Hamlet’s Not Much
Not much just happens to be looking into the mind that wrote the greatest words lumped together in close proximity to each other in any language, which just happens to be about suicide, which just happens to be the Project’s re-directed focus.
Much could be written to set the stage prior to reproducing Hamlet’s words, but to what end? Anything written prior would likely be useless and smack of self-importance. There’s nothing for it. Here it is.
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,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these 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 pitch and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.[1]
There it is – Hamlet verbalizing his thoughts as he’s thinking suicide through. Hamlet spoke those words but are they his? Like, really his? Obviously, anything spoken by one of Shakespeare’s characters can be said to be of that character’s mind, obviously. However, the trick to understanding Shakespeare’s mind is trying to distinguish what he wrote strictly for literary purposes from what he wrote because he actually thought about it, thought it through, tried to understand it and held it as a personally held-belief. Once the distinction is made between words writ because they fit a scene and words writ because they were personal to Shakespeare the investigative peering into his thoughts behind the words becomes clearer and more impactful.
When Shakespeare’s Henry V gives his great St. Crispin’s Day speech, sure, Shakespeare wrote it, but the speech seems to be coming more from Henry’s thoughts than from thoughts that had anything to do with Shakespeare’s personal life. Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ lets the audience into Mark Antony’s mind more than Shakespeare’s notwithstanding Shakespeare wrote it; it just seems more connected to Antony, than personal to Shakespeare. To that end, it seems To be or not to be is spoken more from Shakespeare’s personal thoughts than Hamlet’s.
To Be Or Not To Be
It most certainly is. And it’s a curious question too because it seems to come out of nowhere. To be clear, Hamlet is not contemplating suicide, he’s just thinking it through: what happens after death and why not hasten death by your own hand to be rid of life’s troubles? Prior to Hamlet wondering about suicide, Hamlet shows no suicidal ideation, none. His madness is faked, not real, and he has just sworn to his father’s ghost he will avenge his murder. He’s in full control of his faculties and is determined to avenge his father; Hamlet has everything to live for, he wants to right a wrong and zero reason to die. Yes, he does previously call himself a coward for only talking about avenging his father’s death and not getting on with it but nowhere prior is there the sense that anything in Hamlet’s life has brought him to the point where he should be thinking about suicide from start to finish to post-finish. Say, unlike, Romeo or Juliet.
Be that as it may, the whole thing starts with a question; the question To be or not to be is Shakespeare’s invention: to be, i.e., living or not to be, i.e., dead. Shakespeare invented those few words and thought they would be a half-decent way to start a speech about the ins and outs of suicide; fairly clever one must admit. But maybe he was prompted to write those words after reading them from someplace else. If he got his inspiration or perhaps a seed of thought from someone else’s words – which eventually turned into his owns words – those other words might have come from The Cloud of Unknowing.[2]
The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous treatise by an elder English, Christian mystic teacher writing to a young student about how to get closer to God, in perfect harmony, using contemplation. Concepts in the Cloud include feeling one’s own being and the meaning of sorrow: he alone feels authentic sorrow who realizes not only what he is but that he is.[3] [Editor’s emphasis.] The unknown author suggests a person
almost despairs for the sorrow that he feels, weeping, lamenting, writhing, cursing and blaming himself. In a word, he feels the burden of himself so tragically that he no longer cares about himself if only he can love God. And yet in all this, never does he desire to not-be, for this is the devil’s madness and blasphemy against God…At the same time, however, he desires unceasingly to be freed from the knowing and feeling of his being.[4] [Emphasis added.]
In the author’s treatise called The Book of Privy Counseling some of the Cloud is repeated but there is also mention of sleep and how sleep can be compared to contemplative prayer; for in sleep the natural faculties cease from their work and happy the spirit, then, for it is freed to sleep soundly.[5]
All the teachings on prayer, contemplative thought, associated concepts and the like in the author’s two treatises were all directed towards the goal of becoming closer to God, which might be seen as the opposite of suicide. Indeed, the author explicitly says one should not desire to not be. And it is not conjectured Shakespeare almost certainly found inspiration for his famous speech after reading these works, if he did.
The sole reason the Project points to these works is that they discuss the two macro themes upon which Shakespeare foundated Hamlet’s speech – To be or not to be and sleep. If Shakespeare read the Cloud it’s possible its concept of ‘to be’ or ‘to not be’ and its idea of a prolonged permanent sleep – death – sparked a different train of thought in Shakespeare’s mind and Shakespeare used the underlying concept to develop his own thoughts on the matter; thinking To be or not to be might be a decent way to start a speech on suicide. If Shakespeare did read the Cloud leave it to him to shape and custom-fit it to his purposes wholly unrelated to their original meaning.
Regardless, whether Shakespeare found inspiration for his famous speech from the Cloud,or it is his complete invention, the question To be or not to be sets things in motion. What comes next sometimes gets overlooked.
Noble
If the question in line one outlines the speech’s over-arching dilemma the next few lines ponder which is nobler: to live or die by suicide, or put another way, why not kill yourself?
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?
Shakespeare had just finished Julius Caesar in c. 1599 and dialogued 4 suicides – three of which he classifies as honourable and noble and leaves the other one unspoken. Maybe Shakespeare, in Hamlet, wanted to break down, through reason, why suicide was thought by the Romans to be noble; maybe Shakespeare wanted to write it out and come up with his own reasoning behind such a position. Hamlet, c. 1600, one of his next likely plays after Caesar, was his opportunity. Thinking it through in Hamlet, he sort of asks the Romans, and his audience, a direct question: is it, really, nobler to kill yourself as opposed to letting come what may and suffer life’s toils?
Whether tis nobler in the mind
Option 1: to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
or nobler
Option 2: to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?
And thus begins the thought process that went into the most famous words ever writ: To be or not to be is the question; whether it is nobler to continue to suffer life’s sorrows or it is nobler to commit suicide, is the conundrum. If a person decides on Option 2, suicide, Shakespeare then goes through what that result would bring, how it would manifest, what to not be would look and feel like.
Suicide, Shakespeare says, would get rid of – by way of a permanent sleep – heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, an end certainly to be wished for. With a sleep comes dreams, but, uh-oh, what kind of dreams would one actually dream while in that sleep of death? That – dreams dreamed in the sleep of death – is the reason why Shakespeare initially says suicide’s hand is stayed and people put up with such a calamitous long life. Because really, other than that reason, why would people put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which he then goes on to describe as:
the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes
Building on that, the fact the unknown-death-dreams make people think twice about suicide, Shakespeare then introduces the second unknown: the dread of something after death. It is these two unknowns that Shakespeare sees as the two reasons why people bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. Therefore, he concludes, it’s the fact that
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 pitch and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
And thus Shakespeare concludes his greatest speech: it’s a person’s conscience – thinking about what kind of unknown death-dreams they’ll dream when dead and the possible dread of something after death – that makes them cowardly when faced with a situation where suicide could end a sea of troubles.
So, what does all that have to do with the nobleness question in the first couple of lines? Everything. It’s crystal clear: it’s Option 2, suicide, that is the noble option, Shakespeare’s preferred option. Shakespeare discards Option 1, suffering through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as being the not-noble option because it, being beset with conscience, shows cowardice.
The Roman suicides were characterized by honour and courage resulting in the view suicide was noble. Honour and courageous equals noble. Conscience and cowardice equals not-noble. Though Hamlet only uses the word ‘noble’ once it’s clear during the rest of his speech he’s thinking the conundrum through – which is nobler? – and when he has finished thinking it through, there is a clear winner: it is nobler to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. It is nobler to take arms against a sea of troubles than suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
If one concludes Shakespeare thought suicide noble was only due to the premise he was following the view laid down by Roman culture it is somewhat clear they’ve misinterpreted what Hamlet’s speech really stands for and how Shakespeare ends up answering the question, without explicitly letting on that he did. To be or not to be is not Hamlet’s mind we’re reading, its Shakespeare’s, his personally-held belief.
Ophelia
Ophelia’s suicide was partially discussed earlier to the extent it shed light on how Shakespeare wove into his characters’ dialogue how the burials and funerals of suicides were treated in the 17th century. Also discussed earlier was the problem of identification that some suicides presented – was the death a suicide or not? Shakespeare has his grave-diggers go over those niceties in comic array. Later, Shakespeare has Laertes, Ophelia’s brother, dispute her death was attributable to suicide; the Priest, for his part, makes clear it was a suicide and therefore she is only entitled to abridged funeral services – notwithstanding she is going to be buried with partial Christian assent.
The scene below has Shakespeare introduce another aspect the way certain suicides were treated in 17th century England: the fact one’s social status could impact suicide burials. The higher the social status, the more forgiving the law could be when determining post-death rituals. The two grave-diggers briefly explain.
Gravedigger
If this had not been a gentlewoman, she
should have been buried out a Christian
burial.
Second Gravedigger
Why, there thou say’st; and the
more pity that great folk should have
count’nance *approval* in this world to drown or hang
themselves more than their even-Christian.[6]
The gravediggers recognize the different treatment between societal classes and it is a pity those of higher status – great folk, a gentleman or gentlewoman – sometimes get preferential treatment after a suicide. This is another example of a subtle poke Shakespeare occasionally took at high society when he was defending those of lesser means.
On balance, when looking at the dialogue by all the characters when they were talking about Ophelia’s suicide, Shakespeare always seemed to try to shed light on the fact the laws and customs around suicide were unjust and didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Shakespeare’s Statement On Suicide
As he had in other plays, Shakespeare dialogues contemporary problems with 17th century laws and highlighted the era’s harsh views concerning suicide such as identification issues, burial and funeral rites and how social status could possibly induce differential treatment towards the corpse. Hamlet also offers a great glimpse into Shakespeare’s mind as to how he viewed suicide in the main, personally. When beset with outrageous fortune and a sea of troubles suicide, as opposed to bearing those ills, was the preferred, clear option; the noble option. It is only a person’s conscience that stays their hand. In fact, if faced with the proper circumstances not committing suicide was seen by Shakespeare as cowardly and puzzling.
Shakespeare opens the window to Lucrece’s mind; Hamlet opens the door to Shakespeare’s.
SDRP
[1] 3.1.56-88, 1047.
[2] Unknown author, The Cloud of Unknowing, c. late 1300s in William Johnston, The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling (Penguin Random House, 2014).
[3] Johnston, Cloud, Chapter 44, 92.
[4] Johnston, Cloud, Ch. 44, 93.
[5] Johnston, The Book of Privy Counseling, Ch. 9, 155.
[6]5.1.23-30, 1065.