Review the opening line of the poem and critically analyze the reason for the speaker's words.

The opening line of the poem is:

‘To be or not to be’

From the opening line it is clear that the speaker has a friction in his thoughts and he is in a terrible dilemma. He is weighing the options of living and dying. In the next lines of the poem, the speaker enlists a number of reasons such as the pain of ‘unrequited love’, the troubles of law, humiliation by superiors etc which makes life miserable so much so that one would want to end all the suffering at once by embracing death. But again this set of thoughts is opposed by the speaker’s conscience which tells him that suicide is an immoral act and maybe he would have to face worse situations after death. Hence, all these thoughts have made the speaker weak and he is unable to take a decision.