The purpose of the present text is to analyze Hamlet’s soliloque To Be Or Not To Be  through a textual approach and close reading. It will also provide  a personal interpretation and therefore it is not meant to give definite answers, but only possible ones.

First of all, considering the layout, the reader can recognize the test to be part of a play because he can read the name of the speaking voice before the beginning of the speech. In addition the reader can notice some scene directors ( e.g. “Enter Hamlet”) due to the fact that it is written to be performer on stage. Furthermore he can see  that the act is written in verse ( series of lines).

Going on reading the title, the reader can notice it is the same as the first line. Therefore he can suppose the soliloque to be part of a collection.

The play starts with a famous line: “ To be or not to be: that is the question”. Reading it the reader can notice an alliteration of letter t that makes the rhithm of the line really hammering. This lacerating rhithm, created by hard sounding consonants, can be also noticed untill the end of the act.

  Considering  the morphological level,  the infinitive form of the verbs in the first line is used to convey the meaning of an existencial question. Going on, the character continues to speak to himself pondering  some pros and cons as possible answers to his question. On the one hand he spaks about life life as a frustrating experience, on the other he considers death as a possible solution of life’s difficulties. He is wondering weather it is the case to suffer in the mind or “to take arms against a sea of troubles” (the sea of troubles is a metaphor that judjes life).  Through the sintactic level he communicates e doesn’t know the answer. The questionino sintacts conveys the conflicting and constrastrating mood of his thoughts.

Going on his rub becomes more complex. When he compares death with a never ending sleep, he realizes that when people sleep they can be both dreams (“perchance to dream”) and nightmares. He can’t state what cames after death  ( defined through  a metaphor “the undiscover’d country from whose buorn no travellers return”).

In the last part he seems toh ave understood the reason why people don’t make their lives end: their conscience make them “cowards”. People prefer to bear their hills han to face the unknown after death.

He ends stating that for this reasons people are so reluctanct to take such kind of decisions.