#“HAMLET: ACT 3, SECNCE 1

 

“HAMLET: ACT 3, SECNCE 1”

William Shakespeare

Possibly the most eloquent suicide threat ever, this soliloquy is the turning point in hamlet, marking the beginning of the play’s descent into madness and violence. Hamlet’s feigned lunacy later in the scene prefigures Ophelia’s real insanity and his rage in a tragedy that soon sees most of the protagonists dead. The play is thought to mirror the political situation in England at the time, as to whether the characters are meant to be counterparts to real people. Could the gloomy legitimate heir hamlet represent James VI of Scotland or might that be for tin bras, the king waiting just over the border to invade?

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience dose make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

#Ksrpost

08.08.2021