To Be, Or Not To Be - William Shakespeare

Hamlet Presentation
1. Read poem.
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: 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,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller 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.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
***explain a little about Hamlet and why he would feel this way***



2. Explain its meaning. How he writes.
***show vuvox***
• The “to be or not to be” soliloquy is in Act3, Scene 1 of Hamlet and Hamlet was written around 1599-1601 but the date isn’t for sure because none of William Shakespeare’s writing was published until after his death in 1616 at the age of 52. Two of Shakespeare's fellow actors put together and published thirty-six of William Shakespeare’s works. This collection is known as the First Folio. This soliloquy is one of Shakespeare's most famous piece of writing ever. A soliloquy is a character relating his or her thoughts and feelings to him/herself and to the audience without addressing any of the other characters.
***Remember to read each segment before explaining it***
• First slide: Here Hamlet is introducing his emotions and comparing them to war. He is stricken with grief but also anger for his father’s death. He is introducing his first thought of how maybe he should just end it all.
• Second slide: Hamlet starts to compare death to sleep and that when we sleep, all the trouble in the world goes away and that it is a perfection that is wished.
• Third slide: He starts saying how when you’re sleeping, you dream and he asks what dreams come with that sleep of death. He begins to say that that is where we pause because we don’t know the answer.
• Fourth slide: Here he is saying that why should he have to live with all this grief, of his father dying, of his uncle murdering his father, when he could easily make it all go away.
• Fifth slide: He is saying that it would be easy to end his life with a naked blade instead of bearing with the torments of life but that he dreads what is on the other side. The place where no traveler returns. Hamlet also asks if it would be better to bear with what he knows or to leave and go someplace, where he doesn’t know.
• Sixth slide: Lastly, he is saying that our conscience is what gets us in the end. How we, at first, think that it is a good idea but then realizing that we don’t know what happens in the afterlife and that we end of turning away from it. That is the end of the main soliloquy and after he realizes that Ophelia, a lord named Polonius’s daughter, so he addresses her.
• Hamlet is weighing his options: suicide and possibly facing horror, or living in his constant misery.
• Shakespeare uses Iambic Pentameter which means that each line has to be a certain amount of syllables or “feet”, each line must have five “feet”, and within each separate “feet” there are stressed and unstressed syllables. That’s why he uses ‘Tis or th’ instead of thee so he could have enough syllables in the line.
• When writing this soliloquy, Shakespeare uses a very rhetorical type of writing.So he's kind of asking questions that he already knows the answer to. He also used highly developed metaphors especially in this piece. Hamlet never actually says he is contemplating suicide and compares it to sleep but an even more deep metaphor is when he talks about war. When he talks about war, he is talking about his emotions and that he needs to express how he feels and therefore he uses something just as frenzied and outrageous enough to explain them, war.

3. Explain how it fits with the time period.
• It is very dramatic and that is one way that it is like the Elizabethan Era since they were so dramatic then.
•But Hamlet is very different from the other plays in that time period. Most plays then usually followed rules of Aristotle in his Poetics: that drama should be more about action, not character. Shakespeare made this play the opposite so that people learned of Hamlets thoughts and motives through the soliloquies, not the action.
• The play also has hints of Catholic acts because it was a very religious time. The ghost comes back and says that he has not had his last rights which are important in Catholicism. Revenge tragedies were huge in traditionally Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, because to the Catholic Church the strongest duty was to God and family so if anything happened to your family, you’d have to do something about it.