the pros and cons of killing oneself, can actually be used to support either interpretation.

To ‘suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them’ sounds like somebody wondering whether to carry on living or to end it all, but these lines might just as easily refer to Hamlet’s dilemma over whether to accept the challenge mounted by the Ghost (avenge his murdered father) or to stand by and passively let things play out as ‘fortune’ decrees.

The lines that follow:

To die—to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to

Seem to be more specifically focused on the suicide question, but even here there is some ambiguity. Given that the Ghost of his dead father is firmly on young Hamlet’s mind, he is also meditating here on what happens when we die (not just on what might happen when he dies).

The Ghost appears to call into question that ‘to die’ is ‘to sleep’, since Old Hamlet has not been allowed to rest; he is a ‘traveller’ who has returned from that ‘undiscovered country’ beyond the grave.

Hamlet’s delaying tactics are themselves often misinterpreted. Is it fair to say that Hamlet delays? Yes. Is it fair to say that he delays because he is indecisive? That’s less certain. He certainly gives us that impression, and torments himself for being not ‘man’ enough to avenge his father.

But Hamlet’s ‘failure’ to act immediately is actually downright sensible, since he wants to be sure that the Ghost which he spoke to, which assumed the form of his father, actually was his father and spoke truth to him, rather than being some mischievous demon sent to goad him to murder an innocent man. This is why he puts on the ‘play within a play’ (actually called The Murder of Gonzago , but which Hamlet wittily renames The Mousetrap ): to try to collect evidence of Claudius’ guilt.

As this is a soliloquy from a Shakespeare play, ‘To be or not to be’ is in iambic pentameter – specifically, unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse . But there are a number of variations. Should we stress ‘that’ or ‘is’ in ‘that is the question’? Although ‘ that is the question’ may be more common an interpretation, ‘that is the question’ is viable too.

For our money, the best interpretation of Shakespeare’s lines was by the great actor Paul Scofield; you can hear him reciting ‘To be or not to be’ here . For more about the play, see our analysis of  Hamlet and our study of the character of Hamlet . You might also find our analysis of another of Hamlet’s soliloquies, ‘ O, that this too too solid flesh would melt ’, of interest.

About Hamlet

But despite – or, perhaps, because of – this emotional intensity and complexity, actors down the ages have been keen to put their own stamp on the role, including David Garrick (who had a special wig that made Hamlet’s hair stand on end when the ghost of his father appeared), Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Mel Gibson, Sarah Bernhardt (one of many women to portray the Prince of Denmark), Ethan Hawke, Keanu Reeves, Kenneth Branagh, Maxine Peake, and even John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

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13 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Shakespeare’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy from Hamlet”

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In support of the revenge motive, Hamlet faces off against a powerful and popular king, albeit a usurper, who’s dangerous and also loved by his mother whose own motives are suspect. Claudius was more the politician/ruler and Hamlet the Renaissance scholar, one strong in arms, the other whose demise allowed Fortinbras (“strong in arms”) to invade and take over Denmark at the end. While Claudius was on the throne, Hamlet struggled to overthrow him until he was sure of his guilt. Part of the play’s genius is Claudius’ own soul-searching guilt that had Hamlet known, would have led to sooner action on the part of the prince. Throughout, as audience we are brought into the many deliberations knowing more than the characters inside the play know and wondering who we are as a result of Hamlet discovering himself. The opening words of the play tell it all: Who’s there?

I think you have to work hard to interpret this as not contemplating his fear of death and what lies beyond. That’s not to say the issue of revenge isn’t there – of course it is, Hamlet wouldn’t be contemplating death if not for the foul deed the ghost has laid before him!

As far as the stress on ‘that’ or ‘is’, I think this link should solve this… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEs8rK5Cqt8

Thanks, Ken. I absolutely agree that Hamlet is contemplating death here, but as you say, it’s his *fear* of death – and what awaits him afterwards – that lurks behind his words. If he chooses to ‘avenge’ his father and kill Claudius, and he’s been tricked by the Ghost and Claudius was innocent, hell awaits him. The fact that he refers to the afterlife as the ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns’ when he’s recently been visited by a traveller who has returned (i.e. his father), suggests that he’s still doubting the truth of the Ghost. But this is perhaps partly why the lines have attained the status they have: they resist any narrowly reductive take that sees this as exclusively a ‘suicide speech’ (or similar). I may need to go and reread the play now…

I’ve just been working with the play with A level students recently so it is very fresh in my mind. I’ve grown to love the speech when, perhaps, I’ve tended to let ‘familiarity breed contempt’ in the past. It’s a superb rendering of anguish over a ‘do I, don’t I?’ situation which, of course, has eternal consequences. The Ghost also reveals there’s doubt over the ‘perchance to dream’ that death should be – what if Hamlet is to die and roam the Earth in torment like his father?! What would we choose, I wonder…

As an aside, and fearing ruining what little reputation I might have(!) – for my money the best Hamlet of all is Mel Gibson. I genuinely rate him over all the so-called ‘serious’ Shakespearean actors (yes, even over Olivier) and recommend his film version to all students who want a believable rather than stylised rendition of the character.

Reblogged this on Manolis .

Hamlet tells us what the speech is about in lines 2-5, where he explains what he means by “To be or not to be”. He means that there are two options for him: these options are: in lines 2-3, to put up with random unpleasantness from Claudius and others; in lines 4-5, to actually do something, viz. to take up arms, to fight, and possibly, within the context of the plot, to kill Claudius. As a result of killing Claudius, Hamlet might well die himself.

The natural meaning of “take arms against a sea of troubles” etc is to battle some exterior force; to grab weapons to do battle against the sea which is out there, not here, and certainly not inside us. Or, if the sea were metaphorically inside him, and were an interior enemy, he would need to make that clear, which he does not do. The meaning remains, imho, the clear and patent one, rather than a reference to suicide.

So the dilemma is to put up, or to take action; and this is set out clearly at the start. However, as you say, there is some shadow of suicide in the words of the first line too; and this shadow comes to life when the “bare bodkin” is mentioned later. The speech is about putting up (and choosing life), or not putting up (and maybe choosing death), and the implications of this choice in the next world and this one. Hovering above the text (or lurking beneath it) is the idea that suicide could be an option, too.

It’s always interesting to hear a new perspective on this soliloquy.

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Hamlet: ‘To Be Or Not To Be, That Is The Question’

‘ To be or not to be , that is the question’  is the most famous soliloquy in the works of Shakespeare – quite possibly the most famous soliloquy in literature. Read Hamlet’s famous soliloquy below with a modern translation and full explanation of the meaning of ‘To be or not to be’. We’ve also pulled together a bunch of commonly asked questions about Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, and have a couple of top performances of the soliloquy to watch.

Jump to section: Full soliloquy | Analysis | Performances | FAQs | Final read

Let’s start with a read-through of Shakespeare’s original lines:

Hamlet’s ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ Speech, Act 3 Scene 1

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? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream : ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.–Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d.

Hamlet ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ Analysis

Hamlet is thinking about life and death. It is the great question that Hamlet is asking about human existence in general and his own existence in particular – a reflection on whether it’s better to be alive or to be dead.

The in-depth version

The first six words of the soliloquy establish a balance. There is a direct opposition – to be, or not to be. Hamlet is thinking about life and death and pondering a state of being versus a state of not being – being alive and being dead.

The balance continues with a consideration of the way one deals with life and death. Life is a lack of power: the living are at the mercy of the blows of outrageous fortune. The only action one can take against the things he lists among those blows is to end one’s life. That’s the only way of opposing them. The ‘sleep of death’ is therefore empowering: killing oneself is a way of taking action, taking up arms, opposing and defeating the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Living is a passive state; dying is an active state. But in order to reach the condition of death one has to take action in life – charge fully armed against Fortune – so the whole proposition is circular and hopeless because one does not really have the power of action in life.

Death is something desirable – devoutly to be wished, a consummation – a perfect closure. It’s nothing more than a sleep. But there’s a catch, which Hamlet calls a rub. A ‘rub’ is a bowls term meaning an obstacle on the bowls lawn that diverts the bowl, so the fear of the life hereafter is the obstacle that makes us pause and perhaps change the direction of our thinking. We don’t control our dreams so what dreams may come in that sleep in which we have shuffled off all the fuss and bother of life? He uses the term ‘ mortal coil ,’ which is an Elizabethan word for a big fuss, such as there may be in the preparations for a party or a wedding – a lot of things going on and a lot of rushing about. With that thought, Hamlet stops to reconsider. What will happen when we have discarded all the hustle and bustle of life? The problem with the proposition is that the sleep of death is unknown and could be worse than life.

And now Hamlet reflects on a final end. A ‘quietus’ is a legal word meaning a final definitive end to an argument. He opposes this Latin word against the Celtic ‘sweating’ and ‘grunting’ of a living person as an Arab beneath an overwhelmingly heavy load – a fardel, the load carried by a camel. Who would bear that when he could just draw a line under life with something as simple as a knitting needle – a bodkin? It’s quite a big thought and it’s fascinating that this enormous act – drawing a line under life – can be done with something as simple as a knitting needle. And how easy that seems.

Hamlet now lets his imagination wander on the subject of the voyages of discovery and the exploratory expeditions. Dying is like crossing the border between known and unknown geography. One is likely to be lost in that unmapped place, from which one would never return. The implication is that there may be unimagined horrors in that land.

Hamlet now seems to make a decision. He makes the profound judgment that ‘conscience does make cowards of us all,’ This sentence is probably the most important one in the soliloquy. There is a religious dimension to it as it is a sin to take one’s life. So with that added dimension, the fear of the unknown after death is intensified.

But there is more to it than that. It is not just about killing himself but also about the mission he is on – to avenge his father’s death by killing his father’s murderer. Throughout the action of the play, he makes excuses for not killing him and turns away when he has the chance. ‘Conscience does make cowards of us all.’ Convention demands that he kill Claudius but murder is a sin and that conflict is the core of the play.

At the end of the soliloquy, he pulls himself out of this reflective mode by deciding that too much thinking about it is the thing that will prevent the action he has to rise to.

This is not entirely a moment of possible suicide. It’s not that he’s contemplating suicide as much as reflecting on life, and we find that theme all through the text. In this soliloquy, life is burdensome and devoid of power. In another, it’s ‘weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,’ like a garden overrun with weeds. In this soliloquy, Hamlet gives a list of all the things that annoy him about life: the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, t he insolence of office and the spurns t hat patient merit of the unworthy takes. But there’s a sense of agonized frustration in this soliloquy that however bad life is we’re prevented from doing anything about it by fear of the unknown.

Watch Two Theatre Greats Recite Hamlet’s Soliloquy

David Tenant as Hamlet in the RSC’s 2009 Hamlet production:

We couldn’t resist but share Patrick Stewart’s comedy take on the soliloquy for Sesame Street!

Commonly Asked Questions About ‘To Be Or Not To Be’

Why is hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ speech so famous.

This is partly because the opening words are so interesting, memorable and intriguing, but also because Shakespeare ranges around several cultures and practices to borrow the language for his images. Just look at how many now-famous phrases are used in the speech – ‘take arms’, ‘what dreams may come’, ‘sea of troubles’, ‘to sleep perchance to dream’. ‘sleep of death’, ‘whether tis nobler’, ‘flesh is heir’, ‘must give us pause’, ‘mortal coil’, ‘suffer the slings and arrows’, outrageous fortune’, ‘the insolence of office’… the list goes on and on.

Add to this the fact that Shakespeare is dealing with profound concepts, putting complex philosophical ideas into the mouth of a character on a stage, and communicating with an audience with a wide range of educational levels, and you have a selection of reasons as to why this soliloquy is as famous as it is. Just look at how many now phrases

How long is ‘To be or not to be’?

The ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy is 33 lines long, and consists of 262 words. Hamlet, the play in which ‘to be or not to be’ occurs is Shakespeare’s longest play with 4,042 lines. It takes four hours to perform  Hamlet  on the stage, with the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy taking anywhere from two to four minutes.

Why is ‘To be or not to be’ so important?

‘To be or not to be’ is not important in itself but it has gained tremendous significance in that it is perhaps the most famous phrase in all the words of the playwright considered to be the greatest writer in the English language. It is also significant in the play,  Hamlet , itself in that it goes directly to the heart of the play’s meaning.

Why does Hamlet say ‘To be or not to be’?

To be or not to be’ is a soliloquy of Hamlet’s – meaning that although he is speaking aloud to the audience none of the other characters can hear him. Soliloquies were a convention of Elizabethan plays where characters spoke their thoughts to the audience. Hamlet says ‘To be or not to be’ because he is questioning the value of life and asking himself whether it’s worthwhile hanging in there. He is extremely depressed at this point and fed up with everything in the world around him, and he is contemplating putting an end to himself.

Is ‘To be or not to be’ a metaphor?

The line ‘To be or not to be’ is very straightforward and direct, and has no metaphorical aspect at all. It’s a simple statement made up of five two-letter words and one of three – it’s so simple that a child in the early stages of learning to read can read it. Together with the sentence that follows it  – ‘that is the question – it is a simple question about human existence. The rest of the soliloquy goes on to use a number of metaphors.

What is Shakespeare saying in ‘To be or not to be’?

In the ‘To be or not be to’ soliloquy Shakespeare has his Hamlet character speak theses famous lines. Hamlet is wondering whether he should continue to be, meaning to exist or remain alive, or to not exist – in other words, commit suicide. His thoughts about that develop in the rest of the soliloquy.

Why is ‘To be or not to be’ so memorable?

Ask people to quote a line of Shakespeare and more often than not it’s ‘To be or not to be’ that’s mentioned. So just what is it that makes this line of Shakespeare’s so memorable?

The line is what is  known as a chiasmus  because of its balance and structure, and that’s what makes it memorable. Look at this chiasmus from John F Kennedy: ‘Do not ask what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’  Far more complex than Shakespeare’s line but even so, having heard it one could never forget it. The first and second halves mirror each other, the second being an inversion of the first. Winston Churchill’s speeches are full of chiasma. Even when he is joking they flow: ‘All babies look like me, but then I look like all babies.’

Chiasma are always short and snappy and say a lot in their repetition of words and their balance. And so it is with Hamlet’s speech that starts ‘to be or not to be’, arguably Shakespeare’s most memorable line – in the collective conscience centuries after the words were written and performed.

Look at the balance of the line. It has only four words: ‘to,’ ‘be,’ ‘or’ and ‘not.’ The fact is that the language is as simple as language can get but the ideas are extremely profound. ‘To take arms against a sea of troubles,’ for example, and ‘To die, to sleep, no more, but in that sleep of death what dreams may come,’ every word but one monosyllabic, go right to the heart of human existence and the deepest dilemmas of life.

Let’s try reading it again…

If you’re still with us, you should now have a pretty good understanding of the true meaning behind the words of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech. You may have also watched two fantastic actors speak the immortal words, so should have a much clearer understanding of what messages the soliloquy is trying to convey.

With all of this in mind, why not try reading the words aloud to yourself one more time:

David Tennant speaks Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy

And that’s all for this take on Hamlet’s immortal lines. Did this page help you? Any information we’re missing that would be useful? Please do let us know in the comments section below!

I apologise for the small gripe, but since when did ‘sweating’ and ‘grunting’ become ‘Celtic’ words?

Both words are of Proto-Germanic origin, and Proto-Celt along with Proto-Germanic are considered to be of Indo-European in origin. Which is different than being Latin in origin. I would assume that perhaps they made an error in mentioning they were Celtic in origin instead of Germanic.

I’ve seen a theatrical “King Lear “ recently, and noticed with surprise that there is a soliloquy of “ to be or not to be “ from Hamlet. Is it a free interpretation of the director or is it a real citation from Hamlet? Thank you very much

I appreciate the clear explanation with background you give! Great job!

Thank You. These words remind me that all lives are lived with burdens perceived that don’t always become our realities.At the same time they are encouraging as we move out of shadows into light.

This is where Albert Camus gets the opening lines of “The Myth of Sisyphus.” He writes, The whole question of philosophy is the question of suicide.

Or, as the ancient Greeks had it; ‘ the greatest gift the gods have given to man is that he may end his life when he will’. But I prefer ‘ eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’; 91 soon so each day is a bonus. Wouldn’t be dead for quids !

Thank you, it was as much as I wanted and not more than I needed.

I gotta memorize this for AP English and man I HATE IT!!! Hamlet needs to stop being a little crybaby and just DO IT already!!!!!

Not a bad summary but some mistakes. 1) The first line is not a chiasmus: in a chiasmus, as you correctly illustrate, each part has two elements and they swap places. 2) Hamlet is not debating whether HE should continue to be as the speech is completely impersonal. 3) The idea that he is depressed, and indeed that the speech is a soliloquy, are guesses supported only by post-Renaissance sentimental theatrical tradition, which has sentimentalised the character. Neither you nor anyone else has found a clear meaning in the speech, and since we don’t know what he’s saying we don’t know why he says it. Moreover, the utter impersonality and detachment of the speech suggest rather that it is NOT a soliloquy.

I agree with these comments. I am not satisfied with either the analysis of the writer nor with the later comment that Hamlet is a weak ‘cry baby’ It is a reflective speech not one seeking a decision. He is not choosing, he is considering the inherent options, and we can generally agree with them, although in these more secular days it is the obliteration of life and subsequent oblivion that stays our hand at self-slaughter rather than some post mortem reality. An although it is legitimate to infuse a Christian flavour to Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘conscience’, I dont choose to see the use of that word as implying ‘sin’, more an attempt to avoid making an ill informed and incorrect decision, which in fact is the inherent problem Hamlet faces throughout the play. Is his uncle really guilty, is the spirit of his father benign or demonic, and all the other questions he is constantly asking. From the writer’s point of view, these questions are the tactics he chooses to use to delay the outcome. Hamlet after all is a revenge tragedy, and must needs therefore delay the resolution of the problem posed by his father’s death. Those, like one of the above commentators, who see the whole play as a series of vacillations, are also people I am sure who have never had to kill a member of their own family to avenge the murder of another.

With respect, Shakespeare, while complex, is not inscrutable. The idea that nobody knows what this means, and we can’t know what this means – is perhaps not the best way to read Shakespeare, or anything else for that matter. Shakespeare wrote plays that were meant to be seen, experienced, understood and thought deeply about. That every generation since has done this, is why he is loved, and is why he is believed to be the best to ever put pen to paper.

It seems to me that the original author might benefit from another possibility. Namely, that the question for Hamlet is not just contemplating his own life, but whether or not to directly avenge the murder of his father. To be, or not to be, is, “to avenge” or “not to avenge” which Hamlet (perhaps mistakenly) conflates with his life and existence.

If that holds, he feels that if he does not act, then his life and existence are meaningless. Everything, for Hamlet, has reduced to this moment and this singular choice.

In this mindset, the choice becomes framed as a choice to live or not live, because that is how deeply he feels compelled to act. You could argue that he is rationalizing revenge to be an act that his very life and meaningful existence depend on. When put that way, it’s not a choice at all. He must be. He must act.

The problem is, that this isn’t true. He isn’t faced with a real binary choice in this way. He has options. Hamlet could forgive. He could walk away and forge another life in exile. He could build evidence and try to make a case for private, or even public support against the king. He could raise an army and stage a coup. He could live quietly and wait out the king’s eventual mortality. There are lots of other possibilities that could be framed.

Now, those may seem like feckless choices in the face of great injustice. But imagine what would happen to society if everyone made Hamlet’s choice in every situation. If we, took the direct handling of revenge, even arguably just revenge, into our own hands – it is Hatfield and McCoys forever, with blood in our homes and in our streets. It never stops. I would argue that history clearly teaches us that revenge almost always spills outside or our control and ends up hurting people that weren’t initially involved. Hamlet made the wrong choice and it destroyed him, his family and a lot of innocent people.

Shakespeare is brilliant and complex, and my goodness can he write the most trivial detail in the most beautiful and compelling way. But on another level, he is super simple in terms of bigger picture understanding. The question to help us understand Shakespeare (especially in the tragedies) is this: read the basic events like a child would; namely what is the result of the choices made?

Macbeth – a lot of death and chaos. Is that good or bad? Bad. It may be that Shakespeare’s larger message is that MacBeth and Lady MacBeth made wrong choices in handling ambition. Romeo and Juliet – double suicide by teen / pre-teen couple over a misunderstanding. Wrong choices in handling personal romance. Hamlet – literally everyone but a single survivor dies. Wrong choices in handling revenge and societal injustice.

The “to be or not to be” monologue is showing us how Hamlet goads his own thinking into unalterable action and shows us the setting of his will onto a path that will be incredibly destructive.

Our author here, would set this up as a choice to commit suicide (not to be), or not, and the right answer would necessarily be to live (to be). The problem is, this doesn’t fit with the play, or the outcome of the play. Hamlet is not choosing to refuse suicide in a narrative vacuum. Hamlet choosing to live, also results in the death of a lot of other people. In the narrative, his choosing to live is tightly tied to the execution of his revenge. And he dies anyway.

I suppose you could make the argument that Hamlet was justified in his decision for revenge, but it went badly, because life is messy. I would argue that while life is messy, Shakespeare is not, and his clarity of vision and expression are fraught with intentionality.

And that his insight, when apprehended, leads us to see the ripple of truth and the wisdom of his subject in the real world as well, in ways which are useful and virtuous when rightly understood.

My read would be that the right answer, according to Shakespeare, is to “not be”, leaving direct vengeance to God while pursuing justice as best we can through other means.

With respect I think you have said literally nothing in all that. Get specific. If you think 2B is a soliloquy, what does he say that so desperately needs a special channel of communication to the audience and requires us to imagine the Ophelia can’t hear him despite being literally in his way and the spies can’t hear him despite having located themselves precisely in order to do so? Do you not think it’s possible that our failure to pin down what he says is related to our assumption that it’s a soliloquy?

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To Be or Not to Be: Expert Analysis of Hamlet’s Soliloquy for Teens

June 7, 2023

From Calvin and Hobbes to Star Trek to The Simpsons, Hamlet’s soliloquy “To Be or Not To Be” is one of the most commonly cited lines of Shakespeare. But beyond the evocative first line, what is the underlying meaning and analysis? We will dive into an analysis of Hamlet’s soliloquy shortly but first some brief context.

Hamlet Summary – Putting “To Be or Not to Be” in context

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark , more often referred to simply as Hamlet, is one of the English playwright William Shakespeare’s most well-known plays. It was written likely between 1599 and 1601. The play centers on Prince Hamlet, who is distraught with grief around his father’s murder. At the start of the play, Hamlet is confronted by his father’s ghost who informs him that the king was murdered by the king’s own brother (Hamlet’s uncle), Claudius, who has inherited the throne and married his widow (and Hamlet’s mother), Gertrude.

While at first singularly committed to avenging his father’s death, Hamlet’s contemplative nature causes him to oscillate between the desire to act immediately and melancholic reluctance, rageful vengeance, and existential despair. This context helps us understand the tense conundrums expounded upon in this soliloquy. However, as one can see from its widespread citation, one can also perform an analysis of Hamlet’s soliloquy “To Be or Not To Be” on its own.

What is a Soliloquy?

A soliloquy is a specific kind of monologue. It entails a single character speaking for a period of time while alone. In other words, the character is talking aloud to themselves. (For more examples and explanations of “soliloquy”, check out this link !). Now let’s walk through the text itself.

Hamlet’s Soliloquy – Meaning & Analysis

He begins with that well-known line:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question.” Already the stakes are high. Hamlet is essentially asking whether to choose life or death, being or not being, endurance or suicide. He goes on to say “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?”

This elaborates and complicates on the binary of life or death set up in the first line. He wonders if would be more honorable to endure the suffering he faces due to his terrible and painful “fortune” or to end both his life and troubles in one fell swoop. Take note as well of the military figurative language peppered throughout his personal monologue, such as in words like “noble,” “take arms,” and “the slings and arrows.” As a prince embroiled in royal drama, his intimate woes are entangled with the national politics. Often, this means bloody war. Furthermore, the metaphors signal that there is a war within his own mind due to his agonizing situation. While desiring relief from life’s suffering, he is not totally resolved to die.

He turns to contemplate death, saying:

“To die: to sleep; / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d.”

He equates death to sleep, where suicide is framed not as violent but as a restful space that ends the “heart-ache” and pain he endures in wakeful life. The isolation of “No more” is emphatic and multifaceted. It signals both no more life and no more suffering. He also emphasizes the many forms of pain he desires respite from. There is the “thousand natural shocks” that, through the word natural, evoke an inevitable yet immense pain and then there is the “heart-ache” that appears more intentional and singular in the specific murder of his father. His father’s death and his princely position is further invoked through the word “heir,” given that he is the heir to his father’s crown. Death is a desired (“devoutly…wish’d”) ending (“consummation”) to these manifold sufferings.

“To Be or Not to Be” Soliloquy- Meaning & Analysis (Continued)

The poetics surface through the use of anaphora—repetition of a word or phrase at the start of a line. Hamlet repeats the lines “to die, to sleep,” emphasizing the equation between death and sleep, while also using repetition in a lullaby-like fashion through the songlike refrain. He proceeds to say:

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause: there’s the respect / That makes calamity of so long life.”

For the agonizing  Prince, life (“this mortal coil”) is equated to “calamity” while death is equated to dreaming. But this portion is not merely repetition of his previous aspiration for relief through death. He is beginning to hypothesize why people continue to live in spite of such agonies. In this section, he conjectures that people might continue to suffer “so long”  because they don’t know “what dreams may come” on the other side of life. In other words, people might rather suffer than risk the unknown.

He continues to contemplate why people endure suffering:

”For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, / The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, / The insolence of office and the spurns / That patient merit of the unworthy takes, / When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?”

He wonders how people can “bear” myriad injustices, ranging from the more general “whips and scorns of time” to oppressive acts to difficulty in love to the inaction of the law, and so on. Note again how the most personal matters (“the pangs of despised love”) enmesh with broader structural failings (such as “the law’s delay”). Hamlet sees pain and injustice at every scale—the personal, the political, the individual, and the societal. Hamlet views himself as the victim of legal and personal corruption. Of course, the two are heightened and enmeshed; his father’s murder by his uncle lives at the intersection of both.

It is an open-ended question for the reader/audience as to whether Hamlet is accurately assessing his life’s misfortunes or if he is exaggeratedly framing himself as a victim. Is Hamlet totally at the mercy of unjust forces or does he have agency to change his fortune? Can Hamlet access agency from within grief and despair?

Following this litany of life’s woes, Hamlet shifts from the desire to escape suffering to the fear of the unknown. He asks:

“who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will / And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of?” He essentially argues the no one would grunt through such burdens (“fardels”) if it were not for a fear of what happens after one dies. Death, while an unknown, is a final place from which “no traveller returns.”

The choice to live is framed as something that “puzzles the will,” derived from the pressures of “dread” at the uncertainty of what comes after. In some ways, he is arguing the choice to live arises from adherence to the age old maxim “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” This confounds typical narratives and philosophies around the will to live. Endurance of suffering is not framed as a valiant force of the will prevailing against larger forces. It is instead framed as submission to fear of the unknown. Even the word “fly” implies a sort of agency and freedom in death. The choice is not quite between life and death but between the known and the unknown.

Hamlet’s speech forces the listener to contend with existential questions by reversing typical narratives that yoke life to agency and death to passivity. Instead, he prods at the theory that to live is to be passive in the face of human fear of randomness and chance at the unknown of death. This does not mean that he is bluntly choosing death over life, but interrogating the terms of life and death from within a space of grief and betrayal. His grief and betrayal dismantles his trust in the justice of personal, political, and legal systems. This forces readers to ask whether he is expanding his personal misfortunes to a falsely universal level or if these experiences have opened his eyes to extant and entrenched corruption abound.

Following this string of rhetorical questions, he says: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pith and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry, / And lose the name of action.” One could interpret the adage-like phrase “conscience does make cowards of us all” to mean that conscience’s fear of death turns all into cowards. However, another interpretation based on the previous rhetorical questions could expand to mean that it is rather the fear of the unknown that reduces everyone to cowards. By virtue of saying “all,” Hamlet includes himself in this category, thus revealing that he has chosen life. Nevertheless, he frames the choice of life as the cowardly choice.

The lack of virtue in his choice is underscored through the phrase “the native hue of resolution / is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” He depicts his resolution or thought process as sickly and pale. His thoughts render him weak. He loses “the name of action” and becomes swept up, indecisive, and ineffectual. Indeed, the form of the soliloquy mirrors its content. The soliloquy “To Be Or Not To Be” seems to frame the question increasingly inwards around Hamlet’s own desire to live or to die. He is solo and he is in many ways thinking mostly about his own decision to take his life or continue forth.

Yet the theme of life or death also extends toward his potential actions. Were he to kill Claudius, his uncle who he believes slaughtered his father, and Hamlet believes that life is cowardly suffering, then is it a gift to give death to his uncle? Even though it is fraught, Hamlet ultimately decides to continue to live and continue his plot to seek vengeance upon his uncle.

He then notices his conflictual love interest, “The fair Ophelia” approaching. This ends the soliloquy on the level of plot, because he is interrupted, and on the level of form, because he is no longer alone.

The speech forces us to question the idea of agency in life, within Hamlet’s perspective and beyond. Is it more cowardly to live or to die? Do we access agency more by living amidst suffering or by choosing death? This theme intersects with and diverges from what later would come to be termed Existentialism, a branch of philosophy associated most closely with 19th and 20th-century European thinkers. Existentialism typically contends with whether life itself has inherent meaning or is essentially random. Hamlet questions life’s value and significance, and ultimately assigns life neither meaning nor lack thereof but rather a position of passivity, struggle, and powerlessness. Hamlet views life as a known entity of struggle while it is death that contains randomness and chance.

Furthermore, by highlighting the way Hamlet uses metaphors of war to describe his internal turmoil and comingled grievances of the state and of the intimate, we can see how the speech is making an argument potentially about politics and individual power. If the state is corrupt, do individuals have the power to change that corruption? Or do individuals lack the power to do anything but suffer under endlessly corrupt systems? Would it be more willful to endure or to exit the system entirely? Hamlet’s role as a Prince collapses the personal and the political. He simply cannot separate his personal relationships (father-son, lovers, uncle-nephew, et cetera) from their political valences (king, prince, queen, et cetera).

Hamlet’s own ability to reason is thrown into question. In addition to his pretend madness, this speech thematizes how his utter grief and despair affect his ability to reason. The repetition of sleeping and dreaming connotes a relation between death and peacefulness, while also evoking the underlying surreality that penetrates waking life. Is Hamlet’s view of reality clear and rational? Or is his reality clouded by how the nightmarish circumstances have affected his ability to be reasonable? In this way, a central theme of the play/soliloquy is the struggle to determine what is truly real. What is reality, what is belief, what is madness, what is dream?

Hamlet’s soliloquy also makes us ask how we decipher fact from fiction, reality from performance. The play and this soliloquy in particular make use of the theatrical fictive frame. Hamlet has decided to act as if he has gone mad as part of his plan to exact revenge and extract information. Yet clearly his suicidal ideation makes us wonder if his grasp on reality has been actually shaken.

The central part of his plan involves staging a play that contains a similar murder plot as the one he believes Claudius commited against his father. Hamlet intends to observe Claudius’ reaction to determine his guilt. These elements of a ‘ play within a play ’ structure and the fictive character of Hamlet deciding to intentionally put in a ‘fake’ act within the already existing performance of an actor make us question what is reality and what is a performance. Is Hamlet’s character actually mad or is he acting mad?

To Be or Not to Be – Parting Thoughts

We, as readers, are put in the hot seat. In our analysis of Hamlet’s soliloquy “To Be Or Not To Be” we are reading the words for an actor pretending to play Hamlet pretending to go mad. Where do you, as a reader, stand? A rich exercise to go even deeper is to listen to several performances of the soliloquy after analyzing the text. This will allow you to see how different actors interpret “To Be Or Not To Be” through their performance!

Additional Resources

If you enjoyed this article, you may benefit from checking out other blogs in our High School Success section including:

• 30 Literary Devices High School Students Should Know
• 20 Rhetorical Devices High School Students Should Know
• Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken – Analysis and Meaning
• Great Gatsby Themes & Analysis 
• High School Success

An experienced instructor, editor, and writer, Rebecca earned a BA in English from Columbia University and is presently pursuing a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center in English. Her writing has been featured on The Millions , poets.org , The Poetry Project Newsletter , Nightboat Books blog, and more, and she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize and Arthur E. Ford Prize for her poetry collections. 

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To Be Or Not To Be: Hamlet’s Soliloquy Summary and Analysis

Table of Contents

To Be Or Not To Be: Hamlet’s Soliloquy Summary and Analysis 

To Be Or Not To Be: Hamlet’s Soliloquy Summary and Analysis , To Be or Not to Be | Soliloquy, Overview & Analysis, To Be or Not to Be: Analyzing Hamlet’s Soliloquy, Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1 | Shakespeare Learning Zone William Shakespeare’s timeless play, “Hamlet,” is celebrated for its profound exploration of the human psyche, and one of its most iconic moments is Hamlet’s soliloquy from Act 3, Scene 1. The soliloquy begins with the immortal words, “To be, or not to be: that is the question,” and delves into the complex nature of existence, contemplating the struggles of life, death, and the moral dilemmas that plague the protagonist, Prince Hamlet. 

Opening Lines – The Question of Existence:

The soliloquy commences with Hamlet pondering the fundamental question of existence. The juxtaposition of “To be” and “not to be” sets the stage for a contemplative exploration of life and death. Hamlet grapples with the inherent struggles of human existence, questioning whether it is nobler to endure the hardships of life or to seek relief in the unknown realm of death. The use of this dichotomy serves as a thematic anchor, inviting the audience to delve into the intricacies of mortality and the human experience.

The Perils of Endurance – The “Slings and Arrows”:

As the soliloquy unfolds, Hamlet delves into the hardships that make life a formidable journey. The famous phrase, “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” vividly captures the adversities and challenges that individuals face. This evocative language paints a picture of life’s relentless assaults, suggesting that enduring the blows of fate requires a level of resilience that may exceed the capacities of many. Hamlet’s internal struggle becomes a universal reflection on the human condition, resonating with audiences across centuries.

Contemplating Death – The “Sea of Troubles”:

The soliloquy takes a poignant turn as Hamlet contemplates the idea of death. The metaphorical expression “sea of troubles” conjures an image of life’s vast and turbulent challenges, portraying death as a tempting escape from the ceaseless waves of adversity. Hamlet grapples with the notion that death could be a sleep free from the troubles that plague the living. This contemplation marks a pivotal moment in the soliloquy, revealing Hamlet’s internal conflict and setting the stage for a deeper exploration of morality and the afterlife.

The Fear of the Unknown – “The Undiscovered Country”:

Hamlet’s contemplation of death extends to the fear of the unknown, encapsulated in the phrase “undiscovered country.” This metaphorical expression not only refers to death as an uncharted territory but also alludes to the uncertainty surrounding the afterlife. Hamlet’s hesitation to embrace death stems from the fear of what lies beyond, emphasizing the human instinct to cling to the familiar, even in the face of suffering. This fear of the unknown adds a layer of complexity to Hamlet’s internal struggle and reflects the broader human anxiety surrounding mortality.

The Dilemma of Choice – “Conscience Doth Make Cowards of Us All”:

The soliloquy reaches its emotional zenith as Hamlet grapples with the dilemma of choice. The famous line, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” encapsulates Hamlet’s internal conflict between action and inaction. The reference to conscience as a source of cowardice unveils the profound psychological burden that moral considerations impose on the human psyche. Hamlet’s struggle becomes emblematic of the universal tension between the desire for justice and the paralyzing effects of moral introspection.

The Irony of Fate – “Enterprises of Great Pitch and Moment”:

Hamlet’s contemplation on the consequences of action or inaction introduces the irony of fate, captured in the phrase “enterprises of great pitch and moment.” This expression highlights the weightiness of significant endeavors and the potential for unforeseen outcomes. Hamlet recognizes that even the noblest intentions may lead to tragic consequences, adding a layer of fatalism to his internal turmoil. The irony lies in the juxtaposition of the importance of action with the unpredictable nature of its outcomes, creating a sense of tragic inevitability. To Be Or Not To Be: Hamlet’s Soliloquy Summary and Analysis , To Be or Not to Be | Soliloquy, Overview & Analysis

The Power of Language – “Soft You Now!”:

As the soliloquy nears its conclusion, Hamlet’s attention shifts to the immediate surroundings, providing insight into his complex character. The sudden exclamation, “Soft you now!” signals a shift from introspection to external awareness. This transition emphasizes Hamlet’s ability to navigate between profound philosophical contemplation and acute situational awareness. The interplay between the internal and external worlds showcases the multifaceted nature of Hamlet’s character and reinforces the power of language as a tool for both introspection and interaction.

Closing Reflection – The Legacy of Hamlet’s Soliloquy:

In the final lines of the soliloquy, Hamlet reflects on the consequences of inaction, acknowledging that the fear of the unknown and the complexities of life often lead individuals to endure their sufferings silently. This acknowledgment serves as a poignant commentary on the human condition, resonating across time and cultural boundaries. Hamlet’s soliloquy, with its rich tapestry of language and profound insights, continues to captivate audiences and scholars alike, leaving an indelible mark on the exploration of existential themes in literature.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Hamlet’s soliloquy is a masterful exploration of the human experience, weaving together themes of life, death, morality, and the consequences of choice. Through evocative language, metaphorical richness, and profound introspection, Shakespeare invites audiences to contemplate the complexities of existence through the lens of his tragic protagonist. Hamlet’s soliloquy stands as a timeless testament to the enduring power of Shakespeare’s language and the universal relevance of the questions it poses. To Be Or Not To Be: Hamlet’s Soliloquy Summary and Analysis , To Be or Not to Be | Soliloquy, Overview & Analysis

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--> directory To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The and arrows of , Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, ? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks (70) That flesh is heir to, 'tis a Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the ; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have , Must give us pause: there's the That ; For who would bear the whips and scorns of , The oppressor's wrong, , The pangs of love, the law's delay, (80) The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might With a ? who would bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose , puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? (90) Thus does make cowards of us all; And thus the , And enterprises of , And lose the name of action.-- ! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy Be all my sins remember'd. ______________ : Hamlet and Divine Justice , A. C. Bradey notes that "The present position of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, and of the interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due to an after-thought of Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they precede, instead of following, the arrival of the players, and consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. This is a notable instance of the truth that 'inspiration' is by no means confined to a poet's first conceptions." Does the position of Hamlet's soliloquy make a difference? In writing , Shakespeare is said to have been influenced by the work of French essayist, Michael de Montaigne, translated by an acquaintance of Shakespeare named John Florio. Montagine's essays on moral philosophy might have shaped many passages in , including Hamlet's most famous soliloquy. Could Montaigne be the reason the first and second quartos of the play are , especially regarding Hamlet's propensity to delay? . Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content Skip to primary sidebar Skip to footer Analysis of Soliloquy ‘To Be or Not To Be’ in Hamlet Hamlet's soul is weighed down by the moral dilemma of choosing between living and dying. He oscillates between being reckless and cautious with his conscience, the afterlife, and religion, to rationalize the thoughts in his mind in this epic soliloquy. This Penlighten article provides the analysis and meaning of 'To Be or Not To Be' in Hamlet. Hamlet’s soul is weighed down by the moral dilemma of choosing between living and dying. He oscillates between being reckless and cautious with his conscience, the afterlife, and religion, to rationalize the thoughts in his mind in this epic soliloquy. This Penlighten article provides the analysis and meaning of ‘To Be or Not To Be’ in Hamlet. While writing Hamlet, William Shakespeare is said to have been influenced by the philosophical moral essays of French essayist Michel de Montaigne. These essay’s inspired many passages in Hamlet including the famous soliloquy ‘To Be or Not To Be’. A soliloquy is defined as ‘ The act or custom of displaying one’s innermost thoughts in solitude. ‘ Perhaps the most famous speech in English literature which is majorly governed by rationality and not frenetic emotion appears in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, written in 1602. This widely interpreted and scholarly debated soliloquy appears in Hamlet’s Act III, scene i (58-90). Even though the character morally determines to choose life at the end, the whole speech is based on the subject of death. The soliloquy is scripted in an iambic pentameter with a feminine ending, meaning every line has eleven syllables rather than ten, the last of which remains unaccented. This was a popular scripting style of Shakespeare, and he used it to similarly effect in Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow’ speech. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer Whether it’s more upright to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, The beleaguering’s of misfortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, Or to take up weapons against our troubles And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; And end them by agitating? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end That’s all; and in sleep to say that we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks The emotional disturbance and the many tensions That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation That we are subject to, it’s an accomplishment Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To be essayed thirstily. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; To sleep: maybe to dream: oh, there’s the catch; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come For in death’s sleep who knows what kind of dreams might come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, after the haphazardness and ruckus of life left behind us, Must give us pause: there’s the respect Must make us stop and think: there’s the thing That makes calamity of so long life; That makes our troubles last so long; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, For who would endure the affronts that time brings, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The injustice of the oppressor, the proud man’s arrogant rudeness, The insolence of office and the spurns The pains of unrequited love, the delays of the law, That patient merit of the unworthy takes, The contempt of our victors, and the rejections that happen to those who don’t merit them When he himself might his quietus make When he himself might end it all With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, With a bare blade? Who would bear burdens To grunt and sweat under a weary life, To grunt and sweat under a tedious life, But that the dread of something after death, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn The unknown region from which No traveller returns, puzzles the will No traveler returns, confuses the mind And makes us rather bear those ills we have And makes us prefer to endure the troubles we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Rather than fly to new, vague troubles? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; In this way, thinking makes cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution And thus the natural color of decision-making Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, Becomes sickly with the pale color of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment And endeavors of great might and grandness With this regard their currents turn awry, At this point are derailed, And lose the name of action.-Soft you now! And become inactive. Hearken now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons The lovely Ophelia! Girl, in your prayers Hamlet is an anguished mortal, he keeps getting apparitions of his dead father who bequeaths his son to avenge his death. The kingdom of Denmark is now under the reign of Claudius―his father’s murderer and the newly-wedded husband of his widowed mother. Hamlet’s behavior has turned erratic over the sudden turn of events in his family, so much so that he scorns his beloved Ophelia. He is torn between the responsibilities and the need to get affection from the people he loves, but at the same time, a deep anger seethes inside him to take revenge. His actions are misjudged and termed as crazy, but it’s all the outcome of buried grief and depression. As fate intervenes, Hamlet gets the chance to play out his revenge without feeling the guilt or remorseful obligation for his mortal life. The above soliloquy classically depicts the eternal struggle between choosing life or death, Shakespeare scripts this epic speech as an afterthought about his own reflections on the existence of death and afterlife. He enumerates some of the negative aspects of human existence in this soliloquy, we have all personally experienced “the proud man’s revilement,” “the stabs of scorned love,” and “the impudence of office”. In the first playact, Hamlet anathematizes God for making suicide an immoral alternative. He states, “that this too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! / Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!” (I.ii.129-132). With this, it is clear that Hamlet is debating over the gains versus the losses of ending his own life, but also rationalizes that suicide is a crime in God’s and the Church’s eyes, and this could thus make his afterlife more forged than his present state of affairs. When Hamlet expresses the ailed question, “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” (III.i.59-61), there is trivial uncertainty that he is supposing of death, he is still left without an answer of whether the “catapults and arrows of horrid fate” can be tolerated since life after death is so uncertain. He questions the macrocosm of his death and thinks for a moment that it may be like eternal rest, which first seems to be acceptable until he reflects on what will happen to him when he enters into deep sleep. Just when his “sleep” suffice begins to charm him, he stops short and marvels on, “To sleep: perchance to dream:-ay there’s the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” (III.i.68-69). The “dreams” that he dreads are the ails that the afterlife might bring, and since there is no easement from his earthly agonies through death, he is pressured to question death once again. After graveling this complicated issue and inquiring about the cause of the great sleep, he then goes on to list many woes men are prone to in the bumpy course of life, which pushes him towards death once again. Hamlet poses the question for all depressed souls–is it nobler to exist miserably or to end one’s sorrows in a single stroke? He acknowledges that the response would be doubtlessly yes if death were like a dreamless slumber. By the conclusion of this soliloquy, however, he finally understands, “But that dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns-puzzles the will / And makes us rather bear those ills we have” (III.i.81-84). Although many chose life over death because of the inability to know the afterlife, the speech remains a cryptic reflection about the nature and rationalistic reasons for death. Lastly, Hamlet emerging from his instant of intense personal contemplation, truly implores the gentle and guiltless Ophelia to intercede for him. This soliloquy ponders on some interesting aspects of death, life, and afterlife. Hamlet chose to surrender his life in the hands of fate and obtained the revenge that he was thirsting for. If you wish to get inspired by similar deep-meaning soliloquies, then some more examples of soliloquy by William Shakespeare is worth a read! Like it? Share it! Get Updates Right to Your Inbox Further insights. Privacy Overview “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be Essay (Review) To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block As a source of information (ensure proper referencing) As a template for you assignment Introduction Shakespeare’s style, use of techniques, works cited. “To be or not to be” is one of the most iconic lines in dramaturgy and literature which has grown to define the play Hamlet , written by the famous playwright William Shakespeare in 1599 (Hamlet 3.1.64). In centuries since, it has become one of the most studied, reenacted, and discussed plays ever written due to the genius of its plot, themes, and style. Hamlet is a tragic tale of revenge and justice which highlights the human tragic flaws that Shakespeare masterfully introduces into the plot through philosophical soliloquies, deeply symbolic imagery, and the use of tone and verse for portrayal. Hamlet is a relatively complex play with numerous overlapping themes, the primary ones being revenge and having to face mortality. Death is a continuous presence in the plot as Hamlet loses his father and then attempts to kill Claudius, as a result, directly and indirectly, causing the death of other key characters. Although the primary plot point revolves around revenge, the theme itself is focused on the inner struggle of Hamlet of whether such an action is just and moral. He questions his motifs and the need for such bloodlust. This transitions into the next theme of mortality which is directly interconnected with another concept that the inevitable cannot be avoided. The dark tones that Shakespeare paints in Hamlet and through Hamlet’s suicidal ramblings, the world is seemingly full of death. From the point when confronted with his father’s ghost, Hamlet inevitably accepts that mortality cannot be avoided, which fully drives his actions. In one of his soliloquies Hamlet states, “we defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it is now, ’tis not to come; if it is not to come, it will be now; if it is not now, yet it will come” (Hamlet 5.2.233). It is a discussion on the theme of fate, which is predetermined. Despite omens that may be warning Hamlet, the ultimate fate of his death is decided, and therefore there is no sense in delay or fear. At the same time, the play also comments on the impossibility of certainty and within its motifs, challenges the status quo and expectations of the characters (Lim 5). It begins with supernatural such as the presence of the ghost and Hamlet attempting to glance into Claudius’ soul, to the mystery of the crime and the need for revenge. Some things that seem certain are complex and thus leading to challenges of morality and indecisiveness of Hamlet on how to act. Like many of Shakespeare’s major plays, Hamlet is written in iambic pentameter, using a combination of prose and verse. Shakespeare selectively uses blank verse and uses language to help the reader understand the character’s socioeconomic class as well as psychological state and mood. The mix of prose and verse was common for Shakespeare and other dramatists from that period, redefining the predecessor style of rhyming verse. In the play, Hamlet, as royalty and an educated man, is expected to use iambic pentameter and near-perfect blank verse. However, as Hamlet undergoes the emotional struggle, he breaks verse and speaks in prose, demonstrating evident psychological complexity. It is with this critical mastery that Shakespeare is able to translate the tone of the setting, the tension of situations, and the sensitive emotions of the characters. The style of language is also reflecting in character relationships, as Hamlet speaks in prose with Horatio whom he trusts while adopts erratic prose to demonstrate pretense madness to Claudius (Ballard). Shakespeare uses a variety of techniques to drive forward the plot, reveal the inner thoughts of the protagonist, and implement literary devices such as foreshadowing, irony, and soliloquies. Subtle meanings and phrases foreshadow the events going forward and allow readers to examine Hamlet’s emotional journey and coming to terms with his quest for revenge. Irony creates rapport in character dialogue and allows to create interest and comedic relief. Symbolism, metaphors, and imagery are all thoroughly present in Hamlet. For example, the skull of Yorick is a symbol of death, while the whole play is considered a metaphor for religion where characters reason between morality, mortality, and damnation. Soliloquies and asides are techniques utilized in the play as Hamlet uses it as a unique approach to demonstrate the most intimate thoughts and establish inner conflict which drives the philosophical discussion and moral arguments of the plot. These techniques and literary devices are necessary for the development of the themes and events of the story, creating depth and complexity to the play. The masterful use of style, technique, and language by Shakespeare to emphasize the themes of Hamlet is universally applauded. It strongly contributes to the uniqueness and significance that the play has established in modern literary doctrine. The symbolic nature of imagery along with the literary devices and soliloquies which Shakespeare utilizes allows for an in-depth examination of human nature and flaws regarding the aspect of revenge. Ballard, Kim. ” Prose and Verse in Shakespeare’s Plays.” British Library . 2016, Web. Lim, Vanessa. “‘To be or not to be’: Hamlet’s Humanistic Quaestio.” The Review of English Studies , 2019, pp. 1-19. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark . Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d. Folger Digital Texts , Web. Summary & Analysis Genre & Literary Analysis Important Quotes Essay Topics Essay Samples Norman Krasna’s Play "Dear Ruth" Review Race Barriers to Dreams. "A Raisin in the Sun" by Hansberry Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and the Modern World Promotion and Selection Process: To Be or Not to Be Is Shakespeare's Hamlet Really Crazy? "The Geography of Haunted Places" by Wilson Analysis "Desire Under the Elms" by Eugene O'Neill Human Nature and Morality in “Hamlet” and “Dr. Faustus” Hamlet's Attitude Toward Women in Shakespear's "Hamlet" A Play Within a Play: Hamlet and Second Shepherd's Play Chicago (A-D) Chicago (N-B) IvyPanda. (2021, September 7). “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hamlet-by-william-shakespeare-to-be-or-not-to-be/ "“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be." IvyPanda , 7 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/hamlet-by-william-shakespeare-to-be-or-not-to-be/. IvyPanda . (2021) '“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be'. 7 September. IvyPanda . 2021. "“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be." September 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hamlet-by-william-shakespeare-to-be-or-not-to-be/. 1. IvyPanda . "“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be." September 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hamlet-by-william-shakespeare-to-be-or-not-to-be/. Bibliography IvyPanda . "“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be." September 7, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hamlet-by-william-shakespeare-to-be-or-not-to-be/. “To Be or Not to Be” Analysis The “To Be or Not To Be” speech in the play, “Hamlet,” portrays Hamlet as a very confused man. He is very unsure of himself and his thoughts often waver between two extremes due to his relatively strange personality. In the monologue , he contemplates whether or not he should continue or end his own life. He also considers seeking revenge for his father’s death. Evidence of his uncertainty and over thinking is not only shown in this speech, but it also can be referenced in other important parts of the play. The topic of Hamlet’s soliloquy is his consideration of committing suicide. Throughout the speech, it is obvious that Hamlet is over thinking and wavering between two different extremes: life and death. “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” (3, 1, 56-60). In this quotation, Hamlet wonders whether he should live and suffer the hardships that his life has to offer him or die in order to end the suffering. He believes that life is synonymous with suffering. The “whips and scorn of time, Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes” – Hamlet To Be or Not to Be Soliloquy , Act 3, Scene 1, Line 70-74 Unlock with Patreon! Get access to this and all exclusive member-only essays with Patreon membership. If you've already joined, please log in here Search Menu Sign in through your institution Advance articles Editor's Choice Author Guidelines Submission Site Open Access Why Publish? About The Review of English Studies Editorial Board Advertising and Corporate Services Journals Career Network Self-Archiving Policy Books for Review Dispatch Dates Terms and Conditions Journals on Oxford Academic Books on Oxford Academic < Previous ‘To be or not to be’: Hamlet’s Humanistic Quaestio Article contents Figures & tables Supplementary Data Vanessa Lim, ‘To be or not to be’: Hamlet’s Humanistic Quaestio , The Review of English Studies , Volume 70, Issue 296, September 2019, Pages 640–658, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz005 Permissions Icon Permissions Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech has long been the subject of intense scholarly attention. By situating the speech against the backdrop of classical and Renaissance rhetorical theory, this essay demonstrates that there is still much more to be said about it. The speech ostensibly examines a quaestio infinita or a thesis , and follows the rhetorical rule that the right way to do so is by the invocation of commonplaces. This reading of Hamlet’s speech is not only consistent with Shakespeare’s characterization of the university-educated prince, who frequently invokes commonplaces, but also has significant implications for our understanding of the play and Shakespeare’s own practice as a writer. The book that Hamlet is reading could well be his own commonplace collection, and it is perhaps in looking up his entries under the heading of ‘Death’ that Hamlet finds what he needs in order to examine his quaestio . 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Literary Theory and Criticism Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 2 ) With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet , for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive; but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized; and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness; sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. These, in their broadest terms, have been—for Hamlet, as we interpret him—the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act. —Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. The many-sided Hamlet—son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger—is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. The play is no less a proving ground for the critic and scholar, as successive generations have refashioned Hamlet in their own image, while finding in it new resonances and entry points to plumb its depths, perplexities, and possibilities. No other play has been analyzed so extensively, nor has any play had a comparable impact on our culture. The brooding young man in black, skull in hand, has moved out of the theater and into our collective consciousness and cultural myths, joining only a handful of comparable literary archetypes—Oedipus, Faust, and Don Quixote—who embody core aspects of human nature and experience. “It is we ,” the romantic critic William Hazlitt observed, “who are Hamlet.” Hamlet also commands a crucial, central place in William Shakespeare’s dramatic career. First performed around 1600, the play stands near the midpoint of the playwright’s two-decade career as a culmination and new departure. As the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet signals a decisive shift from the comedies and history plays that launched Shakespeare’s career to the tragedies of his maturity. Although unquestionably linked both to the plays that came before and followed, Hamlet is also markedly exceptional. At nearly 4,000 lines, almost twice the length of Macbeth , Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest and, arguably, his most ambitious play with an enormous range of characters—from royals to gravediggers—and incidents, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes and a play within a play. Hamlet also bristles with a seemingly inexhaustible array of ideas and themes, as well as a radically new strategy for presenting them, most notably, in transforming soliloquies from expositional and motivational asides to the audience into the verbalization of consciousness itself. As Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt has asserted, “In its moral complexity, psychological depth, and philosophical power, Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity.” Hamlet, more than any other play that preceded it, turns its action inward to dramatize an isolated, conflicted psyche struggling to cope with a world that has lost all certainty and consolation. Struggling to reconcile two contradictory identities—the heroic man of action and duty and the Christian man of conscience—Prince Hamlet becomes the modern archetype of the self-divided, alienated individual, desperately searching for self-understanding and meaning. Hamlet must contend with crushing doubt without the support of traditional beliefs that dictate and justify his actions. In describing the arrival of the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world, Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold declared that “the calm, cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared, the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” Hamlet anticipates that dialogue by more than two centuries. Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet makes strikingly original uses of borrowed material. The Scandinavian folk tale of Amleth, a prince called upon to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle, was first given literary form by the Danish writer Saxo the Grammarian in his late 12th century Danish History and later adapted in French in François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1570). This early version of the Hamlet story provided Shakespeare with the basic characters and relationships but without the ghost or the revenger’s uncertainty. In the story of Amleth there is neither doubt about the usurper’s guilt nor any moral qualms in the fulfillment of the avenger’s mission. In preChristian Denmark blood vengeance was a sanctioned filial obligation, not a potentially damnable moral or religious violation, and Amleth successfully accomplishes his duty by setting fire to the royal hall, killing his uncle, and proclaiming himself king of Denmark. Shakespeare’s more immediate source may have been a nowlost English play (c. 1589) that scholars call the Ur – Hamlet. All that has survived concerning this play are a printed reference to a ghost who cried “Hamlet, revenge!” and criticism of the play’s stale bombast. Scholars have attributed the Ur-Hamle t to playwright Thomas Kyd, whose greatest success was The Spanish Tragedy (1592), one of the earliest extant English tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy popularized the genre of the revenge tragedy, derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the Latin plays of Seneca, to which Hamlet belongs. Kyd’s play also features elements that Shakespeare echoes in Hamlet, including a secret crime, an impatient ghost demanding revenge, a protagonist tormented by uncertainty who feigns madness, a woman who actually goes mad, a play within a play, and a final bloodbath that includes the death of the avenger himself. An even more immediate possible source for Hamlet is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599), another story of vengeance on a usurper by a sensitive protagonist. Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions. Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a heartbroken maiden, a fistfight at her burial, and a climactic duel that results in four deaths—into a daring exploration of mortality, morality, perception, and core existential truths. Shakespeare put mystery, intrigue, and sensation to the service of a complex, profound epistemological drama. The critic Maynard Mack in an influential essay, “The World of Hamlet ,” has usefully identified the play’s “interrogative mode.” From the play’s opening words—“Who’s there?”—to “What is this quintessence of dust?” through drama’s most famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”— Hamlet “reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed.” The problematic nature of reality and the gap between truth and appearance stand behind the play’s conflicts, complicating Hamlet’s search for answers and his fulfillment of his role as avenger. Hamlet opens with startling evidence that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has been seen in Elsinore, now ruled by his brother, Claudius, who has quickly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. When first seen, Hamlet is aloof and skeptical of Claudius’s justifications for his actions on behalf of restoring order in the state. Hamlet is morbidly and suicidally disillusioned by the realization of mortality and the baseness of human nature prompted by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty, and in Hamlet’s view, incestuous remarriage to her brother-in-law: O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! A recent student at the University of Wittenberg, whose alumni included Martin Luther and the fictional Doctor Faustus, Hamlet is an intellectual of the Protestant Reformation, who, like Luther and Faustus, tests orthodoxy while struggling to formulate a core philosophy. Brought to encounter the apparent ghost of his father, Hamlet alone hears the ghost’s words that he was murdered by Claudius and is compelled out of his suicidal despair by his pledge of revenge. However, despite the riveting presence of the ghost, Hamlet is tormented by doubts. Is the ghost truly his father’s spirit or a devilish apparition tempting Hamlet to his damnation? Is Claudius truly his father’s murderer? By taking revenge does Hamlet do right or wrong? Despite swearing vengeance, Hamlet delays for two months before taking any action, feigning madness better to learn for himself the truth about Claudius’s guilt. Hamlet’s strange behavior causes Claudius’s counter-investigation to assess Hamlet’s mental state. School friends—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are summoned to learn what they can; Polonius, convinced that Hamlet’s is a madness of love for his daughter Ophelia, stages an encounter between the lovers that can be observed by Claudius. The court world at Elsinore, is, therefore, ruled by trickery, deception, role playing, and disguise, and the so-called problem of Hamlet, of his delay in acting, is directly related to his uncertainty in knowing the truth. Moreover, the suspicion of his father’s murder and his mother’s sexual betrayal shatter Hamlet’s conception of the world and his responsibility in it. Pushed back to the suicidal despair of the play’s opening, Hamlet is paralyzed by indecision and ambiguity in which even death is problematic, as he explains in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the third act: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death— The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. The arrival of a traveling theatrical group provides Hamlet with the empirical means to resolve his doubts about the authenticity of the ghost and Claudius’s guilt. By having the troupe perform the Mousetrap play that duplicates Claudius’s crime, Hamlet hopes “to catch the conscience of the King” by observing Claudius’s reaction. The king’s breakdown during the performance seems to confirm the ghost’s accusation, but again Hamlet delays taking action when he accidentally comes upon the guilt-ridden Claudius alone at his prayers. Rationalizing that killing the apparently penitent Claudius will send him to heaven and not to hell, Hamlet decides to await an opportunity “That has no relish of salvation in’t.” He goes instead to his mother’s room where Polonius is hidden in another attempt to learn Hamlet’s mind and intentions. This scene between mother and son, one of the most powerful and intense in all of Shakespeare, has supported the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet’s dilemma in which he is stricken not by moral qualms but by Oedipal guilt. Gertrude’s cries of protest over her son’s accusations cause Polonius to stir, and Hamlet finally, instinctively strikes the figure he assumes is Claudius. In killing the wrong man Hamlet sets in motion the play’s catastrophes, including the madness and suicide of Ophelia, overwhelmed by the realization that her lover has killed her father, and the fatal encounter with Laertes who is now similarly driven to avenge a murdered father. Convinced of her son’s madness, Gertrude informs Claudius of Polonius’s murder, prompting Claudius to alter his order for Hamlet’s exile to England to his execution there. Hamlet’s mental shift from reluctant to willing avenger takes place offstage during his voyage to England in which he accidentally discovers the execution order and then after a pirate attack on his ship makes his way back to Denmark. He returns to confront the inescapable human condition of mortality in the graveyard scene of act 5 in which he realizes that even Alexander the Great must return to earth that might be used to “stop a beer-barrel” and Julius Caesar’s clay to “stop a hole to keep the wind away.” This sobering realization that levels all earthly distinctions of nobility and acclaim is compounded by the shock of Ophelia’s funeral procession. Hamlet sustains his balance and purpose by confessing to Horatio his acceptance of a providential will revealed to him in the series of accidents on his voyage to England: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Roughhew them how we will.” Finally accepting his inability to control his life, Hamlet resigns himself to accept whatever comes. Agreeing to a duel with Laertes that Claudius has devised to eliminate his nephew, Hamlet asserts that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” In the carnage of the play’s final scene, Hamlet ironically manages to achieve his revenge while still preserving his nobility and moral stature. It is the murderer Claudius who is directly or indirectly responsible for all the deaths. Armed with a poisonedtip sword, Laertes strikes Hamlet who in turn manages to slay Laertes with the lethal weapon. Meanwhile, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup Claudius intended to insure Hamlet’s death, and, after the remorseful Laertes blames Claudius for the plot, Hamlet, hesitating no longer, fatally stabs the king. Dying in the arms of Horatio, Hamlet orders his friend to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” and transfers the reign of Denmark to the last royal left standing, the Norwegian prince Fortinbras. King Hamlet’s death has been avenged but at a cost of eight lives: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Prince Hamlet. Order is reestablished but only by Denmark’s sworn enemy. Shakespeare’s point seems unmistakable: Honor and duty that command revenge consume the guilty and the innocent alike. Heroism must face the reality of the graveyard. Fortinbras closes the play by ordering that Hamlet be carried off “like a soldier” to be given a military funeral underscoring the point that Hamlet has fallen as a warrior on a battlefield of both the duplicitous court at Elsinore and his own mind. The greatness of Hamlet rests in the extraordinary perplexities Shakespeare has discovered both in his title character and in the events of the play. Few other dramas have posed so many or such knotty problems of human existence. Is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is this quintessence of dust? To be or not to be? Hamlet Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays Share this: Categories: Drama Criticism , Literature Tags: Analysis Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Bibliography Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Character Study Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Criticism Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , ELIZABEHAN POETRY AND PROSE , Essays Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Hamlet , Hamlet Analysis , Hamlet Criticism , Hamlet Guide , Hamlet Notes , Hamlet Summary , Literary Criticism , Notes Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Plot Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Shakespeare's Hamlet , Shakespeare's Hamlet Guide , Shakespeare's Hamlet Lecture , Simple Analysis Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Study Guides Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Summary Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Synopsis Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Themes Of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , William Shakespeare Related Articles Analysis of William Shakespeare's The Tempest | Literary Theory and Criticism Analysis of William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra | Literary Theory and Criticism Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Utility Menu Jeffrey R. Wilson Essays on hamlet. Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love. Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences. At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium. Publications              is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach it Like One   ?   : Divine Providence and Social Determinism           Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?  These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.  These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.  Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.  The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).  Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.  That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.  In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory. Chapter One How Hamlet Works Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding). Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well. Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’. Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama. Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being. Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes. Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people. Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia. Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism? Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy. Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future. Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically. Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy. Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior? Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias. Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience. Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet . Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love. Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)? Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?” Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet . Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold. Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor. Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage. Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet . Bibliography Anand, Manpreet Kaur. An Overview of Hamlet Studies . 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New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. 137-76. Bowers, Fredson. Hamlet as Minister and Scourge and Other Studies in Shakespeare and Milton. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Brancher, Dominique. “Universals in the Bush: The Case of Hamlet.” Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm , ed. Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 143-62. Bourus, Terri. Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Bourus, Terri. Canonizing Q1 Hamlet . Special issue of Critical Survey 31.1-2 (2019). Burnett, Mark Thornton. ‘Hamlet' and World Cinema . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Calderwood, James L. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet . New York: Columbia, 1983. Carlson, Marvin. Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Cavell, Stanley. “Hamlet’s Burden of Proof.” Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 179–91. Chamberlain, Richard. “What's Happiness in Hamlet?” The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries , ed. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017): 153-74. Cormack, Bradin. “Paper Justice, Parchment Justice: Shakespeare, Hamlet, and the Life of Legal Documents.” Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature , ed. Donald Beecher, Travis Decook, and Andrew Wallace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015): 44-70. Craig, Leon Harold. Philosophy and the Puzzles of Hamlet: A Study of Shakespeare's Method . London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Critchley, Simon; Webster, Jamieson. Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine . New York: Pantheon Books, 2013. 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Garden City: Doubleday, 1964. Lake, Peter. Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Lerer, Seth. “Hamlet’s Boyhood.” Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England , ed. Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017):17-36. Levy, Eric P. Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. Lewis, C.S. “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” (1942). Studies in Shakespeare , ed. Peter Alexander (1964): 201-18. Loftis, Sonya Freeman; Allison Kellar; and Lisa Ulevich, ed. Shakespeare's Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion . New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. Luke, Jillian. “What If the Play Were Called Ophelia ? Gender and Genre in Hamlet .” Cambridge Quarterly 49.1 (2020): 1-18. Gates, Sarah. “Assembling the Ophelia Fragments: Gender, Genre, and Revenge in Hamlet.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34.2 (2008): 229-47. Gottschalk, Paul. 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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet — The Portrayal in Film Ethan Hawke and Kenneth Branagh The to Be Or not to Be: Analysis The Portrayal in Film Ethan Hawke and Kenneth Branagh The to Be Or not to Be: Analysis Categories: Hamlet To Be Or Not to Be William Shakespeare About this sample Words: 745 | Published: Nov 16, 2018 Words: 745 | Page: 1 | 4 min read Film Comparison Joiner, C. (2019). To Be or Not to Be (Dangerous): Mental Instability in Branagh’s and Almereyda’s Film Adaptations of* Hamlet. Coastlines, 1(6), 8. (https://aquila.usm.edu/coastlines/vol1/iss6/8/) Pilkington, A. G. (2001). Alas, Poor Hamlet: Film Popularizers and the Prince of Denmark. Journal of the Wooden O, 1, 57-65. (https://omeka.li.suu.edu/ojs/index.php/woodeno/article/view/34) Gates, J. E. (2021). Re-Drowning Ophelia: The Representation of Female Disintegration in Recent Films of Hamlet. 9https://digitalcommons.jsu.edu/fac_pres/9/) Walker, E. (2004). Shakespeare on Film: Early Modern Texts, Postmodern Statements. Literature Compass, 1(1). (https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00035.x) Pribisic, M. (2013). Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda by Patrick J. Cook. Theatre Journal, 65(1), 145-146. (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/502535/summary) Cite this Essay Let us write you an essay from scratch 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours Get high-quality help Prof Ernest (PhD) Verified writer Expert in: Literature + 120 experts online By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email No need to pay just yet! Related Essays 1 pages / 587 words 5 pages / 2587 words 2 pages / 700 words 5 pages / 2287 words Remember! This is just a sample. You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers. 121 writers online Still can’t find what you need? Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled Related Essays on Hamlet In William Shakespeare's renowned tragedy, "Hamlet," madness takes center stage as one of the most intriguing and complex themes explored throughout the play. From the feigned insanity of the protagonist, Prince Hamlet, to the [...] The Bard of Avon has bestowed upon us a plethora of literary masterpieces that continue to captivate readers and transcend time. Among his many plays, "Hamlet" stands out as one of his most celebrated and enduring tragedies. [...] In the realm of Shakespearean villains, Claudius stands out as a complex and multi-faceted character whose cunning and deceit drive the tragic events of "Hamlet." From his infamous "Oh, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven" [...] Hamlet is one of the most famous plays written by William Shakespeare. The play has been widely discussed and analyzed for centuries, and it is considered a masterpiece of literature. It addresses several central ideas that are [...] In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, suicide is an prevalent and all-consuming theme throughout the play. Beginning with the murder of his father, Hamlet is the main character who contemplates the thought of suicide many times [...] Hamlet and Macbeth are two of William Shakespeare's most famous plays. Each share not only fame, however, but format: Both feature main characters with tragic flaws that become their demise. In the cases of Hamlet and Macbeth, [...] Related Topics By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails. Where do you want us to send this sample? By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy. Be careful. 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Instructions Followed To The Letter Deadlines Met At Every Stage Unique And Plagiarism Free 308 IMAGES Hamlet To Be or Not To Be by Je'Leycia Procter The Annotated “To be or not to be” 51+ Top Inspiration Famous Quote From Hamlet To Be Or Not To Be ⇉Hamlet: to Be or Not to Be Analysis Sample Essay Example School essay: Hamlet to be or not to be essay "To Be Or Not To Be”: Spoken by Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1 Hamlet William VIDEO Hamlet Short Essay Prompt #3 "Is Life Worth Living? Hamlet's Timeless Dilemma" "Hamlet" OUTTAKES!! -- William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" ... from 60second Recap® Who wrote the play Hamlet #quotes #short #quiz A model answer for Section A Hamlet (4.3) Hamlet Cigars Advert: Dog COMMENTS Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' Soliloquy To be, or not to be, that is the question: The first line of Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be, or nor to be" is one of the best-known quotes from all the Shakespearean works combined. In the play, "Hamlet" the tragic hero expresses this soliloquy to the audience in Act 3, Scene 1. As the plots reflect, Hamlet is facing an existential crisis ... To Be or Not to Be: Analyzing Hamlet's Soliloquy · PrepScholar William Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the most popular, well-known plays in the world. Its iconic "To be or not to be" soliloquy, spoken by the titular Hamlet in Scene 3, Act 1, has been analyzed for centuries and continues to intrigue scholars, students, and general readers alike. The soliloquy is essentially all about life and death: "To ... A Summary and Analysis of Shakespeare's 'To be or not to be' soliloquy By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'To be, or not to be, that is the question': perhaps one of the most famous lines in all of English literature, but arguably also one of the most mysterious - and one of the most misread. Hamlet's soliloquy from William Shakespeare's play is rightly celebrated for being a… 'To Be Or Not To Be': Hamlet's Soliloquy With Analysis ️ The in-depth version. The first six words of the soliloquy establish a balance. There is a direct opposition - to be, or not to be. Hamlet is thinking about life and death and pondering a state of being versus a state of not being - being alive and being dead. The balance continues with a consideration of the way one deals with life and death. To Be or Not to Be: Expert Analysis of Hamlet's Soliloquy for Teens Hamlet's Soliloquy - Meaning & Analysis. He begins with that well-known line: "To be, or not to be: that is the question.". Already the stakes are high. Hamlet is essentially asking whether to choose life or death, being or not being, endurance or suicide. He goes on to say "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and ... To Be Or Not To Be: Hamlet's Soliloquy Summary and Analysis The juxtaposition of "To be" and "not to be" sets the stage for a contemplative exploration of life and death. Hamlet grapples with the inherent struggles of human existence, questioning whether it is nobler to endure the hardships of life or to seek relief in the unknown realm of death. The use of this dichotomy serves as a thematic ... Analysis and Summary of Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" Soliloquy Analyze act 3, scene 1 of Hamlet, including the "To be or not to be" soliloquy. In act III, scene I of Hamlet, the titular character begins one of the most famous soliloquys in literature with the ... Hamlet Soliloquy To be or not to be with Commentary Hamlet's Soliloquy: To be, or not to be: that is the question (3.1) Unlike Hamlet's first two major soliloquies, his third and most famous speech seems to be governed by reason and not frenzied emotion. Unable to do little but wait for completion of his plan to "catch the conscience of the king", Hamlet sparks an internal philosophical debate ... Analysis of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy Summary: Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy explores the theme of existence and the human condition. He contemplates the pain and unfairness of life versus the fear of the unknown in death ... Hamlet's Soliloquies: To be, or not to be Points to Ponder In his book Shakespearean Tragedy, A. C. Bradey notes that "The present position of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, and of the interview with Ophelia, appears to have been due to an after-thought of Shakespeare's; for in the First Quarto they precede, instead of following, the arrival of the players, and consequently the arrangement for the play-scene. To be, or not to be Comparison of the "To be, or not to be" speech in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto, the Good Quarto and the First Folio "To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). The speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most ... Analysis of Soliloquy 'To Be or Not To Be' in Hamlet This Penlighten article provides the analysis and meaning of 'To Be or Not To Be' in Hamlet. Hamlet's soul is weighed down by the moral dilemma of choosing between living and dying. He oscillates between being reckless and cautious with his conscience, the afterlife, and religion, to rationalize the thoughts in his mind in this epic soliloquy ... "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare: To Be or Not to Be Essay (Review) Introduction. "To be or not to be" is one of the most iconic lines in dramaturgy and literature which has grown to define the play Hamlet, written by the famous playwright William Shakespeare in 1599 (Hamlet 3.1.64). In centuries since, it has become one of the most studied, reenacted, and discussed plays ever written due to the genius of ... Why is the "To be or not to be" speech in Hamlet ... Share Cite. "To be or not to be" is the most famous of all Shakespearean quotations, coming as a reflection on mortality and the meaning of life. Hamlet, in considering his own struggles and ... "To Be or Not to Be" Analysis Notes / Words: 934 / January 24, 2020. The "To Be or Not To Be" speech in the play, "Hamlet," portrays Hamlet as a very confused man. He is very unsure of himself and his thoughts often waver between two extremes due to his relatively strange personality. In the monologue, he contemplates whether or not he should continue or end his own ... 'To be or not to be': Hamlet's Humanistic Abstract. Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' speech has long been the subject of intense scholarly attention. By situating the speech against the backdrop of classical and Renaissance rhetorical theory, this essay demonstrates that there is still much more to be said about it. The speech ostensibly examines a quaestio infinita or a thesis, and ... Hamlet to Be or Not to Be Soliloquy Analysis Essay The "To Be or Not To Be" speech in the play, "Hamlet," portrays Hamlet as a very confused man. He is very unsure of himself and his thoughts often waver between two extremes due to his relatively strange personality. In the monologue, he contemplates whether or not he should continue or end his own life. He also considers seeking revenge for ... Analysis of William Shakespeare's Hamlet By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 2 ) With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet, for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. 'To be, or not to be': Hamlet's Dilemma SOURCE: "'To be, or not to be': Hamlet's Dilemma," in Hamlet Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 & 2, Summer and Winter, 1991, pp. 8-24. [In the following essay, Jenkins responds to the criticism regarding ... Essays on Hamlet Essays on Hamlet. Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from ... The Portrayal in Film Ethan Hawke and Kenneth Branagh The to Be Or not When Hamlet says, "To be or not to be that is the question:" (3.1.64) in the Branagh version, his voice is very sincere and brought out the emotion behind what he is feeling. Hamlet's soft tone makes the audience feel all the emotions about him contemplating his own life. When and why did Hamlet deliver the "to be or not to be" soliloquy Quick answer: Hamlet gives his soliloquy "to be or not to be" in act , scene 1, shortly before the staging of the Mousetrap play that will reenact the murder of his father. Unbeknownst to him ... Hamlet Analysis Essay (pdf) Hamlet Analysis Essay Crafting a "Hamlet Analysis Essay" can be both a daunting and intellectually stimulating task. On one hand, the complexity of Shakespeare's masterpiece, "Hamlet," demands a deep understanding of its intricate characters, intricate plotlines, and the underlying themes that permeate the play. The wealth of literary criticism surrounding "Hamlet" further intensifies the ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis