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Friday, December 3, 2010

What's the strangest line in the world's most famous soliloquy?

The most famous soliloquy in the history of the world? Has to be to be or not to be. Though I I haven't taught Shakespeare in many years and when I did I focused on the comedies, and though I am not up on Shakespeare criticism in the least, I'm going to venture an observation that I don't think anyone's made about Hamlet's To Be (I may be wrong, and if I am please let me know): the most striking and revealing aspect of the soliloquy is that it shows us Hamlet's incredible loneliness and isolation. He's considering suicide, and he decides he cannot kill himself because he might suffer in an afterlife - thus conscience dost make cowards of us all. Interesting thought, intellectually - but it's not the way someone considering suicide would think - especially someone who's not really serious about suicide, but just grandstanding or posturing or as they say calling for help. There's not a word in the soliloquy (is there?) about how his death would sadden anyone living - his mother, his beloved, any one of his friends. Isn't that one of the main reasons depressed people turn from suicide - their connection to others? Their sense of the havoc their death would cause? Not in a grandiose manner, but just try to imagine life after your violent death. Would it make a difference, would anyone care? Hamlet doesn't even say that - nobody will care if I die. He's just indifferent to others - no other person seems to matter to him. In that way, the most strange and powerful line of the soliloquy is the last: But soft, the fair Ophelia. He sees her - but he doesn't even make the connection between her life and his death.

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