Hamlet Act III, Scene I - Saturday with Shakespeare Episode 1

Readings of Shakespeare soliloquies and speeches, performed by DeadDocWarren.

In this episode:
Hamlet’s soliloquy on the nature of death and man’s cowardice, or more specifically Hamlet’s own, is best known for its opening line, “To be, or not to be,” yet is full of pith and wit that have made other lines also subject to recycling in entertainment 4 centuries later. While I knew the first several lines of this monologue by heart long before the play was required reading in junior English, even many years after I am still catching references that I missed previously. Hollywood has mined it for multiple movie titles alone, “What Dreams May Come” and “The Undiscovered Country,” in which Christopher Plummer’s Klingon General Chang delightfully quotes snippets from several plays as he taunts Captain Kirk over dinner and later in battle.

I will leave it to serious scholars of Shakespeare as to which plays, speeches and lines are his greatest, but it was this one that was the gateway for me to this world.