The Soliloquies of Shakespeares Hamlet - To be or not to be Soliloquy :: GCSE English Literature Coursework

critical point -- To be or not to be Soliloquy When the Bard of Avon created Hamlet, he simultaneously created the celebrated soliloquy ever uttered by English-speaking men. Thus it is that literary critics rank Hamlets fourth soliloquy as the most notable ever penned. Lets examine in this leaven how such a high ranking is deserved, and what the soliloquy means. In his essay An Explication of the Players Speech, Harry Levin refers to the fourth soliloquy as the most storied of them all Dwelling on gross details and imperfections of the flesh ( look without feeling, feeling without sight), Hamlet will admonish his mother that sense-perception is dulled by sensual indulgence. Here insensibility is communicated by a rhetorical break upon the senses primarily the very faculties of eyes and ears, but incidentally touch and even taste. Leaving the senseless Priam to the insensate Pyrrhus, after another hiatus of half a line (37), the speech addresses violent objurgations to the bi tch-goddess Fortune, closely whom Hamlet has lately cracked ribald jokes with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern whose buffets and rewards he prizes Horatio for suffering with equanimity against whom he will, in the most famous of all soliloquies my italics, be tempted to take arms. (36) Marchette Chute in The Story Told in Hamlet describes fair how close the hero is to suicide while reciting his most famous soliloquy Hamlet enters, desperate enough by this time to be thinking of suicide. It seems to him that it would be such a sure way of escape from torment, just to cease existing, and he gives the famous speech on suicide that has never been worn thin by repetition. To be, or not to be . . . It would be lucky to stop living. To die, to sleep No more. And by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to . . . But Hamlet has never succeeded in deceiving himself, and he cannot do so now. . . . He will not . . . be able to kill himself. He has thought too much about it to be able to take any action. (39) Considering the context of this most notable soliloquy, the speech appears to be a reaction from the determination which ended the rogue and nipper slave soliloquy. In fact, in the Quarto of 1603 the To be speech comes BEFORE the players scene and the nunnery scene and is thus more logically positioned to show its emotional fraternity to the previous soliloquy (Nevo 46).