Speech
“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” Philip K. Dick.
Good morning HSC students and Mr Cheeseman. Most poignantly, Hamlet’s to be or not to be.... symbolically portrays great significance in the context of the whole play. I strongly believe Hamlet could not have successfully performed the act of interchanging between the state of being sane and insane without actually being sane/insane in the first place. Hamlet's impassioned outburst to the audience metaphorically represents profound importance as it encapsulated major, universal, timeless concerns, which still plagues today’s society.
During the Elizabethan period, plays dealing with revenge and tragedy were inevitably common. Since there were strong notions of change and religious upheavals during this phase, there was a dramatic emphasis on the perception of melancholy and insanity. This era , known as the Renaissance period ,encouraged escaping traditional styles of theatre, in turn encouraging the creation of such works as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, encompassing the social, economical and historical concerns of the time.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet presents a contemplative young prince, Hamlet, who experiences melancholy and depression as a consequence of his father’s passing and his mother’s incestuous marriage with his uncle. The sense of melancholic outburst derived from these events inevitably drives Hamlet to a point in which he considers suicide and this notion is successfully exposed in the infamous soliloquy :
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. To die, to sleep;
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:...