Hamlet
Scene #5 · Act III, Scene 1
Hamlet enters alone and delivers his famous soliloquy contemplating suicide, weighing whether it is nobler to endure life's suffering or to end it through death. He concludes that fear of the unknown afterlife—"the undiscover'd country"—prevents people from taking action and makes cowards of them all. When Ophelia appears, Hamlet's tone shifts dramatically; he denies ever giving her gifts, questions whether she is honest and fair, and repeatedly commands her to "get thee to a nunnery." He oscillates between confessing he once loved her and claiming he never did, attacks women for their deceptiveness and ability to make "monsters" of men, and cryptically threatens that all marriages except one shall end, before exiting and leaving Ophelia to lament his apparent madness.
The soliloquy reveals Hamlet's profound existential crisis and his paralysis between thought and action, establishing intellectual overthinking as a central obstacle to his revenge. His cruel treatment of Ophelia demonstrates either his genuine descent into madness or his performance of it, while also exposing his deep misogyny and distrust of women, likely stemming from Gertrude's hasty remarriage. The veiled threat about marriages—"all but one"—foreshadows danger to Claudius and Gertrude, advancing the revenge plot while Claudius and Polonius's observation of the scene leads directly to the King's decision to send Hamlet to England.
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?
Act III, Scene 1 · Hamlet
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.
Act III, Scene 1 · Hamlet
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?
Act III, Scene 1 · Hamlet
Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
Act III, Scene 1 · Hamlet
O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! / The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, / Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th’observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down!
Act III, Scene 1 · Ophelia