Hamlet 5

In his famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy Hamlet weighs the pros and cons of suicide.  First, he compares a life of "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to "tak[ing] arms against a sea of troubles / And, by opposing, end them" (III.i.66-68).  The metaphorical choices Hamlet makes here are important clues to which way the scale is tipping.  Slings and arrows are relatively small, crude weapons and may not be as accurate or as powerful as more modern weapons such as pistols and other firearms.  In contrast, the sea is an image that writers often use to demonstrate endlessness and inevitability.  By juxtaposing these two images, Shakespeare hints that he would rather bear life than end it abruptly.  He would rather soldier his way through life, standing up to a shower of small projectiles that may not even hit him, than take on his inevitable and mysterious death before his time comes.  However, he seems to reconsider the weight of each option later in his soliloquy when he notes how easy it would be to end the suffering of his life.  At line 78, he begins the rhetorical question, "who would bear..."  He finishes the clause with five lines describing the torments that man undergoes throughout life.  Hamlet than compares all these tortures to a description of suicide that lasts a brief line and a half.  His elaborate negative description and relatively painless description of death suggest that, at this point in the soliloquy, he is considering suicide more strongly than when he begins.