This above all: to thine own self be true...

Hamlet and the Gravediggers, Jean Dagnan-Bouveret, 1883.

"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 heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep! perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes 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 despis'd 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 these fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;

And enterprises of great pith and moment,

With this regard, their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action. Soft you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remember'd.

Hamlet (III, i, 56-61)

Perhaps the most famous soliloquy in literature, these words reflect the state of desperation in which Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, finds himself as he contemplates suicide. His father, the King, has died. His mother, the Queen, has remarried within a month of the King's passing, an act which has disturbed young Hamlet in and of itself. To make it worse, she has married the King's brother, Hamlet's uncle, who is now the King of Denmark. As Hamlet's despair deepens, he learns (through the appearance of an apparition of his dead father) that the old King was murdered by the new King. Hamlet's growing awareness of the betrayal of his mother and evil of Claudius leads to a deepening depression and madness. This soliloquy contains the famous words "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all", hinting that the "dread of something after death"-purgatory, hell, perhaps-is what keeps Hamlet alive to avenge his father.