To be or Not to be: A Study of Ambivalence

Having Chosen the title of this paper almost at random from the most famous of Hamlet's soliloquies, I would like to introduce it with another passage from the same play, spoken not by Hamlet but by his uncle and step-father in Act IV. Addressing Laertes and lamenting the passage of time, Claudius says:

There lives within the very flame of love

A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it;

And nothing is at a like goodness still;

For goodness, growing to a plurisy,

Dies in his own too much; that we would do,

We should do when we would …

The word ‘plurisy’, with or without an ‘e’, was used by Elizabethan writers to imply a surfeit or superabundance, rather than in its present sense as a disease affecting the lungs, but both meanings have relevance to Claudius's paradoxical reflection. As many critics have pointed out, the imagery of disease—insidious, poisonous, deadly—permeates the whole play. Coleridge described its atmosphere of seeping melancholy as ‘a state of cold or chilling damp from without and of anxiety inwardly, a morbid unwholesome state’. It mirrors not only Hamlet's abnormally disturbed frame of mind, following the death of his father and his mother's swift remarriage, but that of the Danish court, rife with corruption, treachery and intrigue. In the same way it may reflect not only the troubled times in which the play was written, at the beginning of a new century, but also the fact that Shakespeare's own father died in September 1601. His only son, Hamnet, had died in 1596. Man's helplessness in the fact of sudden change, above all death, seems inevitably to breed phantasies of rankling infection and hidden malignant growths, as well as of the sharp sword or surgeon's knife that may kill or cure; in other words all the mysterious shadowy aspects of man's dual nature.