COMPREHENSION

 

How does Hamlet describe life and death?

 

Within the soliloquy Hamlet tries to understand if living is better than dying.

First of all he considers pros and cons of living; life is described as a sea of troubles; there are two possible attitudes towards life: the first one is a passive attitude and it implies that men suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, while the second one is an active attitude and it implies that men fight against a sea of troubles. Living is difficult, it means to face problems without fear; Hamlet has a negative vision of life and Shakespeare conveys this idea thanks to the use of the semantic field of war, slings, arrows, arms, of a strong language, flesh, heart-ache and of the repetition of the sound –r, arrows, outrageous, arms, troubles.

Afterwards he considers pros and cons of dying; he compares dying to sleeping because death is a sleep. Indeed when you die, you cannot feel anything as when you sleep. Death could allow Hamlet to put end to his life and so also to his troubles, sexual desires, but there is a problem: men do not know what comes after life and so they prefer to live.

 

What is troubling Hamlet at the idea of dying?

 

Hamlet compares dying to sleeping because death is an eternal sleep; however when you sleep you can do dreams or nightmares, so you know what will happen, while when you die, you do not know what will happen because nobody knows what comes after life.

 

Life is described as inescapable torment. What exactly are the torments of life?

 

The torments of life are the wips and scorn of time, th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that the patient merit of th’ unworthy takes.

 

Why do we choose to go on living, according to Hamlet? Choose two quotations to illustrate this point.

 

Because we know what living means but we do not know what dying means; we only know that dying is an eternal sleep, but we cannot imagine what happens after life; indeed this hypothesis is confirmed within the text by two expressions: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…That makes calamity of so long life and But that the dread…we know not of?...

 

What conclusions does Hamlet reach?

 

Hamlet understands with his soliloquy that living is better than dying but at the same time he thinks that men’s conscience make us cowards to act and so enterprises of great pitch lose their name of action.

 

What is Hamlet’s mood in this soliloquy?

 

Hamlet’s mood is sad; indeed he starts the soliloquy to express his confusion about life. Here his negative vision of life comes on surface, because he says 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.

 

 

INTERPRETATION

 

Hamlet’s soliloquy is very complex because here Shakespeare creates multiple levels of meaning; Hamlet does not consider only his personal situation but also a more general one. So the reader can understand that Hamlet is represented as a paradigm of the human being, for this reason students, in studying Hamlet should be able to recognise what makes Hamlet human.

Hamlet considers his personal situation because in the soliloquy he expresses his confusion about life and he thinks of suicide; so he is thinking about his personal situation, but, at the same time he makes a reflection that counts for all human beings. He is considering a general human problem; he is pondering whether it is better to live and suffer the injustices of life or not to live. Besides it is important to notice that he never uses the pronoun I, so he is speaking also about a general human problem.

 

The most important opposition within the text is at the beginning and it is to be or not to be. This is the main topic of the soliloquy and it involves the reader’s attention, because the reader wants to know if it is better to be and so to live or not to be and so to die.

Besides there is the repetition of the words sleep, because Shakespeare wants to underline that death is as an eternal sleep and finally there is a never ending list of the torments of life in order to underline that life is difficult.

 

When Hamlet makes his soliloquy, in the scene there are also Ophelia, Polonius and the King, which are hidden; Hamlet is aware of this thing and so he is pretending to be mad; besides he knows that Polonius and Claudius are hidden, because after the soliloquy, he tells to Ophelia where her father is.