Something Rotten in Denmark

In honor of studying Hamlet this week...

Editing the Text

The Original

“To Be Or Not To Be”: Spoken by Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1
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? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
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?
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.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

A Modern Translation



Transforming the platform: A journal rendition of the soliloquy

Dear Journal,

I’ve been thinking about suicide lately. Would it be better to face what life has dealt me, or to just end it all? I want to sleep and never wake up. I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I just want to dream my heartache away. Am I meant to experience all of these things? Does this happen to everyone, or just me? The heartache, the humility, the tension that only I feel…But I fear death. What happens after when the decision lasts forever? No one comes back from death. Am I just a coward to fear death? Am I too afraid to take action? I can’t look at Ophelia without thinking about what I’ve done. It’s not fair.

The reasoning behind the madness: An explanation

While reading Hamlet, I often feel like I can hear his voice in my head as a 15 year old boy complaining about his life. If the play was turned into a television show, I could easily picture Hamlet as a self-pitying teenager played by some up and coming CW star, spending countless hours writing in his journal about all of his problems (As a side note, I think Emily Dickinson would fit perfectly in this role as well, perhaps as his counterpart across the street). (While I didn't particularly edit the direct lines of Shakespeare's play) I decided to modernize and transfigure them into something completely different, a new work as Zumthor would say. By re-creating Hamlet's soliloquy, I tried to create the same angst and anxiety in a less formal context. I find that the poetic format sometimes takes away from the understanding of the text, and by showing Hamlet's speech through a journal entry I hope to reinforce the context of the words.