of the spirit, not of the brain; he suddenly finds himself in a world in which "your philosophy" is no guide (Kitto 290).
Kitto points out that Hamlet is "inevitably engulfed by the evil that has been set in motion" (330), but evil, as important a force of action as it may be, is the idiosyncratic, not to say melodramatic, plot line of the play. Encasing and explaining evil is a more fundamental, more universal conceptualization of human experience per se. In other words, even though Hamlet seems and indeed is bereft of the consolations of philosophy, only the large structures of philosophy can contain the difficulties of human existence that "To be or not to be" deal with.
The main difficulty is the elusiveness of finding reason in or for human existence per se. For Hamlet, who very much needs an ordered universe, the difficulty has been confounded by the "o'erhasty marriage" of his mother after his father's sudden death, so that time (i.e., the very cosmos) is out of joint. Every normal human behavior has been turned upon its head since the elder Hamlet's death. The bare facts of the case go far to explain why Hamlet might be depressed. Here is a young man who has been away at school and who has obviously adored his father and who, equally obviously, thought his mother did the same: "Must I remember? why, she would hang on him, / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on: and yet, within a month-- / Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!" (I.ii.143-46).
So much for the problem: What can he do? The soliloquy in III.i that begins "To be or not to be" might well read "To act or not to act," for what follows is an extended meditation on the consequences of, as it were, traveling to "undiscover'd country," which may mean the unknown of death but which may also mean the unknown more generally. The tendency in Hamlet to know what he knows very well indeed but to resist finding out the unknown explains such...