HAMLET: 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 wishd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, theres the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: theres the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressors wrong, the proud mans contumely, The pangs of despised love, the laws 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 undiscoverd 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 oer 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 rememberd. What Hamlet is musing on is the comparison between the pain of life, which he sees as inevitable (the sea of troubles - the slings and arrows - the heart-ache - the thousand natural shocks) and the fear of the uncertainty of death and of possible damnation of suicide. Hamlets dilemma is that although he is dissatisfied with life and lists its many torments, he is unsure what death may bring (the dread of something after death). He cant be sure what death has in store; it may be sleep but in perchance to dream he is speculating that it is perhaps an experience worse than life. Death is called the undiscoverd country from which no traveller returns. In saying that Hamlet is acknowledging that, not only does each living person discover death for themselves, as no one can return from it to describe it, but also that suicide os a one-way ticket. If you get the judgment call wrong, theres no way back. The whole speech is tinged with the Christian prohibition of suicide, although it isnt mentioned explicitly. The dread of something after death would have been well understood by a Tudor audience to mean the fires of Hell. The speech is a subtle and profound examining of what is more crudely expressed in the phrase out of the frying pan into the fire. - in essence life is bad, but death might be worse.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 17:03:59 +0000
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