Fav lines of poetry

 1. “To be or not to be:

    that is the question”

  

We have our most illustrious playwright to thank for one of the most famous quotations in the English language. William Shakespeare wrote these immortal lines in Hamlet, and to make better sense of them, let’s look at a few more lines:

“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.”

Spoken by Hamlet himself, these words essentially talk about whether it’s better to live – and face one’s troubles – or die, and be rid of them that way. The implication here is that pain in life is inevitable – “outrageous fortune” has this fate in store for us, and it is for us to choose whether we face up to our “sea of troubles” or end them in death. However, the Elizabethans believed that those who committed suicide would be eternally damned (he refers later in this soliloquy to “the dread of something after death”) – which adds an extra complexity to Hamlet’s dilemma. Life, he implies, is bad; but death might be worse. This is a subtlety overlooked by the numerous references to this speech in popular culture.