phrases as, "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" (III.i.83-5). Hamlet is a representative of universal human experience in feeling as he does but of uncommon stature in his ability to articulate the content and dilemma of that feeling. His awareness of consequences extends beyond the immediate circumstances of his enterprise, which points toward his awareness that the cosmos, or destiny, has a stake in the actions he takes.
The dramatic function of the soliloquy "To be or not to be" is to move Hamlet through the experience of being as such by contemplation of travel to "undiscover'd country" (III.i.79), toward the discovery/recovery of the name of action, thence inside the experience of action as a fundamental attribute of being itself. As Abel puts it, the soliloquy is a meditation that "takes him from the plot into metaphysics, and then, turning him toward death, enables him to feel something metaphysical in the plot" (Abel 55-6). From one point of view, the soli
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