To be or not to be.

[Ray Eston Smith]

In Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, there should be some anger. Hamlet is trying to decide what's the right thing to do about the man who murdered his father. He's contemplating a possibly suicidal attack against a sitting king, and he's questioning his own motives.
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http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/hamlet/9/ - To Be Or Not To Be

To be or not to be WHAT? THAT is the question.

Hamlet is not agonizing over whether to live or die - he is agonizing over how to avoid damnation.

Hamlet feels bound by filial duty to try to kill King Claudius. To kill a king is a dangerous thing - he is likely to die in the attempt, but Hamlet does not fear death:

HAMLET (Act 1, Scene 4, lines 70-73)
Why, what should be the fear?
I do not set my life in a pin's fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?

However, he does fear damnation:

HAMLET (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 609-614)
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me:

Trying to kill a king might be considered a suicide mission and suicide is a mortal sin. Attempting to kill a king would be like taking "arms against a SEA of troubles" (3,1,67).

FIRST CLOWN (Act 5, Scene 1, lines 15-20)
. . . .If the man go this WATER,
and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he
goes,--mark you that; but if the water come to him
and drown him, he drowns not himself: argal, he
that is not GUILTY OF HIS OWN DEATH

But suppose Hamlet succeeds in killing the king. Would that also be a sin? It would depend on his motives. Was he killing to defend the Danish people against a murderous tyrant?

HAMLET (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 73-75)
. . . . is't not to be damn'd,
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?

Or is "this canker of our nature" Hamlet's own AMBITION?

HAMLET (Act 3, Scene 1, line 73-74)
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death WHAT DREAMS may come

HAMLET (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 268-271)
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have BAD DREAMS.
GUILDENSTERN
Which DREAMS indeed ARE AMBITION

If Hamlet kills Claudius out of ambition, he will inherit the same blood-soaked ground that doomed both his uncle and his father to damnation.

A gravedigger was hired on the very day that Hamlet emerged from his mother's womb, which was the same day his father put old Fortinbras into the womb of earth (his grave), thus acquiring land "that was and is the question of these wars" and which was Hamlet's inheritance, figuratively a graveyard, not big enough to cover the dead from the impending war over that same land.

BERNARDO (Act 1, Scene 1, lines 121-124)
I think it be no other but e'en so:
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch; so like the king
THAT was and IS THE QUESTION of these wars.

That was Hamlet's dilemma - whether "to be or not to be," like the Ghost, "so like the king THAT was and IS THE QUESTION of these wars."

Hamlet is too often portrayed as an indecisive, suicidal wimp, but I see him rather as a valiant soldier of the spirit, fighting a desperate internal battle to defend the sovereignty of his soul.

[Zemouli Chahra]

Very nice explanation, it did benefit me a lot.

[Charles Darnay]

I'm not so sure about this interpretation.

At the end of the soliloquy he sees Ophelia: "Nymph in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered." He must conjure up his "display of anger" that he will then use against Ophelia. If he was so riled up by his soliloquy, he would not need to "remember" his sins.

The soliloquy is far more contemplative than irrational - in fact, if you look at all of his soliloquies, this is the only one in which he holds his emotions in check. "To.....or not to....." is the classic model of rhetorical debate that any student would have learned. He puts forth the academic debate of being and not being as it is, and draws out both arguments as if debating with another. One the one side there is all the terrors that we are plagued with "the whips ans scorns of time &c." and of course on the other hand is that "undiscovered country" which may be worse than what we are dealing with now.
The line "thus does conscience make cowards of us all" I would play with a bit of a chuckle: it's the pathetic realization to the purpose of life - and then comes the downcast conclusion in which "enterprises of great pith and moment" are robbed of action because of the "pale cast of thought."

There is nothing here that suggests anger, or any strong emotions. It is the "calming down" after his outbursts in 2.2.

[cafolini]

But the student who ever tried that thingy, to be or not to be, all he had to do was try to not be in order to realize that it is impossible. It is existential nonsense now gone to dwell forever in the museum of history.

[Patrick Walker]

Look, whatever the central debate of this most celebrated speech, it is the generally overlooked and misunderstood conclusion that you should pay attention to. Here is the turning point of Hamlet’s journey. It seems to me utterly disturbing that the young man, who until now has placed so much value on man’s God-given power of reason and been so appalled at the apparent lack of that same quality in others, can reach the conclusion that

‘…conscience doth make cowards of us all;

Hamlet is not saying, as most people assume, that ‘too much thought prevents us from taking any action at all’. ‘Conscience’, I have noticed, is a recurrent word throughout the play, and generally it is used to mean the same thing. Not ‘persistent rumination’ as some people suppose, but rather, as in the modern sense, ‘the sense of moral correctness that governs or influences a person’s thoughts or actions’. So Hamlet, longing for revenge, but knowing up until now the very act to be senseless and morally unsound, ‘reasons’ his way ‘out of reason’. He does this by convincing himself that ‘conscience is for cowards’ and that he will reject the ‘pale cast of thought’ that prevents a man from embarking on ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’ - such as revenge and regicide.

From now on Hamlet is a changed man. He is no longer the reflective, detached thinker of Act II. He is now, to use his own words from his appraisal of Horatio in the next scene, ‘passions slave’, and from hereon embark on a course of violent and impulsive action. After the Play Scene, when Hamlet believes that he has revealed Claudius’s guilt, he is ready to kill. ‘’Tis now the very witching time of night’, says Hamlet, as a prelude to his darkest hour, immediately making associations with witchcraft; and his horrible declaration that ‘now could [he] drink hot blood’ would have been recognised as a common rite of the witches’ Sabbath. Hamlet’s soliloquy here echoes speeches of other Shakespearean villains; most notably Iago, who, plotting against Othello, says

‘Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.’
(I.iii.397-8)

And similarly Macbeth’s speech prefiguring the murder of Duncan:

‘Now o’er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep: Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecates off’rings and wither’d murder…’
(II.i.49-56)

[cacian]

About this soliloquy is this to be or not to be supposed to be'' internal not heard'' meaning all happening in Hamlet's head ,in which case it does not require an answer, ''external heard''meaning as a statment or a declaration of a state of confusion in which case the interlocutor won't know how to answer it.
Or is both heard and not heard in which case it is total maddness.
The question that begs to be asked is this:
Is a solilloquy heard or not heard in other declared or not? and if it is then it is not a soliloquy and if is not then there is no soliloquy.
Hmmm it is getting out of hand.
Enough said.

[Patrick Walker]

All Shakespearean soliloquys are, by their very nature, shared with the audience. If a character asks a question in a soliloquy ("Am I a villain?"; "May one be pardon’d and retain the offence?"; etc) it needn't even necessarily be a rhetoric question. See David Warner's story on his Act II Scene ii soliloquy for further on that.
The other point of a soliloquy is that it moves the story, or a character's journey, forward somehow. To interpret 'To be or not to be' as simply a contemplation of suicide renders the speech meaningless. It comes from nothing and ends in nothing. It's dramatically irrelevant and, to be honest, expendable as far as the play is concerned. But think of it as the turning point in Hamlet's journey (particularly his conclusion in the last few lines) and it all makes sense.

[Charles Darnay]

Look, whatever the central debate of this most celebrated speech, it is the generally overlooked and misunderstood conclusion that you should pay attention to. Here is the turning point of Hamlet’s journey. It seems to me utterly disturbing that the young man, who until now has placed so much value on man’s God-given power of reason and been so appalled at the apparent lack of that same quality in others, can reach the conclusion that

‘…conscience doth make cowards of us all;

Hamlet is not saying, as most people assume, that ‘too much thought prevents us from taking any action at all’. ‘Conscience’, I have noticed, is a recurrent word throughout the play, and generally it is used to mean the same thing. Not ‘persistent rumination’ as some people suppose, but rather, as in the modern sense, ‘the sense of moral correctness that governs or influences a person’s thoughts or actions’. So Hamlet, longing for revenge, but knowing up until now the very act to be senseless and morally unsound, ‘reasons’ his way ‘out of reason’. He does this by convincing himself that ‘conscience is for cowards’ and that he will reject the ‘pale cast of thought’ that prevents a man from embarking on ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’ - such as revenge and regicide.

From now on Hamlet is a changed man. He is no longer the reflective, detached thinker of Act II. He is now, to use his own words from his appraisal of Horatio in the next scene, ‘passions slave’, and from hereon embark on a course of violent and impulsive action. After the Play Scene, when Hamlet believes that he has revealed Claudius’s guilt, he is ready to kill. ‘’Tis now the very witching time of night’, says Hamlet, as a prelude to his darkest hour, immediately making associations with witchcraft; and his horrible declaration that ‘now could [he] drink hot blood’ would have been recognised as a common rite of the witches’ Sabbath. Hamlet’s soliloquy here echoes speeches of other Shakespearean villains; most notably Iago, who, plotting against Othello, says

‘Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.’
(I.iii.397-8)

And similarly Macbeth’s speech prefiguring the murder of Duncan:

‘Now o’er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep: Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecates off’rings and wither’d murder…’
(II.i.49-56)

I like your line of thinking, and I will not challenge your interpretation of "conscience." But there are a few points I want to bring up to see if your argument can without some Cartesian inquisition.



Here is the turning point of Hamlet’s journey


This is what I disagree with



He does this by convincing himself that ‘conscience is for cowards’ and that he will reject the ‘pale cast of thought’ that prevents a man from embarking on ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’


Here is how I will challenge it.

I don't think he convinces himself of anything in this soliloquy. The final thought - that our "enterprises of great pith and moment &c" - is not the "final thought." That is, Ophelia walks in and conveniently interrupts his line of thinking. I think he realizes that this is the destructive power of conscience (define it how you will) but he does not yet settle on this line of thinking. Or rather, he is not as convinced as you make him out to be, nor is this the turning point.



He is now, to use his own words from his appraisal of Horatio in the next scene, ‘passions slave’, and from hereon embark on a course of violent and impulsive action.


Don't take "passion's slave" out of context. Hamlet does not label himself passion's slave when referring to it - but I don't think that's you are implying here. However, there are only two instances in the play where we see displays of "passion" in Hamlet: the killing of Polonius (III.iv) and jumping into Ophelia's grave (V.i): neither of which are reflective of the soliloquy in III.i.

Despite his "proof" of Claudius' guilt and his decision that "'Tis now the very witching time of night" Hamlet remains rationally conflicted, as seen in his next action - not killing Claudius in III.iii. If he was so convinced that he would not let conscience make him a coward, he would have killed Claudius in prayer (as Laertes swore he would do to Hamlet.) But he doesn't. Instead he is the same Hamlet who laments that God "fix'd his cannon gainst self-slaughter."

I think that Hamlet's turning point is not until Iv.iv. His resolution "my thoughts be bloody or nothing worth" is him shaking off any last shred of conscience. He becomes Death embodied after surviving (presumably) the first attempt on his life. He steps into the role of the Revenger that the Revenge Tragedy demands. From here, there is no conscience, no being or not being, only Death.

"To Be or Not to Be" is a masterful work of rhetoric and that is why it has earned the place of the most well-known soliloquy. But when considered in the context of the plot and character of Hamlet, it is probably the only soliloquy that does not advance the plot. It is a refresher, a half-way reminder, of where Hamlet currently is. He jumps from "madness" to "pitiful" throughout the long scene in Act II that we need to take stock and realize the central conflict within him. I support this with evidence from the original "to be or not to be" speech, which if it had not been changed, would not have been granted any place in our collective memory.

[Patrick Walker]

Interesting points but I disagree. Hamlet’s soliloquy over the praying Claudius, and his desire to effect Claudius' damnation, has been popularly explained away as a pretext for delay. Or that his words here disguised, not expressed, the true feelings of the "pure soul unequal to the task imposed on it". But our modern day tendency to take Hamlet’s expressed sentiments here lightly, no doubt reflect our dimming belief in Hell and damnation. Looking back at some early-mid 18th century criticism of the play you can consistently find what seems to reflect what might have been the Elizabethan response to Hamlet’s speech. It is particularly interesting how Williamson’s instinctive response to the speech was one of horror, though he failed to follow this response through to its logical conclusion. He concludes, ‘the desire to destroy a man’s soul…by cutting him off from all means of repentance; this surely in a Christian Prince is such a piece of revenge, as no tenderness for any parent can justify’.
Davies praised actor/manager David Garrick for rejecting "this horrid soliloquy".
And the 18th Century actor Sheridan, said that this speech, ‘if really from the heart, would make Hamlet the most black, revengeful man’. But isn’t that exactly the point? Rather than due to lack of resolution, or the warnings of conscience, or due to the ‘sensibility’ of a ‘gentle disposition’, Hamlet has rather assumed his revenger’s role insofar as, not content with taking blood for blood, he goes beyond private blood revenge and embraces evil by contriving the eternal fate of the victim’s soul. Ben Kingsley said that ‘[Hamlet] is finding very good reasons for not doing it now. Sound reasons…philosophically and rationally’. Nonsense, I say. Hamlet’s reasoning isn’t sound. There is nothing left of the noble Hamlet; the scholar, the philosopher; the courtier.

As for Hamlet's Act 4 Scene 2 soliloquy, in short, the speech is in two sections. At first Hamlet reproaches himself for his failure to act. Then he uses the example of Fortinbras to exhort his own cause, climaxing in the bloody resolution of the final couplet. Now even actor/critics, such as Pennington, who admire Hamlet’s ‘fine blade of self-reproach’ in this speech, have acknowledged the pointlessness of Fortinbras’s campaign against Poland. Yet there is a tendency among directors and actors, critics, readers and theatregoers, to accept what Hamlet says here as some kind of universal maxim; a statement by Shakespeare making Fortinbras a moral exemplar against which Hamlet should be judged.
The soliloquy seems to be generally played in performance as a ‘maturing’ of Hamlet the Revenger. Or a noble speech indicative of a new found self-knowledge in the ‘hero’, and one of great philosophical reflection. The actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree regarded these as ‘noble lines…vividly …the workings of Hamlet’s inner nature’. Pennington, sees here ‘a new lucidity in Hamlet, undeceived, no longer intellectually evasive’. Berkoff sees a ‘fitting debate on our cowardice to act...how we are all guilty in the face of some example’. But putting the speech in the context of my response to Hamlet’s revenge, I cannot agree.

In the first scene of the play we learn that Fortinbras, prince of Norway, an apparently hot-headed, rebellious and unrestrained youth has ‘shark’d up’ an army of desperados. And yet in the present soliloquy Hamlet describes him as a ‘delicate and tender prince’, ‘puff’d’ with ‘divine ambition’. It is often concurred that Shakespeare contradicts himself in his presentation of Fortinbras and thus Hamlet’s judgement a valid one. But Hamlet is contradictory in his reasoning. A few lines earlier he has shown that he knows Fortinbras’s campaign against Poland has no justification. ‘Twenty thousand men’ are being led ‘to their graves’ for ‘a straw’. He knows the example of Fortinbras to be ‘as gross as earth’. Yet in this soliloquy Hamlet seems to twist this example until it ‘exhorts’ him. He sees Fortinbras as a rash, unreflective young man ‘making mouths’ at the consequences of his actions, and for a mere ‘eggshell’ he exposes ‘what is moral and unsure / to all that fortune, death and danger dare’; just as in the next scene Laertes will echo:

[I] ‘I dare damnation…
Let come what comes…’

Surely we are not expected to want Hamlet to follow this example, but Hamlet, seeing the prospect of carnage over a trifle, shames himself into resolution. The working of Hamlet’s mind here is exactly the same as earlier in the play when he exhorted himself after witnessing the Player’s passionate display at ‘a fiction’. As Knights points out, ‘the soliloquy can only…define one further stage in the withdrawal of Hamlet’s consciousness, a sacrifice of reason to a fantasy of quite unreflective destructive action’.

[Patrick Walker]

By the way, I do suspect that Shakespeare removed the latter speech for performance (hence its not being included in the Folio edition of the play), the reason being, as you yourself touched on, its echoing 'To be or not to be'.
The IV; ii soliloquy, as great as it is, does seem somehow out of place in the general arc of the play.

[Patrick Walker]

I also never took it that Hamlet's soliloquy/thoughts were "interrupted" by the appearance of Ophelia. The speech does seem to me to reach a conclusion; it can be no accident that Shakespeare chose to end Hamlet's rumination on the word "action".
I still believe that the action of the play and Hamlet's journey hinges on this decision.

[Charles Darnay]

Ending on "action" is no coincidence, but so is not ending on a rhyming couplet. In I.ii, Hamlet's soliloquy is certainly interrupted by Horatio's entrance:



But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!

and this soliloquy is the only other one that does not end on a rhyming couplet. The counter-argument to this is that rhyming couplets only come at the end of scenes, and these two soliloquies are not at the end of scenes. However, Claudius' soliloquy in III.iii is not at the end of a scene, but still ends on a rhyming couplet (if we take original pronunciation into account) - so I am firm in my belief that Ophelia's interruption stops whatever thoughts he still had.

[Patrick Walker]

A nice post, and a good argument, but argue it as I may, and whether Ophelia's entrance in III.i does interrupt Hamlet's shared thoughts with us (the audience), it doesn't change the fact that by the end of this speech he has reached a very dangerous and frightening conclusion.

[Patrick Walker]

By the way, you could argue that Claudius' soliloquy in the prayer scene does end with a couplet, as he concludes his soliloquy on Hamlet's exit with one - though this does, likewise, end the scene too!

[stanley2]

After reading the editors notes in the new Arden edition and others, the idea that Hamlet is aware that Claudius is listening occurs because he may have overheard Polonius propose eavesdropping or been doing some spying himself. It seems to me that, however distracted he is, he could not miss seeing Ophelia when he enters(Act 3, scene 1?). Therefore, the speech is, in part, the product of his education at Wittenberg and is addressed to Claudius.