Aug 21, 2008

Hamlet | An Approach to Hamlet

In this excerpt L.C. Knight discusses the meaning of Hamlet's celebrated soliliquoy, "To Be or Not to Be."

There is, perhaps, no well-known passage in Shakespeare that has been found so perplexing as that in which Hamlet communes with himself between the preparation of the play to catch the conscience of the king and its performance—'To be, or not to be, that is the question . . .' It can perplex for various reasons, one of them being the variety of different explanations of crucial phrases that can reasonably be made. (In the Furness Variorum edition the text completely disappears for a couple of pages whilst a footnote marshals conflicting interpretations of the opening and general tenor;...