To Be Or Not To Be
What Hamlet and St Paul have in common
I’m always curious to read the Q&A section in the Weekend magazine that comes with The Guardian newspaper. It’s nice and short, and I like imagining the person who is quizzed thinking about their answers, coming up with just a single sentence for each. I wonder if they are actually interviewed or whether they just get sent a form in the post that they ponder over breakfast. Faced with twenty questions, one of them is invariably “Do you believe in life after death?”1 Jessie Wallace, recently voted the sexiest female in British soap, gave “being under anaesthetic and being able to feel pain” as her greatest fear, and the way she would like to die as “suddenly and peacefully” . She answered “definitely” to the one about life after death.
In what is one of the greatest speeches ever written in the English language, the troubled Prince of Denmark ponders the dilemma of life and death. Hamlet begins his soliloquy “To be, or not to be — that is the question”2. His life is unbearable, Denmark a prison, and the only escape death. The world itself is a gaol, “A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’th’ worst”3 and so to take his own life would provide the only way to break free. The obstacle, “the rub”, however, is described:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.4
It is the unknown, a concept that is developed as Hamlet’s speech goes on, “the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country”5. The reason that such a land after death inspires dread is hinged around man’s conscience. The Prince explains his hesitation to commit suicide “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”6 as his knowledge of right and wrong stays his hand.
The sufferings of life are described vividly by the anguished Hamlet. He lists oppression, disgrace, disappointed love, injustice and rejection. They are all the “whips and scorns of time”7 leaving man to “grunt and sweat under a weary life”8. All the problems that humans encounter sets up a powerful dilemma: the choice between life and death. Hamlet disappointedly comes to the old conclusion that it is better to “bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of”9.
A man who knew the feeling of real whips and the true scorn of many he came across was Paul, one of the apostles around at the time of the early Christian church. He could say “Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked… I have laboured and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked”10. At the time when he wrote to the church in Philippi he was in jail, in chains for Christ11, suffering because he wouldn’t keep quiet about Jesus.
Like Hamlet, Paul faced a great dilemma as he sat incarcerated, prompting him to write “Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two”12. Is he in the same position as Hamlet? He had every reason to desire death, certainly not possessing the luxuries available to a Prince, and in a physical prison, surely we could understand a similar depression? But what Paul is actually agonising over is which is better, not which is worse. He wrote “I will continue to rejoice”13, seeing life as an opportunity to know, love and serve Christ day by day, and death as the eternal reunion with the Son of God. Thus Paul could say “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”14
Life provided Paul with the opportunity to encourage and teach the Christians he had already done so much for, and for this reason he accepts the possibility that he may remain alive. In total contrast to Hamlet, he concludes that “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far”15. But what about his conscience? Didn’t his knowledge that he had once been responsible for the imprisonment and death of many Christians inspire some fear in him? In a letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul explained why death was something he looked forward to with such anticipation. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!”16. It all comes down to knowing Jesus. Paul is sure that Jesus has done everything required in order that he can live eternally with a holy God. Finding out more about Jesus in our daily lives, learning to serve, love and become more like him is why life is good. Seen from this point of view, death is even better, being the way in which we get to meet Jesus, if he hasn’t returned to earth before we die.
1 The Guardian 15/05/04
2 Hamlet 3.1.57
3 Ibid, 2.2.244–245
4 Ibid, 3.1.67–69
5 Ibid, 3.1.79–80
6 Ibid, 3.1.84
7 Ibid, 3.1.71
8 Ibid, 3.1.78
9 Ibid, 3.1.82–83
10 2 Corinthians 11:23–25, 27
11 Philippians 1:13
12 Ibid, 1:22
13 Ibid, 1:18
14 Ibid, 1:21
15 Ibid, 1:23
16 Romans 5:8–9