SARAH:  This is probably the most memorized speech in the English language, yet, astoundingly, there is no consensus on what it actually means.

RALPH:  Perhaps it’s precisely this lack of consensus that makes it so famous!  Although it is probably more due to the first line of the soliloquy:  “To be or not to be:  that is the question.”

SARAH:  This opening line, at least, seems to be fairly straightforward . “To be or not to be”, that is, to live or to die, to exist or to stop existing.  But the next few lines present two distinct choices, or two possible paths to follow.  Ralph, would you…?

RALPH:  Sure, Sarah.

“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.”

SARAH:  The meaning of the first choice, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, seems clear:  Hamlet means putting up with the misfortunes of life.  And in his own specific case, he’s referring to putting up with the murder of his father, his mother’s remarriage to Claudius, his rejection by Ophelia, and so on, without trying to change things.

RALPH:  But the second choice is “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.” One way to read this is that Hamlet is referring to taking up arms against Claudius, trying to kill him, and to put an end to the matter one way or the other, resulting in either Claudius’s death or his own.

SARAH:  In the original Hamlet legend that Shakespeare used for a source, the Hamlet character says, “Either I will stand over Claudius’s body holding my bloody sword in the air in triumph, or I will die trying.”

SARAH:  But many critics see these first few lines of the soliloquy as a possible reference to suicide. One such critic is Harold Bloom, a Professor at Yale University and one of the most widely known literary critics of our time

SARAH:  Bloom sees Shakespeare as the first modern intellectual writer, and as someone who radically changed the way we think about ourselves as human beings.

SARAH:  Bloom sees a dramatic shift in Hamlet’s outlook since his “rogue and peasant” soliloquy near the end of Act II, when he seemed determined on a course of revenge.  According to Bloom, Hamlet has now sunken back into the suicidal despair of the very first soliloquy, the “too too solid flesh” monologue from Act 1.

RALPH:  These sudden and extreme mood swings that Hamlet exhibits throughout the play would be consistent with the severe depression, or melancholy, diagnosed by earlier critics like A.C. Bradley and John Dover Wilson.

SARAH:  For Bloom, when Hamlet says “whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer,” Hamlet’s talking about the the demons in his mind, demons that would be eliminated through suicide, instead of getting rid of the demonic Claudius.

RALPH:  Yet even if there is perhaps a reference here to suicide, Bloom doesn’t think the whole soliloquy is a meditation on suicide –  instead, for Bloom, the real meaning of “to be or not to be” is, as he says it, “the power of Hamlet’s own mind against a universe of death, or a sea of troubles.”

SARAH:  And in this struggle, even though the soliloquy seems to end on a dark note, where action becomes impossible, Bloom sees a kind of victory for Hamlet and his deep capacity for self-reflection. Bloom writes:  “Hamlet’s will loses the name for action, but not the true nature of action, which abides in the exaltation of mind.”

RALPH:  Bloom is not alone in emphasizing the centrality of self-reflection in this speech.  Marjorie Garber, a Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard, and author of a book called Shakespeare After All, writes that this speech has come to be crucial to what we mean by modern subjectivity or our sense of self.

SARAH:  Garber writes:  “Although Hamlet contemplates action, contemplates murder, contemplates revenge, it is being, not doing that have made this character the mirror that subsequent writers, philosophers, and critics have held up to human nature.”