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01.Hamlet
a.“To be" means to live and not to take action and suffer the life passively.“Not to be”means to take action and die and to end one’s sufferings actively.
i.This soliloquy shows the attitude of a Renaissance humanist toward life and death. The speech represents Hamlet's contemplation of suicide. Here, Hamlet is pondering the question of“life or death”.
ii.He is thinking of committing suicide to end his own life by a sudden act of bravery, but he hesitates, doubting whether death can give him rest and peace.
iii.On one hand, he defends personal revenge and social injustice, but on the other, he realizes the predicament he is in due to his excessive thinking.
b.As a spokesman and intellectual for Renaissance humanism, Hamlet is the central figure of the tragedy.
i.As an idealistic thinker, he is forthright, courageous and honest by nature. To realize his personal ideal of filial piety and a strong sense of justice to demand revenge, he pays great tribute to the infinite capabilities of man:“ the beauty of the world/ the paragon of animals.”
ii.Being a careful observer, he is introspective, thoughtful, perhaps world- weary and sardonic.For his delaying inaction in revengeful action, trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing, and plotting, and bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his father' s death, he is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact and thought, language and action.
c.His life is constantly role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility.He is too sophisticated to degrade his soul to the conventional role of a stage revenger.
