1/18/2024 0 Comments To be or not to be meaning![]() ![]() The speech and the line reflect some of the existential questions that Hamlet the play and Hamlet the character are interested in. ![]() It marks the beginning of Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' speech which is a soliloquy. Hamlet’s soliloquy begins with the memorable line, To be, or not to be, that is the question. 'To be or not to be' is one of the most famous lines in all of English literature. His mental struggle to end the pangs of his life gets featured in this soliloquy. Following that line, "not to be" would be an alteration of the syntactic order, which is done for stylistic/rhetorical effect. To be, or not to be by William Shakespeare describes how Hamlet is torn between life and death. In the speech, Hamlet contemplates death and suicide, weighing the pain and unfairness of life against the alternative, which might be worse. ![]() In that sense, "to" introduces all the elements that go in the clause, which makes "to not be" perfectly valid. 'To be, or not to be' is the opening phrase of a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called 'nunnery scene' of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1. So, this speech is about whether or not Hamlet should kill himself, which isn’t totally out of the blue at the beginning of the play, the first time Hamlet is onstage alone, he contemplates it there as well. Okay, he’s openly questioning if he should live or die. So we have a to-clause and a that-clause. To exist or not to exist, to live or not to live. Nowadays, though "to" still retains its prepositional meaning of intention or purpose ( I'm going to dance), "to" has undergone a syntactic shift to become a prefix (morpheme) which introduces a clause, much like "that" does in I demand that she behave. The famous line that begins Prince Hamlet's soliloquy in Shakespeare's Hamlet, 'To be, or not to be, that is the question' is probably the most cited statement in all classical drama. In Old English, the infinitive was inflected as a noun, and the dative infinitive was governed by the preposition "to," which is what survives (for lack of a better term) in modern English. Generally speaking, in "not to be," we negate what's taken to be the full verb (to + verb) in "to not be," we negate the stressed verb "be" just like McEnroe does when he says "you can not be serious." In such case, we are not really splitting the infinitive. If inflation falls to 2 by the end of this year, that means the cost of everything will no longer be going up, right Wrong. If meaning doesn't change, then it becomes a stylistic choice. What does To be, or not to be mean To be, or not be means Hamlet’s mind is torn between two things, being and not being. Either way works ( to not to be or not to be), as long as meaning isn't compromised. ![]()
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