Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Comparison of the "To be, or not to be" speech in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto, the Good Quarto, and the First Folio. "To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1).
The monologue, spoken in the play by Prince Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II, Scene 2, follows in its entirety. Rather than appearing in blank verse, the typical mode of composition of Shakespeare's plays, the speech appears in straight prose:
In this reading, Hamlet is disgusted by his mother's "incestuous" relationship with Claudius while simultaneously fearful of killing him, as this would clear Hamlet's path to his mother's bed. Ophelia's madness after her father's death may also be read through the Freudian lens: as a reaction to the death of her hoped-for lover, her father.
The phrase occurs in Hamlet act 3, scene 4, [6] as a part of one of Hamlet's speeches in the Closet Scene. [ a ] Hamlet has been acting mad to throw off suspicion that he is aware that his uncle, Claudius , has murdered his father and married his mother, Queen Gertrude , in order to usurp the throne.
Accordingly, the meaning might be: 'when we have unwound and worked off this coil of mortality.' In this way, the length of our life is metaphorically the length of thread that is coiled on a spool, a metaphor related to the ancient Greek mythological figures of the Fates. As humans live, the thread is unwound from the coil by the shuttle of ...
William Shakespeare's play Hamlet has contributed many phrases to common English, from the famous "To be, or not to be" to a few less known, but still in everyday English. Some also occur elsewhere (e.g. in the Bible) or are proverbial. All quotations are second quarto except as noted:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, A Tragic Episode, in Three Tabloids is a short play by W. S. Gilbert that parodies William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The main characters in Gilbert's play are King Claudius and Queen Gertrude of Denmark, their son Prince Hamlet , the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , and Ophelia .
David P. Gontar in his book Hamlet Made Simple proposes that Hamlet's delay is best explained by conceiving of Prince Hamlet as the son of Claudius, not Hamlet the Dane. Noting that Hamlet is suicidal in the first soliloquy well before he meets the Ghost, Gontar reasons that his depression is a result of having been passed over for the Danish ...