Sunday Pages: "To Be, Or Not To Be"

A soliloquy by William Shakespeare

In a particularly bleak moment of my early 20s, when life seemed hopeless and failure inevitable, I pulled from my shelves the paperback copy of Hamlet on which cover my mother had written her name in perfect cursive, and read—really read—the Dane’s soliloquy.

“Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations,” Oscar Wilde once snarked, and he had a point. Shakespeare at his best is as sublime as English literature gets—he was basically inventing the language in real time—but there’s an awful lot of Shakespeare that belongs on the cutting room floor. Hamlet, however, feels like a greatest hits album. It is Past Masters Volume 2, and the soliloquy is “Hey Jude,” the artist at the peak of his powers. Sometimes, hype is justified.

As I read the soliloquy, I marveled at how powerful it was, how complete. I had an idea of writing something down that day, hoping to get something productive out of my foul mood, but I could only laugh. There was no way anyone could ever write something better on the subject of Is life worth living? Shakespeare had obviated the need. I might as well try to sculp David.

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? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.

That’s the part everyone knows, the part they teach in school. Hamlet is wondering whether or not he should bother. He’s on the fence about it. He imagines death as sleep, and considers how lovely it would be to close his eyes, drift into eternal rest, and not have to deal with the agony any more. Because, I mean, Hamlet is going through some things.

What stops him from drowning himself in said sea of troubles is that he doesn’t know what comes next, and that terrifies him. What if there is an afterlife—and it’s even worse? The speech continues, after the lines the English teachers had us memorize once upon a time, as he explores this dread idea:

There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

That’s a fancy way of asking, “Why would anyone put up with the incredible bullshit life throws at you when you can just slit your wrists?” A bodkin is a dagger.

And then comes the word more essential to the best poetry than any other: but.

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Hamlet is so afraid of what might come after that he determines that suicide is too risky. His desire to do himself in melts away. That “undiscover’d country” could be a hellscape, after all. Better the devil you know.

In my angsty twenties, as discussed, I thought this was the best meditation on suicide anyone could possibly write. Shakespeare had all the bases covered. But now I see that this is not actually the case. For one thing, Hamlet is behaving rationally. He is able to dispassionately examine his options: to be, or not to be. But suicidal ideation is, almost by definition, irrational. The Prince has it backwards: It’s the “pale cast of thought” that does the sicklying over, not the other way around.

So Hamlet’s objective approach to self-harm is of a piece with Dorothy Parker’s, in her poem “Resumé:”

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Clever as all get-out, and unlike Shakespeare, meant to amuse, not to convince.

The flaw in the Hamlet soliloquy is that it depends on fear. He doesn’t “lose the name of action” because he wants to stay alive, but because he’s terrified of death. Which misses the point. And the point is this: Life is fucking awesome! You’re the Prince of Denmark, dude! You have cool friends! Ophelia is too hot for a nunnery! Get your shit together for five minutes, quiet those ghosts, and the world is yours!

Even now, in the post-Trump, post-truth universe of OANN and Omicron, of rampant gun violence and science denial—a grim reality in which we have to not only know who Lauren Boebert and Mike Flynn and Jim Jordan are, but pay actual attention to them—the world is amazing! It is! There is so much good out there, so much beauty, so much poetry and art and genius and love—more than there has ever been before, in all of history, recorded or otherwise. As Paul Simon put it, these are the days of miracle and wonder!

Is it hard to see it some days? Of course. Does the ugliness and ignorance and cruelty muck it all up? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there, shining through the darkness, always.

This “Bittersweet” line from Brian Andreas, in a print I saw hanging on a friend’s wall around the time I re-read Hamlet 25 years ago, beautifully sums up what I’m talking about—and what the eponymous Dane is unable to see: “She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful & life was so short.”

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Photo credit: Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, 1948.