For CSUF English 102 Students and Casual Passerbys
From perhaps the most famous passage in all of Shakespeare, here is a clip that combines multiple interpretations of Hamlet’s third soliloquy, the “To be or not to be” speech. Note the similarities and the differences between the scenes. You may find a transcript of the Hamlet’s Third Soliloquy at the end of this post.
A point of interest in this soliloquy tends to be the debate over if this passage truly reflects Hamlet’s struggle of whether or not he should commit suicide. For my part, I really do think that is but one of Hamlet’s considerations, but I think there’s much more going on here than that. This is one of the things that makes this particular clip compelling: I think one can get a sense of which actors and directors want to emphasize the suicidal aspect of the soliloquy while others have opted to “read” Hamlet with a different emphasis, and here’s the fun part (or the hard part…): each one of these interpretations has merit, even the parody! So here are some questions for your own consideration and reflection:
- Which scene(s) do you think emphasize(s) Hamlet’s inner-struggle with suicide?
- Which scene(s) seem(s) to be emphasizing something else?
- What is it about the setting, the acting, the lighting, etc., lends each segment to various interpretations?
The same questions can be asked between the multitudes of any Shakespeare productions including the “inspired by…” interpretations i.e. Twelfth Night the text itself, Trevor Nunn’s Film (1999), and She’s the Man (Fickman 2006). What from Twelfth Night do you think Trevor Nunn is trying to emphasize? What from Twelfth Night do you think Fickman is trying to emphasize with She’s the Man?
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. (III.i.58-90)
5 Comments
Grant Dempsey
March 07, 2012 at 10:46 pmI think another interesting question at least to mull over, if not to answer (because it’s probably unanswerable), is the extent to which the texts are designed to generate such a range of interpretations as they’ve generated. That is to say, to what extent do we want to think of it as true that Kenneth Branagh’s realization of the scene represents one possibility that Shakespeare pretty much had in mind while composing the scene in text, that Franco Zeffirelli’s represents another, that Laurence Olivier’s represents another, etc.? It’s kinda like the story of the blind men who all touch a different part of one elephant… Or do we want to say that there is no elephant already there, that Shakespeare’s text doesn’t somehow contain all of these interpretations as inherent potentialities but that a part of Shakespeare’s brilliance and technique is his self-conscious manipulation of the vagueness of the medium of text? That Shakespeare is able deliberately to construct texts so they can be read in ways that are cohesive and yet that even he can’t anticipate specifically?
Grant Dempsey
March 08, 2012 at 8:17 pmI just wanted to add that in part this stems from a certain impulse in me actually to oppose “bardolatry.” For that reason, I was a little bit in conflict with myself when I wrote “a part of Shakespeare’s brilliance” in my proposal of the second interpretive idea. I do think that if we really want to get to the heart of these texts, then at a certain point we’ve got to kind of drop the idea of Shakespeare’s brilliance as something that renders his consciousness distant from ours not only in time and space but also in its nature (i.e. the idea that his thought is simply “beyond” ours because of his talent). At a certain point we should want not primarily to celebrate Shakespeare’s genius and instead to recall Shakespeare’s humanity. It’s sometimes said that a goal in science is to make the familiar unfamiliar, to see an object in a way that is new and facilitates deeper thought about that object. I think maybe we should do the opposite here: we should make what we’ve made unfamiliar familiar again in order to make deeper thought possible. If we assume that Shakespeare’s fallible, and that he’s pretty much like ourselves except in that he happens to be very talented and practiced at poetry, then we can get better in touch with Shakespeare as a-human-being-who-has-communicated-with-us-in-writing.
That’s why I like the question of whether it’s to be said that Shakespeare’s made a whole elephant for directors to touch different—but all practically preformed—parts of, as if the text were so broad just ontologically, or that, I dunno, Shakespeare’s conscious of and working with the intrinsic vagueness of his medium, in this case according to the particular demands of theatrical writing. How do we want to understand the manner in which a text seems to invite not slavish interpretation but creative reconstruction (i.e. the apparent truth that every reader of Hamlet has his or her own fundamentally unique Hamlet)? It gets us thinking about Shakespeare’s writing process, about his text as a way of entrance into his experience as one of us, and in that way lets us start to think of engaging Hamlet as in principle not terribly unlike just sitting down and having a beer with the ol’ bard.
Craig Bernthal
March 10, 2012 at 5:58 pmWell, you know how much I love doing it this way. “No one is going to tell this sweet prince good night!”
Jeremiah Henry
March 10, 2012 at 7:03 pmOh yes! At this point, Hamlet isn’t ready to find out “what dreams may come” or to, ahem, put Claudius to sleep either. As you suggested to our class, this clip from The Last Action Hero is the perfect parody. I really do love the line you quoted, too. It ties the parody and the text together, and it’s just plain funny.
Grant Dempsey
March 11, 2012 at 5:29 am“To be, or not to be. …Not to be.” Cue explosions.