Real-Life Communication
You are a dramaturg that has been hired by a Shakespearean theater
company to help audiences understand the meaning and context of the plays.
Currently, you are leading a study session with a group of students who are
about to see Hamlet.
"This is a language-oriented profession," says
dramaturg Denis Johnston. "You need to have excellent research skills, editing
skills and writing skills."
Plus, dramaturgs must have excellent verbal
communication skills. "You act as a moderator in discussions and do a variety
of things to promote and help audiences understand the play," says Cindy SoRelle,
a dramaturg in Texas.
You are going to look at a famous soliloquy in
the play. First, you give the students a background to the scene:
Hamlet
has been visited by the ghost of his father, who tells Hamlet that his brother,
Hamlet's uncle, is the man who murdered him. Hamlet doesn't know what to do.
Does he have the courage to avenge his father by killing his uncle? Should
he just kill himself? This is what he considers:
To be, or
not to be, -- that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to
suffer,
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms
against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? - To die, to sleep,
No
more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural
shocks
That flesh is heir to? - 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be
wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep perchance to dream; ay, there's the
rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have
shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That
makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns
of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs
of despised love, the law's delay
The insolence of office, and the spurns
The
patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus
make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat
under a weary life
But that the dread of something after death,
The
undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns -- puzzles
the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to
others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And
thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast
of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard,
their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
The
students follow along on a script as you read the soliloquy. Once you have
read it, you ask students a few questions about the script. This is what you
ask:
- What is the rub, or the problem that may occur when one sleeps?
- In the first few lines, what is Hamlet trying to decide?
- What does Hamlet say makes a person a coward?