The interpretations of this famous Shakespeare's soliloquy i read on internet depicts it as Hamlet contemplating about suicide. I read it as something else.
What is read is as choice of being passive or dying fighting by choosing to be active.
To be or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Dilemma begins with first option of being open minded and noble to think that everything is pure and justified. That fortune is not outrageous but our own thinking is making it. So, we keep on suffering and trying to make our thoughts nobler. Mind keep on suffering to maintain a rose tinted view.
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die to sleep
Second option is to fight for your believe, for your perception of righteous. In this process of fighting sooner or later mortality would take you 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?
Sleep, death avoids all the agony of existing in world which is with odds at your inner belief.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep
Absence or end of agony is the ultimate goal everyone wish for.
To sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub,
Though death is the ultimate peace, there is a catch why people don't want to die.
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.
The catch is that no one know what exist after death, though we are certain that death will end the shocks of flesh, what else if will bring no one knows.
There's the respect that make calamity of so long life: For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time, the Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely, the pangs of despised love, the Law's delay, the insolence of Office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his Quietus make with a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life,
Coming back to first option of surviving; it is respected otherwise who would suffer in natural mortal pains of human existence.
but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.
But it is not respect that make people choose to live. It is fear of unknown after death.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
The real force behind the reason to live is fear
And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over, with the pale cast of thought,
the force of action, is made bleak by thought creation of unseen future after death
And the enterprise of great pith and moment, with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action
Thus thought douse the fire of action
Soft you now, The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy Orisons, Be all my sins remembered.
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