ANALYSIS OF HAMLET’S SOLILOQUY FROM THE FIRST TO THE 16TH LINES

In the first scene of the third act of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark there is Hamlet’s soliloquy, where he expresses his confusion about life and thinks of suicide.

A soliloquy is a speech made by a character when he is alone on the stage.

In the soliloquy, Hamlet is pondering whether to go on living or to put end to his life; the reader can understand this from the expression To be, or not to be and he can also notice that Hamlet does not use the verb to live but to be. Indeed to live implies only the physical aspect and so actions like eating or sleeping, while to be implies physical and psychological aspects. At the end of the expression there is a dash that invites the reader to stop and reflect but it also reminds the idea that Hamlet must think and dialogue with himself to understand what it means to be. Besides at the end of the first line there is the word question that underlines Hamlet’s existential doubt. Hamlet associates life to the verb to be and death to the verb not to be; from this things and from the use of the word question the idea of Hamlet as an adolescent comes to the mind of the reader; indeed Hamlet is an adolescent, he sees something or black or white and he is never sure about what to do.

After the question posed by Hamlet, he tries to understand if it is better to live or to die he has to analyse the aspects of living and dying. First of all he considers the pros and cons of living; living is difficult, it means to face problems without fear and Shakespeare conveys this idea thanks to the use of the semantic field of war, slings, arrows, arms, he uses the metaphor of the sea of troubles and through a strong language, flesh, heart-ache, and the repetition of the harsh sound –r, arrows, outrageous, arms, troubles, he underlines the negative vision of life in Hamlet’s opinion; Hamlet thinks that life is full of suffering and he has got this idea because he had has a lot of pains, caused for example by his father’s death or by the not paid love for his mother.

Afterwards he analyses the pros and cons of dying; he compares to die to to sleep because death is a sleep. Indeed when you die you cannot feel nothing as when you sleep. Death allows Hamlet to put end to his life and so also to his sexual desires but men do not know what comes after life and so they cannot know if dying is better than living.