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To Be Or Not To Be Soliloquy Analysis

1064 Words5 Pages

This essay will be about Hamlet’s famous, “To be, or not to be,” soliloquy. It starts off when Hamlet walks into a trap laid by Claudius and Polonius. Deep in thought, Hamlet goes off on a rant about Life’s troubles. Throughout the Soliloquy he contrasts action versus inaction. It delves deeply into death and why a person would or wouldn’t want to experience it. By the end he has reached the consensus that too much thinking will keep you from ever acting and thereby kill you. This passage was rendered so beautifully in its time that we still can sympathize with it today. A master of poetic phrasing, Shakespeare paints a beautiful picture of words in this soliloquy.
There is much creative phrasing in this immemoralized passage. The very first line states the entire …show more content…

The end of line eight plus line nine sum up the feeling of every sane person; that an end to suffering is, “Devoutly to be wish’d.” So far through this soliloquy, Shakespeare has made a convincing argument for death and in line ten, death and sleep are once again compared using anaphora. However at the end of the line, he adds in an interesting variable, dreams. Just as sleep contains dreams, what if death does as well? This totally changes the course of the soliloquy, showing how too much thought into something can upset a formerly neat argument. The denotation of the word rub at the end of line ten has changed since Shakespeare first wrote it. In certain situations the connotation can be similar as in, “Someone rubbed you the wrong way,” but in its most common definition very different. Back then it referenced a game similar to lawn bowling. In this game a rub was some spot that changed the course of the ball, deflecting it off target. This relates to the thought of dreams in death throwing Hamlet’s previous thoughts off course. In lines eleven through thirteen, Shakespeare restates line ten in a more comprehensive manner. He shows that we shouldn’t run off to death because no

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