To Be or Not To Be

With "The Fate of Ophelia," Taylor Swift's new song from her new album, "The Life of a Showgirl," on everyone's mind. Let's talk about a real interpretation of the classic play "Hamlet" in a way that actually applies to our modern moment.

A college senior, taking her first Shakespeare class in University, arrived in class this past Tuesday, to receive a lesson in theatrical close reading. I am that student, obviously. When I showed up and sat front row in the lecture hall of Shakespeare II, Tragedy and Romances, I assumed that we would start with something groundbreaking, niche, hard to have access to if you weren't in the beating heart of academia. I was both right and wrong. We began with a close reading of Shakespeare's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy, in Act III of "Hamlet." "Hamlet" is not a niche play. Most people have heard of it, either in high school, because they have seen the Lion King, or have at least seen the Looney Tunes episode in which it is referenced. My professor began our close read by analyzing the syntax of the sentence itself. He pointed out how the oddity of starting a sentence with an infinitive, creates a reading situation in which anyone becomes the subject of the sentence by insertion. For example, if you write the sentence, "To be an author is amazing," the implication is that being an author is amazing for me, you, them, her, etc. A sentence which starts with an infinitive takes on a universal subject. However, Shakespeare adds an "or" and a negation to his infinitive, and then says that these offer an argument: should we be or not. Hamlet, a character who has been highly educated as my instructor pointed out, introduces this soliloquy in the way in which a debater would begin a two sided argument. The Prince of Denmark originally portrayed by a man in his 30s, is somewhat of an eternal student, and in his, perhaps the, most iconic soliloquy, he demonstrates a casual rhetorical exercise, but which has stakes for him. And, due to the syntax of his sentence, it has stakes for us too.

"Hamlet" is a play about the roles we take on in life in order to get by and to achieve what we want. It is also a play about politics, religion, love, grief, and many other aspects of what it means to be human. However, I think that portrayal and pretending best sum up the main themes of the play, as those are the themes which I find most affecting, and which most illuminate the urgency of the matter of our modern stake in the question of "To be or not to be."