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Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be..." "The major question in 'To be or not to be' cannot be suicide. If it were, as many have noted, it would be dramatically irrelevant. Hamlet is no longer sunk in the depths of melancholy, as he was in his first soliloquy. He has been roused to action and has just discovered how to test the Ghost's words. When we last saw him, only five minutes before, …

…Renaissance. Hamlet is trapped between two worlds. The moral code from which he cannot escape is basically medieval, but his instincts are with the Renaissance. Shocked from his unthinking acceptance of the commandments of Church and State, he is forced to find a new orientation. Can God have created man a thinking creature and yet have ordered him not to use the very faculty that raises him above the animals? What is it "to be"?