To Be Or Not To Be: Hamlet Discussion Questions

1. In the beginning of the act, Hamlets asks himself a question. “To be, or not to be—that is the question.” What Hamlet is actually asking is considering if he wants to live or kill himself. Whether he should live in sorrow and accept fate as it is now or if he should fight it and continue to live.
2. Although most people would say that Hamlet is afraid of death that’s why he won’t kill himself. Hamlet isn’t afraid of that at all, he is afraid of what would happen to him after he is dead. The reason he if afraid of what comes after is because no one truly knows what comes after death. It could be another life that we are granted or even worse it could just be the end period.
3. Hamlet is saying that we must put up with a lot of things in
There may be many answers to why we put up with these certain things. Hamlet believes that we put up with all these hurtful things in life it because we are afraid. The thing that he says we are afraid of is death, but not death itself; it is what comes after death. The reason we are afraid of it is because no one knows what truly comes after death itself.
5. When I first read the line “Conscience does make cowards of us all” I thought he meant that conscience is what stops us from doing what we truly want to do. An example of this is if someone steals something from a store and they want to go back. The person won’t go back because they feel it is bad if they go back to the store that they stole something from. This is saying that our conscience is making us fear what could happen, which makes us a coward and I fully agree with what Hamlet
Throughout the whole poem, Donne is trying to tell people that they shouldn’t fear death at all. He is just saying that death is just a fear that we all have to overcome. Death isn’t a hard thing to overcome at all. As long as you have the help to overcome it, death will just be something that you overcame. Once you don’t fear death anymore, it can’t scare you anymore.
5. When you first start to read the poem, Donne’s tone is very defiant. He clearly states that he doesn’t like how death thinks that he is all high and mighty. Death thinks that if it can make people fear, then he can control every move that they make in their lives. There are a couple of words that Donne uses to describe his feeling for death itself. The two main words that I found were both in the same line, Line 2. “Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,” The two words are mighty and dreadfull, the way that Donne uses these words to get his point across.
6. There was one main thing that surprised me when I first started to read this poem. Donne is a really brave to face death and tell death that he isn’t afraid of what it has to bring. To me. Donne is trying to tell death that no matter what is thrown at him, Donne will stand tall and fight whatever he has to. This poem might be a way to tell people that they shouldn’t fear it, they should stand together. If we all stand together on this, we as a community would be able to stand up to anything that comes at