Analysis of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy (lines 1-15)

Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is the most famous and important soliloquy in the
tragedy; it can be found in act III scene 1. A soliloquy is a literary device where
a character speaks to himself to reveal his inner and most secret thoughts.

In the scene, before Hamlet enters, Claudius and Polonius decide to spy on him in
order to discover the real cause of Hamlet's feigned madness. In the soliloquy,
Hamlet debates about life and death, wondering whether is better to keep on
living or to die. In the first part, from line 1 to 5, he analyzes the pros and
cons of living; he describes life as a "sea of troubles", where fortune often
opposes men's actions and he states that there are two possible attitudes
towards life: a passive one, consisting in suffering and bearing the "arrows"
of an adverse destiny, and an active one, which implies to take arms against
all troubles and die with them. From line 5 to 14, Hamlet tries to describe death
and its good and bad aspects: he compares death to a sleep, which puts an end
to all pains of life, and so he affirms everyone should strongly wish to die. However,
as he develops the comparison between death and sleep, he encounters a problem:
as in a sleep there may be dreams, good ones and nightmares, in the sleep of
death there may be something we do not know. According to Hamlet, this is the
main cause why men prefer to go on living and suffering, rather than die.

At the beginning of the soliloquy, the two verbs "to be" and "not to be" are in a highlighted
position, to stress their importance in the question; they stand for "to live"
and "to die". Directly from the second line, Hamlet takes life into
consideration and he asks himself if it's nobler to live bearing all
sufferings, or fighting against them. The adjective "nobler" remarks that his
choice will not be dictated by self-interest, but only by moral and religious
motives. Indeed, Hamlet does not consider only his personal situation, but a problem
which affects the entire mankind, so he wants his answers (if there are any) to
derive from universal principles. As a matter of fact, he often repeats the pronouns
"us" and "we", but he never uses "I". The nouns in this part of the soliloquy
mainly belong to the semantical field of war: slings, arrows, arms; moreover, life
is metaphorically represented by a tormented sea (this comparison may also be
considered a hyperbole, since it is an exaggeration). All these elements
contribute to make up a very negative view of life, which clashes, at least at
the beginning, with a more positive view of death.

In line 5, death is immediately compared with a sleep: when one goes to sleep, all his troubles
go to sleep as well, so death may be the definite cure for all sufferings. As a
proof of that, Hamlet states that, after death, there is no more heart-ache and
natural shocks "that flesh is heir to". Since the expression "heart-ache" can
be interpreted as love pains, the "natural shocks" Hamlet mentions may be
sufferings in a sexual intercourse. These troubles find their end in "a
consummation devoutly to be wish'd", where the adverb "devoutly" highlights the
strong desire for death, which appears to be the "happy ending" of life.

In lines 9-10, the pace slows down and Hamlet repeats the verb "to sleep", as he were
thinking, then he adds the verb "to dream". Hamlet seems to have realized that
a sleep is not always calm, but it may be interrupted by dreams, and among them
there are also nightmares. The syntax of the following sentence is more complex
and fragmented, to stress Hamlet's preoccupation; beside, in line 11, a
contrast can be noticed between the phrases "sleep of death", which gives an
idea of stillness and calmness, and "dreams may come", which gives the idea of
acting (dreams) and movement (come). It is impossible to decide whether these doubts
are well founded or not; the verb "may" and the terms "perchance", "rub", "respect"
do stress that. In line 14, "calamity" is associated with "long life", to
stress that all calamities are lifelong, and so, longer is life, longer are its
troubles. From line 15, Hamlet describes these calamities, creating a list of
the major of them. The first calamity is time: time fight has indeed been used
by all cultures to describe a war which always ends with man's defeat. Its "whips
and scorns" remind men that they cannot be always young, and every new age
cause new disabilities.

In my opinion, the first part of the soliloquy is the most powerful and it
effectively conveys a problem all men in all times have faced, and, probably,
no one will be able to solve.