Let’s start with a simple question: Why would Shakespeare return to the subject of suicide in Act 3 Scene 1 when Hamlet has already addressed it directly in Act 1 Scene 2?
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! / Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!”
By Act 3, Hamlet has considered and rejected suicide on religious grounds. He is now two acts into a revenge tragedy in which not a drop of blood has been shed. His father’s ghost claims he was murdered by his brother, Claudius, who has usurped his throne and married his widow. Hamlet’s initial vow to exact revenge has been blunted by a fundamental doubt: Is the ghost merely an agent of the devil, tempting him to murder an innocent man? But now a troupe of actors has arrived from Wittenberg, where Hamlet had been studying at university before the action of the play. Hamlet knows the actors well, and has asked them to act a play of his own devising, depicting the murder of his father just as the ghost described it. He is excited at the prospect of using this play to “catch the conscience of the king.” Why, at this precise moment, would his thoughts turn back to suicide?
The words “To be or not to be” set up an opposition — but not necessarily between living and dying. In context, the opposition is between suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and taking arms “against a sea of troubles.” Endurance and passivity are pitted against action and intervention. The choice is not whether or not to commit suicide, but between putting up with injustice and doing something about it.
Hamlet then asks why — given all the wrongs that life heaps upon us — we don’t simply “make our quietus with a bare bodkin.” The consensus reading takes this as a reference to self-killing. But “quietus” in Elizabethan usage meant the settling of a debt, either literally or by paying someone back. A search of the Early English Books Online database reveals not a single instance in which “quietus” means “suicide” outside this speech. The circular logic by which “making one’s quietus” in Hamlet’s speech means suicide — because that is how Hamlet uses it — doesn’t stand up. I say this with some confidence, having spent an entire afternoon going through every single occurrence of the word “quietus” in the Early English Books Online database and not found a single one (apart from the supposed usage by Hamlet) where it means “suicide”!
The answer Hamlet gives to his question is that we do not take revenge because we fear divine punishment after death. “The dread of something after death… makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of.” Thus conscience “makes cowards of us all,” and “enterprises of great pith and moment… lose the name of action.”
For Shakespeare’s audience, suicide was something shameful and unredeemable, as can be seen from the way the gravediggers grumble about Ophelia (whose death bears some of the hallmarks of suicide) being buried on consecrated ground. If the Nunnery Scene speech is indeed about suicide, then it describes suicide as “taking arms against a sea of troubles” and an enterprise of “great pith and moment” — and that simply doesn’t fit with the early modern perception of suicide.
One of the basic, most obvious contradictions between what many Christians say and what they do lies in their adherence — or lack of it — to Biblical injunctions to turn the other cheek. In the Geneva Bible (which we know Shakespeare to have been intimately familiar with) Luke 6:27 — “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies: do well to them which hate you” — carries the footnote, “Christian charity, which differeth much from the worldly, doth not only not revenge injuries, but comprehended even our most grievous enemies, and that for our Father’s sake, which is in heaven: so far is it, from seeking its own profit in doing well.” Hamlet’s tragic flaw, in that context, is not indecision. It is that he ultimately acts in defiance of his own moral code. The Bible he quotes throughout the play is explicit: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19). A just revenge in Shakespeare’s world — the revenge of Fortinbras, for example, or Macduff — is one pursued openly, backed by legitimate authority. Hamlet’s revenge is private, plotted, and deceitful, and it destroys him along with those around him.
Peter Lake, in Hamlet’s Choice (Yale University Press, 2020), argues that Hamlet ultimately makes the “Christian choice”, trusting in Providence rather than plotting his way to revenge. However, Hamlet’s actions are anything but Christian. He is damned from the moment he kills Polonius. He refrains from killing Claudius at prayer because he wants him not merely to die but to suffer in hell. He engineers the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And he takes his final revenge in a moment of passion. Hamlet may talk about the “divinity that shapes our ends”, but his actions tell a different story. He is not a Christian who trusts Providence. He is a man who uses the language of Providence to rationalise revenge.
Steven Pinker, in Better Angels of Our Nature, sees the early modern period as a watershed, a time when, for many, taking revenge into one’s own hands was part of a code of honour, while Christian injunctions to love one’s enemies and the rise of seeking legal redress were calling that code into question. Why would Shakespeare, who had his finger so firmly on the pulse of the society in which he lived, not have debated this issue?
Even aside from such considerations, it is a lot more likely that, at this stage in the play, the question in the audience’s mind was not whether Hamlet was going to kill himself, but whether he was going to kill Claudius. They had, after all, paid to see a revenge tragedy.
The Critical Tradition
A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) established the suicide interpretation as the mainstream scholarly view, but the meaning of Hamlet’s speech has been a matter of debate since long before Bradley.
Tobias Smollett criticised what he saw as the illogic of the soliloquy, though he, like Bradley, frames it largely as a speech about suicide (The British Magazine, Vol. III, pp. 262–4, July 1762). A few years later, in 1765, Samuel Johnson framed the question “To be or not to be” as something Hamlet must settle before he can form “any rational scheme of action under this pressure of distress” — a prerequisite to deciding whether to act, not a meditation on whether to live. Taking arms against troubles may involve risks, or even “the loss of life”, but, in Johnson’s view, death here is a consequence of action, not its aim, and the question is whether to act at all, knowing the cost. Johnson doesn’t explicitly frame the action in terms of revenge, but his approach is considerably closer to the revenge reading than to Bradley’s later interpretation.
The first modern scholar to make a comprehensive case for the revenge reading was Irving T. Richards, in a landmark article, “The Meaning of Hamlet’s Soliloquy” (PMLA, vol. 48, no. 3, 1933, pp. 741–766). Richards’ paper is doubly valuable: it argues for the revenge interpretation and surveys the entire range of critical discussion before 1933, making it the essential reference for understanding how readers responded to the speech before Bradley’s influence took hold. Davis D. McElroy extended the argument in “‘To Be, or Not to Be’ — Is That the Question?” (College English, 25:7, 1964, pp. 453–5), though he believed the speech opens on revenge and then shifts toward suicide, while I see it as focused on revenge throughout. Most recently, Saleh Aljumah’s 2025 paper “‘To be, or not to be’: Has Hamlet’s Famous Line been Misunderstood?” in the International Journal of Literature Studies argues that the speech works on two levels — as a rumination on the morality of taking revenge into one’s own hands, and as a performance for the eavesdropping Claudius and Polonius. That’s worth thinking about; I’ll come back to it by means of a slight detour.
Is Hamlet’s Speech Really a Soliloquy?
This isn’t such a strange question as it may seem, and it has important implications for the possible meaning of the speech. Ophelia is right there on the stage while Hamlet speaks and Polonius and the king are also there, hidden out of sight. Can Ophelia hear what he is saying? Does Hamlet know or suspect that someone may be eavesdropping?
James Hirsch has argued this case most fully, in two articles (“The ‘To be or not to be’ scene and the conventions of Shakespearean drama”, in Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 42, 1981, pp. 115–36; and “Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies”, Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 58, 1997, pp. 1–26) and in subsequent work. His central argument is that the speech was designed to be understood by playgoers in Shakespeare’s theatre as a feigned soliloquy, spoken by Hamlet to mislead Ophelia, her father, and ultimately the King about what is on his mind.
Hirsch makes a strong case. A moment before Hamlet enters, the King tells Gertrude, “We have closely sent for Hamlet hither.” All through the play Hamlet is portrayed as deeply suspicious of Claudius. Here he has been summoned by his hated enemy to a particular location; of course he will be on his guard. He comes fresh from deducing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Claudius’s puppets. Finding Ophelia at the same location would naturally arouse his suspicions.
This scenario is ripe for exploitation. Hamlet pretends to give the eavesdroppers precisely what they came for — a reliable account of what is troubling him — while speaking words designed to mislead. Looked at in this way, the speech operates on two levels. On one level, he speaks of the inevitable suffering of this life, with no mention of specifics and, for good measure, an apparent disbelief in ghosts — “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” — which would reassure Claudius that Hamlet continues to fret about his unhappy lot and either doesn’t know or doesn’t believe the reports of sightings of his father’s ghost. He then pretends to notice Ophelia as if for the first time: “Soft you, now, the fair Ophelia.” His cover eventually breaks when her scripted behaviour provokes him into asking “Where’s your father?” — a question that suggests he already knows Polonius is present.
The idea that this is a feigned soliloquy — that Hamlet knows he has an audience — is considerably strengthened by several other plays of the period. In George Chapman’s Sir Giles Goosecap (1602), the character Clarence knows that Eugenia and her aristocratic handlers are hidden nearby to inspect his character. He delivers a deeply philosophical, poetic monologue about love that is entirely tailored to be overheard, successfully winning her affection. In John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), the disguised Duke Altofronto (acting as the cynical court jester Malevole) intentionally steps into open galleries or near tapestries where he knows usurpers are listening. He then loudly stage-manages his “private” grief to feed his enemies false information and steer their political plots. In another play by Chapman, The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), the treacherous La Fin, realising he is being eavesdropped on, delivers a feigned soliloquy designed to mislead the eavesdroppers. And in John Ford’s The Broken Heart (1633), Orgilus delivers a solemnly meditative speech while hidden characters spy on him, feigning philosophical grief to conceal his plans for vengeance. This last is particularly close to what Hamlet appears to be doing in the Nunnery Scene.
These early 17th-century plays are explicitly shaped by the structural mechanics and dramatic irony of the Nunnery Scene, strongly suggesting that Hamlet knows he is being spied on and tailors his words in such a way as to mask his true thoughts behind a lament on the vicissitudes of life and the hope of respite after death.
Deliberate Ambiguity?
From there, it is not too much of a jump to speculate that, while, on one level, Hamlet’s speech masks his true intent, on another it reveals it — that is, he frames his meditation on the morality of revenge in language that will be heard by Polonius and the king as ruminations on suicide and the miseries of life.
If that’s what Shakespeare intended — and I think there’s a fair chance it is — Hamlet’s speech is doing serious heavy duty! At one level, Polonius and Claudius hear the lament of a melancholy prince, incapable of action, expressing a generalised disenchantment with life. At another, the theatre audience hear a man working through the moral logic of an action he cannot yet bring himself to take. And, underlying both, the revenge that is the play’s true subject remains present — unnamed, displaced into philosophical abstraction, but structuring every line. If Ophelia were not such a limp rag of a character, she might have grasped what was going on here, but she lacks the shrewdness and perspicacity needed to piece it together.
Could that be the bottom line here? Could Hamlet be simultaneously performing madness, contemplating revenge, and musing on suicide in the same thirty lines, for different audiences? If so, it would be an extraordinary theatrical achievement. The parallels in the plays of Chapman, Marston and Ford suggest that such a reading is at least possible.
Inconclusion in Conclusion
I don’t suppose we will ever know. I’m pretty sure that Hamlet’s talk of taking arms “against a sea of troubles” and enterprises of “great pith and moment” isn’t about suicide, and I’m pretty sure that making one’s “quietus” with “a bare bodkin” meant settling accounts violently, that is, killing those that have wronged us. But if he knows he is being overheard — and Hirsch makes a strong argument that he does — he can only formulate such thoughts by hiding them behind another layer of meaning — should we continue struggling in this world, or should we just give up? Why do we bother? The lack of specifics — no “I”, no dead father, no explicit mention of anything other than vicissitudes of life that he, as a prince, was largely exempt from — leaves the text wide open to different interpretations. And if that’s what Shakespeare intended, I would have dearly loved to be standing in the pit of the Globe around the turn of the 16th century to see just how the actor playing Hamlet pulled it off!
Discussion and Essay Questions
“The standard reading of ‘To be or not to be’ as a meditation on suicide relies on circular logic.” Drawing on your understanding of the speech, how far do you agree?
How does the immediate dramatic context — Ophelia on stage, Polonius and Claudius listening from concealment — affect your interpretation of the speech? Does it matter whether Hamlet knows he is being observed?
“Hamlet’s tragic flaw is not that he delays, but that he acts.” How far does the play support this reading?
Consider the word “quietus” in its Elizabethan context. Does the meaning of the word support or undermine the traditional suicide interpretation?
“The speech is most interesting not as a statement of one meaning but as something capable of meaning different things to different listeners.” How far does this illuminate its dramatic function?
Ano Sensei (John R. Yamamoto-Wilson) holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was a professor in the Department of English Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, until his retirement in 2018.
The Core Argument
Let’s start with a simple question: Why would Shakespeare return to the subject of suicide in Act 3 Scene 1 when Hamlet has already addressed it directly in Act 1 Scene 2?
By Act 3, Hamlet has considered and rejected suicide on religious grounds. He is now two acts into a revenge tragedy in which not a drop of blood has been shed. His father’s ghost claims he was murdered by his brother, Claudius, who has usurped his throne and married his widow. Hamlet’s initial vow to exact revenge has been blunted by a fundamental doubt: Is the ghost merely an agent of the devil, tempting him to murder an innocent man? But now a troupe of actors has arrived from Wittenberg, where Hamlet had been studying at university before the action of the play. Hamlet knows the actors well, and has asked them to act a play of his own devising, depicting the murder of his father just as the ghost described it. He is excited at the prospect of using this play to “catch the conscience of the king.” Why, at this precise moment, would his thoughts turn back to suicide?
The words “To be or not to be” set up an opposition — but not necessarily between living and dying. In context, the opposition is between suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and taking arms “against a sea of troubles.” Endurance and passivity are pitted against action and intervention. The choice is not whether or not to commit suicide, but between putting up with injustice and doing something about it.
Hamlet then asks why — given all the wrongs that life heaps upon us — we don’t simply “make our quietus with a bare bodkin.” The consensus reading takes this as a reference to self-killing. But “quietus” in Elizabethan usage meant the settling of a debt, either literally or by paying someone back. A search of the Early English Books Online database reveals not a single instance in which “quietus” means “suicide” outside this speech. The circular logic by which “making one’s quietus” in Hamlet’s speech means suicide — because that is how Hamlet uses it — doesn’t stand up. I say this with some confidence, having spent an entire afternoon going through every single occurrence of the word “quietus” in the Early English Books Online database and not found a single one (apart from the supposed usage by Hamlet) where it means “suicide”!
The answer Hamlet gives to his question is that we do not take revenge because we fear divine punishment after death. “The dread of something after death… makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of.” Thus conscience “makes cowards of us all,” and “enterprises of great pith and moment… lose the name of action.”
For Shakespeare’s audience, suicide was something shameful and unredeemable, as can be seen from the way the gravediggers grumble about Ophelia (whose death bears some of the hallmarks of suicide) being buried on consecrated ground. If the Nunnery Scene speech is indeed about suicide, then it describes suicide as “taking arms against a sea of troubles” and an enterprise of “great pith and moment” — and that simply doesn’t fit with the early modern perception of suicide.
One of the basic, most obvious contradictions between what many Christians say and what they do lies in their adherence — or lack of it — to Biblical injunctions to turn the other cheek. In the Geneva Bible (which we know Shakespeare to have been intimately familiar with) Luke 6:27 — “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies: do well to them which hate you” — carries the footnote, “Christian charity, which differeth much from the worldly, doth not only not revenge injuries, but comprehended even our most grievous enemies, and that for our Father’s sake, which is in heaven: so far is it, from seeking its own profit in doing well.” Hamlet’s tragic flaw, in that context, is not indecision. It is that he ultimately acts in defiance of his own moral code. The Bible he quotes throughout the play is explicit: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19). A just revenge in Shakespeare’s world — the revenge of Fortinbras, for example, or Macduff — is one pursued openly, backed by legitimate authority. Hamlet’s revenge is private, plotted, and deceitful, and it destroys him along with those around him.
Peter Lake, in Hamlet’s Choice (Yale University Press, 2020), argues that Hamlet ultimately makes the “Christian choice”, trusting in Providence rather than plotting his way to revenge. However, Hamlet’s actions are anything but Christian. He is damned from the moment he kills Polonius. He refrains from killing Claudius at prayer because he wants him not merely to die but to suffer in hell. He engineers the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And he takes his final revenge in a moment of passion. Hamlet may talk about the “divinity that shapes our ends”, but his actions tell a different story. He is not a Christian who trusts Providence. He is a man who uses the language of Providence to rationalise revenge.
Steven Pinker, in Better Angels of Our Nature, sees the early modern period as a watershed, a time when, for many, taking revenge into one’s own hands was part of a code of honour, while Christian injunctions to love one’s enemies and the rise of seeking legal redress were calling that code into question. Why would Shakespeare, who had his finger so firmly on the pulse of the society in which he lived, not have debated this issue?
Even aside from such considerations, it is a lot more likely that, at this stage in the play, the question in the audience’s mind was not whether Hamlet was going to kill himself, but whether he was going to kill Claudius. They had, after all, paid to see a revenge tragedy.
The Critical Tradition
A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) established the suicide interpretation as the mainstream scholarly view, but the meaning of Hamlet’s speech has been a matter of debate since long before Bradley.
Tobias Smollett criticised what he saw as the illogic of the soliloquy, though he, like Bradley, frames it largely as a speech about suicide (The British Magazine, Vol. III, pp. 262–4, July 1762). A few years later, in 1765, Samuel Johnson framed the question “To be or not to be” as something Hamlet must settle before he can form “any rational scheme of action under this pressure of distress” — a prerequisite to deciding whether to act, not a meditation on whether to live. Taking arms against troubles may involve risks, or even “the loss of life”, but, in Johnson’s view, death here is a consequence of action, not its aim, and the question is whether to act at all, knowing the cost. Johnson doesn’t explicitly frame the action in terms of revenge, but his approach is considerably closer to the revenge reading than to Bradley’s later interpretation.
The first modern scholar to make a comprehensive case for the revenge reading was Irving T. Richards, in a landmark article, “The Meaning of Hamlet’s Soliloquy” (PMLA, vol. 48, no. 3, 1933, pp. 741–766). Richards’ paper is doubly valuable: it argues for the revenge interpretation and surveys the entire range of critical discussion before 1933, making it the essential reference for understanding how readers responded to the speech before Bradley’s influence took hold. Davis D. McElroy extended the argument in “‘To Be, or Not to Be’ — Is That the Question?” (College English, 25:7, 1964, pp. 453–5), though he believed the speech opens on revenge and then shifts toward suicide, while I see it as focused on revenge throughout. Most recently, Saleh Aljumah’s 2025 paper “‘To be, or not to be’: Has Hamlet’s Famous Line been Misunderstood?” in the International Journal of Literature Studies argues that the speech works on two levels — as a rumination on the morality of taking revenge into one’s own hands, and as a performance for the eavesdropping Claudius and Polonius. That’s worth thinking about; I’ll come back to it by means of a slight detour.
Is Hamlet’s Speech Really a Soliloquy?
This isn’t such a strange question as it may seem, and it has important implications for the possible meaning of the speech. Ophelia is right there on the stage while Hamlet speaks and Polonius and the king are also there, hidden out of sight. Can Ophelia hear what he is saying? Does Hamlet know or suspect that someone may be eavesdropping?
James Hirsch has argued this case most fully, in two articles (“The ‘To be or not to be’ scene and the conventions of Shakespearean drama”, in Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 42, 1981, pp. 115–36; and “Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies”, Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 58, 1997, pp. 1–26) and in subsequent work. His central argument is that the speech was designed to be understood by playgoers in Shakespeare’s theatre as a feigned soliloquy, spoken by Hamlet to mislead Ophelia, her father, and ultimately the King about what is on his mind.
Hirsch makes a strong case. A moment before Hamlet enters, the King tells Gertrude, “We have closely sent for Hamlet hither.” All through the play Hamlet is portrayed as deeply suspicious of Claudius. Here he has been summoned by his hated enemy to a particular location; of course he will be on his guard. He comes fresh from deducing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Claudius’s puppets. Finding Ophelia at the same location would naturally arouse his suspicions.
This scenario is ripe for exploitation. Hamlet pretends to give the eavesdroppers precisely what they came for — a reliable account of what is troubling him — while speaking words designed to mislead. Looked at in this way, the speech operates on two levels. On one level, he speaks of the inevitable suffering of this life, with no mention of specifics and, for good measure, an apparent disbelief in ghosts — “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” — which would reassure Claudius that Hamlet continues to fret about his unhappy lot and either doesn’t know or doesn’t believe the reports of sightings of his father’s ghost. He then pretends to notice Ophelia as if for the first time: “Soft you, now, the fair Ophelia.” His cover eventually breaks when her scripted behaviour provokes him into asking “Where’s your father?” — a question that suggests he already knows Polonius is present.
The idea that this is a feigned soliloquy — that Hamlet knows he has an audience — is considerably strengthened by several other plays of the period. In George Chapman’s Sir Giles Goosecap (1602), the character Clarence knows that Eugenia and her aristocratic handlers are hidden nearby to inspect his character. He delivers a deeply philosophical, poetic monologue about love that is entirely tailored to be overheard, successfully winning her affection. In John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), the disguised Duke Altofronto (acting as the cynical court jester Malevole) intentionally steps into open galleries or near tapestries where he knows usurpers are listening. He then loudly stage-manages his “private” grief to feed his enemies false information and steer their political plots. In another play by Chapman, The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), the treacherous La Fin, realising he is being eavesdropped on, delivers a feigned soliloquy designed to mislead the eavesdroppers. And in John Ford’s The Broken Heart (1633), Orgilus delivers a solemnly meditative speech while hidden characters spy on him, feigning philosophical grief to conceal his plans for vengeance. This last is particularly close to what Hamlet appears to be doing in the Nunnery Scene.
These early 17th-century plays are explicitly shaped by the structural mechanics and dramatic irony of the Nunnery Scene, strongly suggesting that Hamlet knows he is being spied on and tailors his words in such a way as to mask his true thoughts behind a lament on the vicissitudes of life and the hope of respite after death.
Deliberate Ambiguity?
From there, it is not too much of a jump to speculate that, while, on one level, Hamlet’s speech masks his true intent, on another it reveals it — that is, he frames his meditation on the morality of revenge in language that will be heard by Polonius and the king as ruminations on suicide and the miseries of life.
If that’s what Shakespeare intended — and I think there’s a fair chance it is — Hamlet’s speech is doing serious heavy duty! At one level, Polonius and Claudius hear the lament of a melancholy prince, incapable of action, expressing a generalised disenchantment with life. At another, the theatre audience hear a man working through the moral logic of an action he cannot yet bring himself to take. And, underlying both, the revenge that is the play’s true subject remains present — unnamed, displaced into philosophical abstraction, but structuring every line. If Ophelia were not such a limp rag of a character, she might have grasped what was going on here, but she lacks the shrewdness and perspicacity needed to piece it together.
Could that be the bottom line here? Could Hamlet be simultaneously performing madness, contemplating revenge, and musing on suicide in the same thirty lines, for different audiences? If so, it would be an extraordinary theatrical achievement. The parallels in the plays of Chapman, Marston and Ford suggest that such a reading is at least possible.
Inconclusion in Conclusion
I don’t suppose we will ever know. I’m pretty sure that Hamlet’s talk of taking arms “against a sea of troubles” and enterprises of “great pith and moment” isn’t about suicide, and I’m pretty sure that making one’s “quietus” with “a bare bodkin” meant settling accounts violently, that is, killing those that have wronged us. But if he knows he is being overheard — and Hirsch makes a strong argument that he does — he can only formulate such thoughts by hiding them behind another layer of meaning — should we continue struggling in this world, or should we just give up? Why do we bother? The lack of specifics — no “I”, no dead father, no explicit mention of anything other than vicissitudes of life that he, as a prince, was largely exempt from — leaves the text wide open to different interpretations. And if that’s what Shakespeare intended, I would have dearly loved to be standing in the pit of the Globe around the turn of the 16th century to see just how the actor playing Hamlet pulled it off!
Discussion and Essay Questions
Ano Sensei (John R. Yamamoto-Wilson) holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was a professor in the Department of English Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, until his retirement in 2018.