Hamlet’s Most Important Lesson

Shakespeare on how to defeat fear

In Shakespeare’s plays, there are plenty of characters designed to instill some sort of physical fear in you, like the witches in Macbeth or the ghost in Hamlet.

Yet these physical representations of fear are nowhere near as terrifying as the feelings of doubt and uncertainty that lurk deep inside one’s self. Indeed, the fears that keep you from pursuing your dreams and ambitions are often the most paralyzing.

This kind of fear is all too common — especially when you are presented with something new. Because regardless of how compelling your reasons for changing things up might be, it is human nature to prefer the devil you know over the one you don’t. The result of this, however, is that most people never take the leap for fear of what awaits them on the other side.

In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare addresses this topic of fear and uncertainty head-on, but not in the way you think. Because while Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy is often understood to portray Hamlet as suicidal, it’s actually doing the exact opposite.

Today, we explore the hidden meaning behind Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech — and what it can teach you about overcoming your fear of the unknown…

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Can You Trust a Ghost?

At the beginning of Hamlet, the audience meets the eponymous Prince, whose father has recently died. Then a ghost of the murdered King Hamlet appears early in the play to inform his son of the treachery that befell him — he claims it was his brother, Claudius, who murdered him in order to take his throne and marry his wife. The ghost then asks Prince Hamlet to avenge his death by murdering Claudius.

Modern readers often take this as undeniable proof that Hamlet’s father was murdered by Claudius, which leads them to criticize Hamlet’s later actions. But as Shakespeare’s audience knew, you couldn't just trust every ghost you ran into. Some would spring from hell to tell you lies and cause destruction, so Hamlet is initially wary of what the ghost says.

As such, he resolves to take action to uncover the truth about his father’s death, and see if he should trust the ghost.

To do this, Hamlet devises a plan to have a group of actors perform a play in which a king is murdered by his brother. While the play is being performed in front of Claudius, Hamlet observes the king’s reaction. Claudius’s obvious discomfort tells him that the ghost was honest: King Hamlet was murdered.

Prince Hamlet then immediately sets to work concocting a plan for how to kill his uncle and avenge his father. His resolve has never been stronger.

But of course, murdering a king is no easy task. Hamlet knows what he’s up against, and what he risks by continuing his path forward. So in order to understand why he’s so determined, we need to look at something that happened right before the play was performed for Claudius.

And this is where we come to “To be or not to be…”

Suicide, or Something More?

If you’re like most people, you were probably taught that Hamlet’s soliloquy is like an open suicide note, and that the words “to be or not to be” can easily be interpreted as “to live or die.”

Fortunately, however, there is more to the monologue than that superficial reading. In fact, it is much more about Hamlet deciding whether or not to face his fears and take action than it is about him deciding to literally “be” or “not be.” But before we dive into that, let’s take a look at the timing of the speech.

The “to be or not to be” monologue comes immediately after Hamlet has told the actors how he wants his play to be performed for Claudius. His plan has finally been set in motion, and he’ll soon know whether or not his uncle is guilty.

The speech, therefore, is about what he will do based on what happens during the performance of the play. After the famous first line “to be or not to be”, Hamlet then asks:

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 break this down into more contemporary speech, Hamlet is asking whether it’s better to just sit by and suffer with whatever life throws at you (in the modern world, that could be a dead-end job, horrible boss, bad relationship, etc.), or if it’s better to take up the fight against those forces and do something about them.

He then proceeds with the next few lines:

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

This is the part people usually point to to say Hamlet is suicidal. But what if he’s simply in agony over “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to”? To look forward to a time when suffering no longer exists (“’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d”) is not the same as actively wanting to end your life.

Hamlet continues:

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.

Here, Hamlet proclaims that not knowing “what dreams may come” after death is what keeps people from killing themselves — what makes “calamity of so long life.”

On the surface, it once again looks as though Hamlet is directly addressing suicide — saying that the only reason you don’t kill yourself is because you don’t know what awaits you on the other side. But this is where the genius of Shakespeare starts to emerge, and where the hidden meaning of the soliloquy becomes evident.

Because Hamlet isn’t talking about suicide. He’s talking about uncertainty.

And over the course of the next ten lines, Hamlet reveals the reason why so many people are paralyzed by fear of the unknown — and what you can do to overcome it…