'To sleep, possibly to dream' is a famous line in probably the nigh famous section of Hamlet. Shakespeare's play is chock-total of famous lines – as the old quip has it, information technology's a smashing play but has too many quotations in it – but this detail moment in this long tragedy offers an particularly high density of well-known quotations per page.

In Shakespeare's play, Village is the Prince of Kingdom of denmark and the son of the murdered King Hamlet and the Queen, Gertrude. The conversation with the gravedigger suggests that Village is 30 years quondam, although he is withal a educatee, at the University of Wittenberg. So nosotros don't know exactly how old Hamlet is meant to be, merely we know he is a student and that he is of an introspective and bookish cast of listen. As he demonstrates in his numerous soliloquies in the play (and Village has a lot of words: it's the second most demanding Shakespeare role for an actor to learn, with the nigh lines after Richard Three, though the latter'due south lines are spread across two plays), Village is a human who likes to chew things over and think nearly them before he acts.

Considering Hamlet likes to talk a great deal earlier he really does anything, he is often characterised as 'a man who cannot make up his listen'. The words that tend to come up when people endeavour to analyse the character or personality of Hamlet are indecisive, delaying, and uncertain, with 'inaction' being the fundamental defining characteristic of what Hamlet actually does during the play. Certainly, the poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought Hamlet'south chief fault was his indecision: he detected 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate disfavor to real action consequent upon it' – i.e., Hamlet is ameliorate at thinking virtually doing things than really doing them.

And 'To sleep, possibly to dream' and the surrounding spoken communication are a good case in betoken. The moment in question – in which we notice the line 'To slumber, perchance to dream' – is institute in Act iii Scene one in the most historic soliloquy in Hamlet, the championship graphic symbol'south spoken language which begins 'To be, or not to exist, that is the question'. Village'southward soliloquy from William Shakespeare's play is rightly praised for existence a searching and complex meditation on the nature of life and death, but some interpretations of the soliloquy serve to reduce the lines to a more simplistic significant. It begins:

To exist, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the listen to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to accept arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing stop them. To die—to slumber,
No more; and by a sleep to say nosotros stop
The heart-ache and the yard natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, in that location'southward the rub:
For in that slumber of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal scroll,
Must give us interruption—

'To sleep, perchance to dream': in other words, if decease is but a sleep, and dying is just like falling comatose, and then perhaps ('perchance') we will dream afterwards death. Mayhap the afterlife will exist full of dreams.

But that's where the problem lies for Hamlet, who, of all of Shakespeare'due south characters, is the one most prone to over-thinking. For as he goes on to say, in that 'slumber of death' nosotros practice not know what kind of dreams might befall united states of america: they may, after all, be more like nightmares than dreams. Of course, Hamlet doesn't say 'but that's the trouble', but 'ay, there's the rub': a 'rub' being an impediment or obstacle. The word comes from the game of bowls: a rub was the name given to an obstacle which causes the bowled ball to veer off course.

The line 'To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there's the rub' typifies Village'due south oral communication every bit a whole, which operates on this dialectic, whereby Hamlet presents himself with a proposition to which he then offers the counterargument: 'to be … or not to exist'; 'to dream … ay, at that place's the rub'. For this reason, some critics accept drawn parallels between Shakespeare's soliloquies and the essays of Michel de Montaigne, who was pioneering the modern essay form at around this time, in the tardily sixteenth century. Montaigne's essays deliberate a particular consequence, because the different aspects, much as Shakespeare'southward characters – Hamlet specially – engage in a sort of dialogue with themselves when in soliloquy manner.

'To sleep, maybe to dream', then, warns confronting the dangers of longing for the ultimate sleep – the 'sleep of death' – because the living tin little comprehend what happens later on we die, and what 'dreams' may prevarication in store for us so. It is in keeping with some of the other classic quotations from Hamlet, such equally 'there are more than things in heaven and earth, Horatio' and 'the undiscover'd country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns'.