What can one say about the greatest play ever written? I suppose nothing that hasn’t already been said, but I can try hard and tell you how I feel when I read this masterpiece.
When I was growing up, Shakespere was the last thing to occupy my head. I needed more time to think of girls, cricket, movies, more girls, more cricket, and more movies. My ninth grade english litreture teacher changed all that. No, she didn’t teach Hamlet, instead she read Merchent of Venice. I can’t say I enjoyed that play that much, although Shylock was great fun. It was that 2 year period which got me into Shakespere in general.
As I came to the closing stages of School, I began to have more problems in life......the usual stuff any teenager goes through: heartbreak, lack of focus, etc.......it was against this background that I discovered my Granddad’s copy of the ’The Complete Works of Shakespere’. The first play that I read, or tried to read, was Hamlet.
There is so much of greatness in the play. I am not going to go into all of that. Instead I am going to focus on the big one: The ’to be or not to be’ soliloquay....
When I read it properly for the first time, I thought , ’now why didn’t I think of that’.
I suppose over the years alot of people must have thought the same. But they didn’t. The beauty of the soliloquay doesn’t lie in what it tells the reader. Instead the real buty is the HOW factor. The rhythm, the words, the arguments put forward for suicide........just one word to describe it: BEAUTIFUL.
When ever I feel down, I read the to be or not to be soliloquay. It’s a weird thing to admit, because a lot of people look at me with a ’’o for real face?’’ when I say that. Try it when you are feeling down. Get a copy of Hamlet, take it to your room. Open to Act 3, Scene 2 . (Make sure you are alone) and read it aloud. Imagine that you are the troubled Prince, try to mimick the relevent emotions.....enjoy the privacy, take full advantage of it and read out the words as loud as you can, revel in the beauty of the words. Enjoy.