Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 to the early 1600s, is a play that follows the story of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, and his revenge for his father’s death. The story takes place in a distant castle in Elsinore, Denmark. A tragic story of Hamlet’s life after his father had been killed, by none other than his uncle. With his father’s passing, Hamlet presumably goes mad, and claims his father’s ghost has visited him and informed him that Claudius murdered him to become the new king. During Act 3, Scene 1 Hamlet delivers a powerful speech, lines 64-77, contemplating his death because of how treacherous and dark his life has become. Although the central plot to the play is revenge, it is crucial for the reader to understand why Hamlet was contemplating his suicide.
Three skills I have gained from this course that have assisted me in understanding Hamlet’s “To Be Or Not To Be” speech is reading the passage out loud, figuring out whether the passage is in iambic meter, and breaking down the text line by line. First, I read the passage out loud to myself, really trying to understand the dictation and pronunciation of the text. This skill allowed me to hear the flow and sentence structure of the passage. In addition, I went through the passage and utilized my scansion skills to highlight the rhythm of the text. I realized that Hamlet’s speech is written mostly in prose, where Hamlet is in a state of madness, speaking in a disordered manner. The use of a prose when a character is speaking in a disordered state is also apparent in Macbeth, when Queen Macbeth speaks chaotically as she loses ahold of life towards the end of the play. In addition, although Shakespeare wrote most of Hamlet in iambic pentameter, he deliberately did not write Hamlet’s speech in iambic meter. Shakespeare purposefully did this partly because of the speech’s main focus on suicide. During the fifteen and sixteen hundreds in England, suicide was considered a sensitive matter. During this period, the State and Church enforced strict christian laws in the Elizabethan society. Suicide was deemed a great sin, associating it to selfishness and the devil. The term ‘suicide’ was such a taboo that it was referred rather as self-murder, symbolizing it as a criminal act. Being such an uncomfortable topic, Shakespeare distanced these tragedies in remote lands away from England, resulting in also distancing it from the English audience. This allowed the audience to possibly understand and even sympathize with these tragic acts. Similar to many of Shakespeare’s suicides, Hamlet took place in Denmark and was discussed when no one else was around. Lastly, breaking down each line and understanding what it meant helped me understand the overall passage.
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Hamlet begins his speech by saying, “To be or not to be—that is the question/Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer” (3.1.64-65), questioning whether to live or die. He continuously refers suicide as a noble act when one suffers in life, trying to justify himself. As Hamlet proceeds he wonders whether he should continue passively living through the struggles or whether to “take arms against a sea of troubles” (3.1.66), take action and end his miserable life. Only a couple lines before, Hamlet is sure of his plan to avenge his father’s death but now is contemplating his suicide. When Hamlet states, “by opposing, end them” (3.1.68), this symbolizes that his suicide would not solve his problems, but would rather just end for himself. As Hamlet stated previously, “in the mind”, he acknowledges that his thoughts and perspective of life is only true about his life. But as Hamlet further ponders on his suicide, he realizes that killing his uncle would not stop “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks” (3.1.70) in his life, it would just increase his struggles. At the end of the passage, Hamlet comes to a realization when he concludes, “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” (3.1.74-77). Hamlet finally discovers that what makes life worth the struggle and hardship is ultimately arriving to death, and in death dreams could come true.
As a result, Hamlet is not a typical avenger, but rather a avenger who is challenged with his own madness and the harsh truths of life. On a side note, Shakespeare makes it possible for me to learn valuable lessons from his plays, like not accepting racist and misogynistic principles in a society from Othello, or that love can be uncontrollable and unpredictable from Romeo and Juliet , or finally, that life is full of hardships that one has too go through to grow as an individual from Hamlet.
Work Cited
- Shakespeare, William. Hamlet from The Folger Shakespeare. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library, April 26, 2021. https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/
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