TO BE OR NOT TO BE

“to be or not to be” is one of the most famous verse that belong to Hamlet’s soliloquy written by W.Shakespeare. First of all I would like to clarify the meaning of the word “soliloquy” which is a long speech said by a person who is alone on the stage and its aim is to express the character’s feelings.

In the first line Shakespeare uses the verb “to be” rather than “to live” to enlarge the meaning to the concept of existence. As a matter of fact the second verb refers merely to the necessities of humans as living beings such as: to eat, to sleep exc. As a consequence “not to be” means not to exist thus to escape from worldly problems but also not to have the possibility to face problems

Right from the start the playwright puts the audience to a tuff situation: the choice between to be or to die.  In the following lines Hamlet is wondering what is the best to do: to exist or to die. He is asking himself: is better to exist and suffer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” which means every human pain and injustice “or to take arms against a sea of troubles” which means to die?

In my opinion Hamlet feels inapt to his kind of life and society since he is going through a crisis; as a matter of fact his mood is always quite unhappy and tragic sometimes. He is also unable to cope with his life’s problems and thus he does not know if it is worth to keep on living or if it is better to die. Indeed he blames the fate for his problems.

In the following line Hamlet makes a comparison between “to die” and “to sleep”. He believes that dying means to sleep since when you are sleeping you forget worldly problems. Furthermore while you sleep you can also dream which means creating your own world without any kind of problems. ("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").

In these lines Shakespeare uses words taken from the semantic area of the war to stress the complexity of the crisis Hamlet is going through. The playwright uses also the sound device of alliteration of the letter “r” to underline the difficulties that Hamlet is trying to cope with.

The mood of the soliloquy is pessimistic.