To Be(come)

The most famous line in all of Shakespeare (and English letters) is Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech, found in Act 3 scene 1 of his play. It goes like this:

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.

We were supposed to talk about it today in class, but I got so wrapped up in talking about the play, I missed the opportunity to really dive into this speech. While some of my students may appreciate the fact that they don't have to talk much about Shakespeare, I'm constantly frustrated by my own inability to shut up and listen to the students. Because of my own motor-mouth ways, we end up spending about 85 of the 100 minutes in class watching a film version of the play or listening to me speak. The final fifteen minutes opens up the dialogue a little bit.

I've been trying for years to avoid this problem, but it always comes back to the fact that there's so much in the play and so little time to discuss it. So--naturally--I avoid talking about it hardly at all.

This has nothing to do with the time dedicated to it, however: When I taught the play to my seniors last year, we spent one day discussing the first twenty or so lines of this speech--we never even finished it. This speech is a well that constantly replenishes.

That seems impossible, and for those who already dis- (or won't) like Shakespeare, the speech can come across as...underwhelming. What's he even complaining about? To die or not? Why is he using weird words like "quietus" or "fardels"? In a lot of ways, the speech is just that: a speech.

But it is layered with implications, both for Hamlet as a character, the plot of the play, and deeper meanings. The one thing I try to leave with my students, though, is less of existentialism (at this point in the play, Hamlet is considering suicide--"his quietus make/With a bare bodkin"--but he's not doubting that he exists...he's more worried that he will continue to exist) and one more of implication. I use Truman G. Madsen's version of "To be(come) or not to be(come)" as the crux of the argument. Are we--students and teacher alike--aware of the continual, lifelong, unending process of becoming something better? Or are we choosing not to become something greater? Seen from this angle, the speech is driving at the idea of suffering the "sea of troubles" in order to metamorphose into something different. And that something is the dread of the speech. What we may become ought to both frighten (dread) and inspire (conscious) us. Hamlet is pessimistic, yes, but he's not wrong: If we do not act--"lose the name of action"--then we cannot become something more.

What we become? That is, indeed, the question.