To be or not to be: Meaning Then

What was Big Willy Shakes going for?

Hamlet is basically contemplating suicide on and off throughout his soliloquies. In this soliloquy, he compares death to a little sleep, which he thinks wouldn't be so bad. The only catch is that we might have dreams when dead—bad dreams.

Of course, we'd escape a lot by being dead, like being spurned in love. This is that whole "slings and arrows" bit is all about. He's saying being in love is like being hit with thousands of arrows because it hurts so much. Plus Hamlet feels betrayed by his mom because she married so soon after his dad's death. And to his dad's murderer no less.

But then Hamlet wonders if it's better to put up with the bad things you know about in life than to run off into death's "undiscovered country." His problem is that he doesn't want to keep on living when he is super depressed about his uncle killing his dad and marrying his mom, but he doesn't know what death will bring and that's scary, too. He could totally end up a mopey, creepy, lonely ghost like his dad. Anyone else get chills?

Even thinking about the unknown that death brings "make cowards of us all." There are no people who travel back from death to tell us what death is like. There are no Twitter feeds or Facebook updates. So how do we know what to expect when we die? Well, we don't.

Hamlet may talk—and talk, and talk—about suicide, but what he's really concerned with is mortality, and the fact that our world is made of death and decay. (Yeah, we know that life looks pretty grim when you put it that way. Sorry.). From Hamlet's initial confrontation with a dead man's ghost to the final bloodbath, the play is trying to come to grips with just this problem: if we all die eventually, then does it really matter who kills us—and when?

Yep. It just got real. But that's pretty much the point of this speech. Hamlet is really seriously considering those Big Questions about life and death, and what it means to live.

Sure, you could say that Hamlet is starting to sound like a broken record with the whole suicide thing. But he just might be moving on here. After all, instead of obsessing about whether or not to kill himself, he's exploring the reasons why people in general don't commit suicide—which might be one reason he doesn't use the word "I" or "me" in this whole soliloquy. Go back and check. We're not lying.

He's not even talking directly about himself. He's thinking more generally about life itself. When it comes down to it, he's talking about you, us, and everyone else out there. That's why the question is "to be or not to be." Essentially, Hamlet's asking whether people should exist or not. Heavy stuff, no?