THE MONOLOGUE from ACT III SCENE I

A Room In The Castle

The object of the present text is to provide my personal interpretation of William Shakespeare’ s ACT 3 SCENE 1 “A Room In The Castle”

It is not meant to give definitive answers but I am going to make some possible conjectures, about the meaning of the monologue and about the way in which Shakespeare organised it, supported by textual references.

There is no doubt that William Shakespeare was one of the most famous writer in English literature

He wrote a lot of plays composed to be performed and in poetical languages especially tragedies where heroes become tragic heroes. Shakespearean tragedies often begin in an ordered society, because a society or a person need order to be functional, but end with caos. The change is a consequence of environmental’ s change because the environment reflects human feelings.

The topic of his tragedies are usually connect to human feelings, emotions, love or head matters and every interior issues.

One of the most famous and significant tragedies written by William Shakespeare is Hamlet; now I am going to consider the third act of the first scene’ s monologue.

To start with it is essential to distinguish monologue from soliloquy: indeed monologue is a speech made by a person who forgets to be surrounded by others while a soliloquy is a speech made by a person who is alone and speaks to him self and nobody listen to him.

The title of the monologue I am going to analyse is A Room In The Castle and the word “room” underline an interior place so it is a metaphor to refer to the monologue speaker’s interior.

The monologue starts with the question “to be or not to be” so the intelligent reader asks himself why the writer decided to start the monologue with the question and what he wanted to express with this opposed thoughts.

However the reader immediately understand that Shakespeare went on developing an argumentation to support or contrast the two option “to be” and “not to be” because he wanted to search an answer to his issues.

“To be” means when somebody decides to face problems, the suffering and pains of life while “not to be” means when somebody doesn’t want to face the reality and he lets himself go down.

Shakespeare used the infinitive verb to create abstract effects and because it adds existential dimension to the space and there is an interrogative syntax to communicate his interior.

Reading the second question the reader understand that the speaker was in difficult because he didn’t know if it was the case to fight or to surrender to the problems.

Shakespeare used the verb “to sleep” as a metaphor to indicate the death, also the expression “to end heart-head ache and shocks” remind to the death because it means to given an end to the human problems. He considered the death as something that people wish indeed Shakespeare change the order indeed he is contrary the Christian values in which the suicide is prohibited.

Since Shakespeare associate the death to a never ending sleeping and since when you sleep you dream he consequently associate the death to the dreams so reader understand that to die strikes fear into people because when you dreams you can have nightmares.

Shakespeare have a negative conceptions of life because people have to bear whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’ s contumely, the pangs of a despite love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and he asked himself who might bear all this. The writer used the conditional verb “might” to underline that is a far probability.

Shakespeare didn’t understand why people continue to live bearing pains and suffering instead of to die and he provided the answer to the question immediately after. He stated that people are afraid of what comes after death because it is an undiscovered country from which nobody returns and of which people can only assume some ideas and this is the reason why people prefer living.

In conclusion the writer support the idea that conscience make people cowards and the striking fear of what comes next blocks everybody. Therefore their ideas become awry and they do not know how to act. In two last lines Hamlet, who is the speaker of the monologue, called out the Nymph Ophelia asking that his sins would be remembered.