R. S. WHITE
“Suicide Is Painless” is a song dating from 1970, with lyrics written by Mike Altman and misleadingly serene and melodic music composed by Johnny Mandel. It gained fame as the theme song for the film M*A*S*H, directed by Robert Altman, who was the father of the lyricist, and then for the television series of the same name from 1972 to 1983. These were based on a novel by Richard Hooker (pen name of Dr. H. Richard Hornberger) published in 1968, and although set in the Korean War, the film especially was claimed as a sly satire on the Vietnam War, along the lines of Heller’s Catch 22, though less acerbic. Its mode was a version of mordant, black comedy that suited the times. More because of the television series, which was gentler still, the song became enormously popular, but it continued to have special resonance for the antiwar movement. The song’s refrain expresses apparent fatalism and quietude, suited especially to the flower power generation, the nonviolent wing of the counterculture and peace movement, which advocated “dropping out” rather than engaging with war by actively opposing it. Morally speaking, the slogan “make love not war” is consistent with “’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” rather than “to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them” (3.1.57–60). The reference to Hamlet’s famous speech is not imposed but mentioned explicitly in the song, when the singer speaks of being asked about“questions that are key”: “Is it to be or not to be / And I replied, ‘Oh why ask me?’” This leads to the final iteration of the refrain: “’Cause suicide is painless,” an observation on which the song remains placidly indifferent on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
The first lines of the most famous passage in the world, translated into every language, warrant some close attention, especially since they have suffered the fate of so many quotable phrases in Hamlet in being worn down by constant quotation into a numbing vacuousness.
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. (3.1.56–60)
Or, in the much maligned but still cogent Q1 version, “To be, or not to be; ay, there’s the point” (7.114). For a start, the sequence of thoughts could form a chiasmus or an equation setting up a set of quandaries that, as we shall see, have teased the thoughts of avant-garde thinkers:
To be [exist, live] OR not to be [die]
X
To accept [suffer] OR to oppose
Active opposition by arms to“th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, / … the law’s delay, / The insolence of office” (3.1.71–73) and other injustices may allow one to survive, whereas the kind of silent acquiescence advocated in the song may involve suffering and death. On the other hand, the lines could form a parallelism of choices:
To be [exist, live] OR not to be [cease to exist, die]
==
to accept [suffer] OR to oppose
Here, accepting wrongs without trying to right them constitutes a kind of death of the spirit and negation of being, while to rebel is an act of living, to oppose is to live. Hamlet continues the train of thought to a new set of considerations. To die is “to sleep” and opt out of “the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to,” which is “a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d” (3.1.62–64). One meaning is that Hamlet is repeating his own earlier wish “that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter” (1.2.131–32) and contemplating suicide as a way out of his dilemmas. Suicide on this reading is a “quietus,” literally an economic reckoning or squaring of the account but also suggesting a peaceful, reconciled release from life—not an active choice, but a passive acceptance of death.
However, the nagging, puzzling, and ambiguously unattached phrase “No more” remains, posing for any editor a severe problem of punctuation. Q2 leaves the question open by withholding any clarifying punctuation, printing “to die to sleepe / No more,” while F offers a slight degree of disambiguation but no more clarity:“to dye, to sleepe / No more.” Jenkins punctuates thus: “To die—to sleep, / No more; and by a sleep” (3.1.60–61). The Oxford edition, edited by Wells, Taylor, and Jowett, chooses “To die, to sleep— / No more, and by a sleep.” An internet editor (plucked at random from the many editions available) chooses a noncommittal “To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end.” Is “no more” simply an attempt to “think no more about it” (as in Lady Macbeth’s“consider it not so deeply” [2.2.29]), or does it mean “To die [is] to sleep no more,” as a return to the defeatism of the parallel “to accept is to die”? Astonishingly, the phrase “no more” is repeated twenty-four times in the play, mostly at emotionally significant moments, and “sleep” recurs twenty-one times, as though there is some subliminal drive toward Hamlet’s eventual fatalism in his “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.215–16). At the very least, equating death and sleep sets up another troubling, potentially nihilistic thought process: if death is like sleep—and, as Prospero said, “our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (The Tempest 4.1.157–58)—then Hamlet may paradoxically and literally mean “to sleep no more,” since such a state opens up a new fear of what lies beyond the grave, “that the dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.78–80). The sufferings might include a guilty conscience over what one has not done in life, conscience that “makes cowards of us all” (3.1.83), and we recall that Hamlet has actually met a returning traveler from purgatory, one who died, he says, “Cut off even in the blossoms of [his] sin” (1.5.76), with conscience still unbearably pricking. This in itself might encourage once again the option of suffering in silence, bearing “those ills we have” (3.1.81) rather than forcing issues and courting the horrible consequences in purgatory if the task is not completed in a state of virtue.
However, the opening section of the soliloquy has been read in a completely opposite way, as favoring action through self-assertion, defiance, and political activism. This is the meaning drawn from Hamlet’s words by activists in many political struggles, as we have seen, in countries as diverse as Egypt and Poland. It was raised in the campaign for black equality and civil rights in America in 1964, by no less a figure than Malcolm X, in a speech delivered at the Oxford Union, which can be viewed on YouTube. He makes clear his discomfort in quoting from a white writer, but nonetheless quotes Hamlet’s words to justify the use of violence in a just cause, ending with this statement:
I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think it was, who said “To be or not to be.” He was in doubt about something—whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—moderation—or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time.
Malcolm X is building on other references in Hamlet’s speech that are taken to advocate revolt against oppression—“Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely … / The insolence of office” (3.1.71, 73)—and the wrongs of inequality are made even more politically explicit in Q1’s catalogue of wrongs, “The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged / The taste of hunger or a tyrant’s reign” (7.125–26). This one speech in Hamlet, then, played its paradoxical part in the civil rights movement in America and offered a pacifist intervention in the Vietnam War.
It could be argued that Hamlet himself eventually resolves his conundrum with extraordinary intellectual acuteness, somehow managing to make his final moments both acquiescent and active in a resolution based on simple expedience and opportunism. He literally takes up arms with a rapier equated with a “bare bodkin” (3.1.76), but facing death so certainly that it amounts to a suicidal wish, as Horatio clearly foresees: “You will lose, my lord” (5.2.205). Even this dire “augury” (5.2.18) inspires Hamlet to understand the kind of mortal compromise he is making: “Not a whit. We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be” (5.2.215–20). In other words, leave it to fate and the demands of circumstances to answer the question for us. The question Hamlet raised in his first six lines in the famous passage are unresolved at this time, but they reverberate through the play. They set chiming all these profound and apparently irreconcilable conundrums, in a paradoxical form that Aronson, without actually mentioning Hamlet, has described as central to twentieth-century avant-garde thinking, “a battle between nihilism and rationality—both exist within the movement” (Aronson 40). No wonder the set of questions has “puzzle[d] the will” (3.1.80) down through the centuries, not least among those existentialists, freedom fighters, rebels against conformism, and all others who live with conscious deliberation along the edges of life and death.
Robert White is Winthrop Professor of English at the University of Western Australia, and a Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800. He has published extensively on Shakespeare and on Keats, and his latest books are Shakespeare and Emotions (ed., 2015), Avant-Garde Hamlet (2015) and Shakespeare and the Cinema of Love (2016).
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From Avant-Garde Hamlet: Text, Stage, Screen (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015)
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