Passage Analysis Hamlet

This passage, from act one of Hamlet by Williams Shakespeare is vital to one’s understanding of the play as a whole because it calls to mind the major themes of Hamlet’s uncertainty about who he is coupled with the confusion he feels about his identity, Hamlet’s highly mercurial nature, and the power of influence that father’s wield over their sons. In the opening line of this passage, ““Where wilt thou lead me? Speak; I’ll go no further”, Hamlet is literally demanding that the ghost tells him where he is being taken. After already beginning to follow the ghost, Hamlet, in a moment of hesitation, has decided to ask where they are going. On a more figurative level, however, he is asking the ghost “where am I going?”, in an attempt to better
Hamlet’s attempt to use the acting troupe to verify his understanding of reality leads to him questioning his own understanding of identity. After speaking to the actors, Hamlet asks himself, “Is it not monstrous that this player here, / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force his soul so to his own conceit / That from her working all his visage wann'd, / Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, / A broken voice, and his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!”(). Hamlet opens this soliloquy with an open lamentation about his current situation. He is so bewildered and self-deprecating because while these actors are almost able to trick themselves, reflected through the word “conceit”, into showing emotion, while he cannot bring himself to take action. Hamlet goes on to explain how he feels as though he “can say nothing; no, not for a king,/ Upon whose property and most dear life / A damn'd defeat was / made. Am I a coward?/ Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?/ Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?/ Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,/ As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?” (). Hamlet is questioning whether he is able to be a prince and fulfill his role in Denmark as a prince. Even after Hamlet has used the play to justify that the ghost was telling the truth, and Claudius did kill his father, Hamlet still struggles with his sense of his identity in the “to be, or not to be” soliloquy. The opening line, “To be, or not to be: that is the question”, is particularly interesting (). Hamlet is caught between his own self-concieved ideas of his own identity and cannot escape it, and, like in the exchange with the ghost, when faced with hesitation, Hamlet immediately decides to stop. This line can