To Be or Not to Be

For Hamlet we needed to pick a speech from Act III so I picked the To Be or Not to Be quote and I talked about what that quote meant and what all Hamlet was talking about in it. So here is my page or so of what I wrote about it.This one is my more updated on because out of three of them we had to pick one that we wanted to extend on.

“To Be or Not to Be”

In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (act III, scene I) has Hamlet questioning what he should do with his life. This is taken into a very serious term by the fact that Hamlet starts to talk out loud around Ophelia about how he is feeling about everything that is going on with him and if whether or not he actually should take his life or keep it. The famous quote of, “To be or not to be”, is spoken in such a way that has captured the attention of its audience for many years. By showing the struggles that Hamlet had over his life after everything started to go wrong for him in his eyes. Because he feels like there is truly nothing for him in his life that would make him want to keep living because everything has been turned upside down and ruined by Claudius.

Hamlet wonders if he should even keep going through all the trouble of staying alive or if it would just be easier for him to end his life and move on. In the quote, “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”, so that he is really wonder if it is better for him to tough it out and keep going or to just take his own life and be done. Yet he is very cautious of doing that because he is not entirely sure what is on the other side and doesn’t know what will happen to him. In the quote ,”to sleep: perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub”, gives an example of him not being so sure of what to expect once he has killed himself. After seeing his father’s ghost and the hell that it is in it makes him wonder if he will suffer the same or if he will move on to something better. Because right now he is seeing no outlet to a better life and he is through with living, yet he feels that by killing himself he will somehow end up in his own type of hell with the sins that he himself has created through his own actions in life. Hamlet wants the sweet relief of death but yet he knows nothing of what is after this life so he will not kill himself because he doesn’t want to end up like his father on the other side. When Hamlet says, “No traveler returns, puzzles the will”, makes sense to the fact that he thinks against it because of the unknown he faces. He then tells Ophelia to remember his sins so that she will not repeat the ones that he himself has created in order to keep her out of the hell that he has created for  himself.

In conclusion Hamlet has made a choice between life and death of his own life and has chosen to keep it. Because he doesn’t know what I son the other side because he himself has never seen it and believes his father’s ghost that it is a terrible place. This was a truly great decision that Hamlet was conflicted with because his life has changed so much in just a short while and for him to consider killing himself to end it is a very big deal. Yet in the end the question if the unknown is the one thing that stopped him from making this decision.