“To be, or not to be”

 

Shakespeare‘s play, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’ (c.1602) is one in which almost everyone is killed, including Hamlet himself. By Act III, Scene I, he is grieving the murder of his father by his father’s own brother, i.e. his uncle, who then not only claims the crown but also marries his widowed sister-in-law, Hamlet’s mother. His father’s ghost is urging him to take revenge and two of his friends are intent on betraying him. Oh, and there’s an unresolved love interest.

That is the context for the famous monologue “To be, or not to be, that is the question”, in which Hamlet weighs up the pros and cons of living or dying. On the one hand, dying is the escape from all of life’s problems; on the other hand, it is a journey into the unknown and it could be worse than living, therefore we must carry on. He is not holding Yorick’s skull at this point ~ that comes in Act V’s graveyard scene.

Some of the lines from the monologue have entered common usage, such as:

• “shuffle off this mortal coil”
• “to sleep, perchance to dream”
• “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”
• “ay, there’s the rub”.

(Top image [cropped]: Derek Winterburn at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)