Window to the Mind-- A Soliloquy from Hamlet----Act III-Scene I
--Lines56-90.
Hamlet is the most complex of
the characters, created by Shakespeare. His father was the king of Denmark, who
was murdered by his own brother, Claudius.
It must have been a shock to young Hamlet, and to add insult to injury,
his mother marries Claudius.
Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears
and informs Hamlet that his brother,
Claudius, poured poison into his ears while he was sleeping in the garden, and killed him. The
ghost asks Hamlet to take revenge on Claudius. Hamlet is torn between
conflicting thoughts. The prescribed part focuses on Hamlet’s troubled mind.
“To
be or not to be” is the famous quotation from Shakespeare. Hamlet is not sure
what is better: to bear all kinds of evil and shocking things that nature
throws at us and suffer patiently, or oppose them and end them by taking arms.
The third option is to end our lives by committing suicide. “Death” is compared
to sleep, and if by this sleep of death, we can put an end to all the
heartaches and natural shocks of this life, it is to be sincerely wished, but nobody is sure of the evils one has to
face in the dreams that may occur in the sleep of death. They may be worse than
the sorrows, one faces in this life. This fear makes people bear the evils in
life—the oppressor’s cruel treatment,
the proud man’s insult, the pain of despised love, the rudeness of
people in office, and the contempt of the unworthy people-- very
patiently. They prefer these evils to
the unknown, perhaps, more horrible things in the life after death. So, they
don’t dare to take away their lives with a dagger, which appears to be easier
than bearing all the hardships of this life..
Hamlet
feels that this dread of facing terrible things after death makes us all
cowards. We are not able to carry out great activities or new projects because
this fear of the unknown after death hampers all our movements. So far, no
traveler has returned from “the undiscover’d country,” of death. Hence the fear
of death grips us, and makes us cling on to life in spite of various
difficulties and sorrows. Hamlet ends his soliloquy, when he sees Ophelia reading a prayer book.
He asks her to remember to ask pardon for all his sins in her prayer.
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