‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; ’tis unmanly grief;
His speech ended, Claudius twists Laertes, the son of the Lord Chamberlain, Polonius. Laertes articulates his wish to return to France, where he was living before his return to Denmark for Claudius’s coronation. Polonius offers his son permission, and Claudius genially grants Laertes his approval as well.
Turning to Prince Hamlet, Claudius inquires why “the clouds still hang” above him, as Hamlet is still dressing in black bereavement clothes. Gertrude advises him to recycle his “nightly color,” but he responds bitterly that his inner mourning is so great that his stern manifestation is just a poor mirror of it. Impacting a tone of paternal advice, Claudius announces that all fathers die, and all sons must lose their parents. When a son loses a father, he is duty-bounce to grieve, but to grieve for too long is unmanly and unfortunate. Claudius advises Hamlet to think of him as a father, repeating the prince that he situates in line to thrive to the throne upon Claudius’s fatality.
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 Armes against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ake, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is here too? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To dye to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; I, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give vs paws.
The vital claim of the world-famous monologue in Hamlet is, in concentrated form, that our state is so miserable that entire non-existence would be definitely preferable to it. Now if suicide essentially offered us this, so that the substitute “to be or not to be” lay in front of readers in the complete sense of the words, it could be selected categorically as a highly advantageous annihilation. There is something in us, nevertheless, which tells the audience that this is not so, that this is not the termination of things, that fatality is not a total obliteration.
In this viewpoint, the Prince’s further considering the origin of death can be regarded in yet a various light (moreover to the aforementioned two offerings, i.e. the predictable failure to win the brawl against the “sea of problems” or the only way to overpower it indeed). Specifically, death could be regarded as a third option – the way which permits to evade selecting between to be and not to be in general.
In spite of whether the concern is located on “life against death” or “action against no action”, the themes undertaken by the soliloquy ruled to the nature of the Danish Prince often getting contrasted to existentialists after the term was initiated in the twentieth century.