Page:Some Textual Difficulties in Shakespeare.djvu/53

Rh Which is to say:

To a dead man, a king is not. But to a live king a dead man is.

Or, in other words:

With the king, a body is. But with the body a king is not.

Or, to use Hamlet's exact words:

The body is, with the king. But the king is not, with the body.

It is all a matter of being, this question of is. And consciousness is what being consists of, or life.

The reader will at once be reminded of the soliloquy:—"To be or not to be." It is all of a piece with this, even as the play in its deeper aspects, is all of a piece. Let us turn now to the soliloquy.

The whole soliloquy, "To be or not to be," is engaged solely with the subject of forgetting. That is to say, not with mere death, as ordinarily understood, but with oblivion. Hamlet's one great desire was to forget. The only way to forget is to die. Hence his contemplation of suicide.

There is but one thing that stays his hand from self-destruction. It is the question as to whether, after death, there may still be consciousness. And therefore memory of things in this life. For if he must remember in the future life, his heart must still ache; and in that case there is no escape in that direction, no inducement in dying. It was not merely his