The Helplessness of Man

The Helplessness of Man

Out of all that William Shakespeare contributed to the English language, little is better known than Hamlet’s soliloquy, To Be or Not to Be, in the first scene of the second act of Hamlet. Even given the prominence of the passage, it is nearly impossible to extract a definite meaning from the speech and at most, there is consensus that Hamlet is considering suicide as a way to escape from the traumas he experiences and the growing madness that underlies the development of his character. Hamlet’s reason for the speech, in a quotidian, contextual sense, stems in part from his lack of control over his grim present circumstances. There is much to think about as he experiences the “pangs of despised love” (80) from Ophelia’s rejection of his advances, his uncle Claudius’ murder and usurpation of the power of the original king, Hamlet’s father, and a call to vengeance by a spectral paternal vision. More existentially, Hamlet meditates on the unknowable nature of the afterlife, the fundamental pointlessness of living, as well as our vulnerability at the fear of death that traps one within a life which Hamlet considers a living hell. In the passage, Shakespeare uses anaphora, metaphors and Hamlet’s detached, depressed tone as the prince determines that our vulnerability to fear, especially of the beyond, is the only control on keeping people from choosing release through suicide from life’s torture.

Early in his soliloquy, Hamlet contrasts two perspectives on death with an anaphora. He

questions whether barely endurable suffering is unique to him as an individual or in a greater sense, reflective of the human condition as he explores the unknowingness and the unknowable that make people inherently fearful of death. Earlier in the play, Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, revealing to him the prospect of an afterlife so he is left little choice but to believe in something beyond life. He ruminates on death and the uncertainty surrounding the afterlife and states “[t]o die, to sleep … we end [t]he heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to … To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there’s the rub” (68-73). On one hand, life is characterized by tortuous pain and suffering sufficient to make death seem preferable to life, yet given that what follows death is unknowable; heaven, hell or something entirely different, he is anxious that suicide might tip the balance to eternal misery perhaps worse than earthly suffering. As Hamlet further considers his existential predicament he questions through use of the ambiguous word “heir” whether his struggle with the meaning of life and death is solely personal as heir to the king, or more reflective of humanity in general, heirs to the wages of original sin.

For Hamlet, with his awareness of at least a ghostly afterlife, suicide is a deeply troubling notion and a dubious way out of his crisis. The prince lives at a time when the Catholic church holds monopoly over Christian faith and dogma, and a suicide, abjured by the church, risks excommunication and eternal damnation. Hamlet shows religiously inculcated aversion for the act that could free him from his suffering when he remarks on the ecclesiastical prohibition “[o]r that the Everlasting had not fixed [his] canon’ gainst self-slaughter!” (135-136). With killing oneself an unpalatable option due to fear of the unknown, along with assurances by the church that suicide has eternal negative consequence, Hamlet must consider the most efficacious manner in which to meet and contend with life’s perpetual turmoil.

Hamlet, uncertain about the nature of life beyond death and fearful about the consequences of suicide on eternity, must endure existence, or “the calamity of so long life” (77). Nonetheless, he still questions whether it is fair or right to expect one to endure life’s difficulties without complaint or pushback. He questions whether “‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [o]r to take arms against a sea of troubles” (65-67) demonstrating his and humanity’s profound conundrum. His thought, composed of two metaphors, showcases that either decision, life as a uncomplaining martyr, or as an active resistant to life’s unrelenting oppression, leads essentially to the same end, despair. Hamlet compares slings and arrows, indiscriminately meted out and uncompromisingly deadly earthly weapons of war, to the unbearable indignities he and others suffer from the blows meted out without reason by fortune, or unpredictable destiny. For Hamlet, fortune is unknowable and it is largely irrelevant whether fortune has an agenda, and it may or may not be out to get him or others. Though he doesn’t appear to believe in fortune’s agency, regardless, he and possibly all of humanity must find ways to survive the torments of life. Hamlet questions and wishes to reject the strategy of passive acquiescence to a living hell with no clear escape. On the other hand, he understands that though one may choose to fight, it is evidently impossible to attack a sea, a body incapable of being conquered by a single human or even a society,due to its sheer size and status as an inanimate subject. By mentioning this Sisyphean task, Shakespeare demonstrates Hamlet’s conviction that the human condition on Earth, possibly calculated, but more likely entirely unplanned, cannot