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Articles

Sick to Death?

Is suicide a disease to be treated, or a choice to be respected? Justin Busch tackles the problem by analysing the concept of disease.

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? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d.
(Hamlet, Act III, scene 1)

Referring to this very speech, George Santayana commented on “the positivism that underlies Shakespeare’s thinking.” Santayana found this attitude striking; “Shakespeare,” he wrote, “is remarkable among the greater poets for being without a philosophy and without a religion.”¹

Hamlet’s stance toward the world, and Shakespeare’s approach to religion, become all the more powerful with the audience’s realization that the act being contemplated is that of self-destruction, or what we would now call suicide. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word suicide dates from about 1651, almost half a century after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.

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