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."

Summary:

Bernardo and Francesco change posts at the nightly guard, and Marcellus brings out Horatio to witness a spectral event which has recently been occurring during the guards' watches. Horatio sees the ghost, but the ghost remains silent. We are then introduced to the King and Queen, Claudius and Gertrude, and learn that Hamlet, Gertrude's son, is displeased with the union of his mother and his uncle, only two months after the death of his father. Claudius has also, in some ways, usurped the throne from Hamlet. Polonius, the king's advisor requests that his son be allowed to return to France for university, and the king sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to ensure that peace remains between Denmark, where this play transpires, and Norway, where a prince named Fortinbras is preparing to take back some land it lost to Denmark in the time of Hamlet senior's reign. Hamlet desires to go see the ghost about which Horatio tells him, and when he does, he is informed by the ghost that it is his father! He is also told that his father was murdered by his brother, Claudius! Hamlet receives instructions to seek vengeance, and does so in some respects.

We hear a rumor that Hamlet has gone mad upon being spurned by Ophelia, his heart's desire, and that now he roams the castle in a state of confusion and strangeness. Claudius and Polonius use Ophelia to test the waters of Hamlet's madness, and spy upon him. Then a troupe of actors arrive, who will show a play to lift Hamlet's spirits, however, Hamlet has another idea. He pulls aside one  of the players and offers him a special part to read. Hamlet intends to display the murder of his father and watch his uncle's reaction, so that he might interpret his guilt. Claudius reacts strongly, and Hamlet is certain that he murdered his dad. Hamlet's soliloquy occurs in Act III Scene I of the play, before the guilt of Claudius is known for certain, but after his plan to trap Claudius in his guilt has been made.

The famous soliloquy begins...

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 arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them.

I would like to point something out here, that while the speech is often seen as a conversation with Hamlet to Hamlet about whether or not he should die, he uses quite a lot of active language. He chooses words such as "take arms," and "opposing," and crafts images such as standing firm in a "sea of troubles," as the waters of life, turbulent, try to drag him down. Although he mentions that his "mind" "suffers," the language which he uses to discuss ending his life, is active and physical, not passive and withdrawn. In his mind,  the "slings" and "arrows" of the chance and haphazard nature of human life afflict him, but in his body he is strong. He can choose to stop suffering in the mind but take control with his body, by fighting the fortune he faces in life. Does he mean by killing himself? This is the most popular and the universally accepted interpretation of this speech, but I want to push back on that interpretation, because of the grammar of the opening line. This is a question for us as well. Let us recall that I proposed that the most important theme in Hamlet is playing a part or affecting a persona. Let us also recall that Hamlet is rumored to be mad by Polonius. Now, I want to highlight that this speech has been adapted differently. In the 1943 version of the play free to watch on Youtube, Hamlet is alone for these lines. In the 1994 version, the word for word version, Hamlet is observed and spied upon while he recites this speech. If he is indeed monologuing, and not soliloquizing, then perhaps he directs this question to the room and listeners around him, which includes the audience, and the audience includes us.

Hamlet is not asking if he should end his own life, but he is asking us how we might take action when life appears worse than death due to mental suffering. He is also asking us whether our reaction to internal struggle should be an act of external violence. Unfortunately, Hamlet, although he does not kill himself, does kill another man, Polonius, the father of a girl with whom he might have had a romance. Hamlet chooses violence in reaction to his circumstances rather than a different active response to passive troubles. Well known and beloved, Hamlet has become an example of the subjective human, a person driven by internal and unknowable motives, whose actions are mere gestures of an inner truth that belongs to one capital "I" alone. He is the picture of modern individualism, cited as the moment where people became self identifying subjects, apart from their community. This sense of self also comes with a deep isolation. In class, the idea that continued coming up for me was the idea of the modern student, alone against an onslaught of seemingly unrelated news and opinions which reach them form other actors and individuals with whom they can choose to identify or not. Social media has made a mark on the soliloquizing young adult, in that nowadays, most of us find ourselves monologuing in our most private moments, and asking questions that apply to all subjects. We constantly ask "to be or not to be" and start discourse online with this "insert-adjective-here" format of conversing, and we play different roles at different times in these conversations. Seldom do we show our true selves, but often we find ourselves taking deliberate and serious action as a consequence of what began in a more passive and ideological sphere.

I think if we are to learn something from Hamlet, we are to learn that little has changed since Shakespeare wrote this highly identifiable speech. In the shoes of the Prince of Denmark, we interact with millions whose faces we are unaware watch us, but we ask them life's most meaningful questions nevertheless. Let's take caution as we radically isolate ourselves with how we discourse, and take a moment to remember the stakes which all of us have in the questions we ask, and the role we choose to play in responding to them.

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