He starts out contemplating the possibility of committing suicide if it weren’t for the fact that he is religious enough to believe that suicide is a mortal sin and Hell awaits him. But who wants to live if you have to bear the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, etc.? Towards the end, Hamlet wanders a little off topic and starts to muse on how too much thought on any topic tends to lose the name of action. Enterprises of great purpose can be deterred if you sit around thinking about them for too long. This is central to Hamlet’s own tragic flaw — indecision. Do you kill someone that a ghost tells you to kill? If the king is innocent and the Ghost is just the Devil trying to win one more soul over to his side, then killing Claudius will also get Hamlet sent straight to Hell. So Hamlet decides to play being mad, since madmen are given wide berths and then he can learn some things and let the King’s own guilty conscience give him away later on (when he yells “I need more light!” at the end of the play-within-a-play)

I’m doing the hamlet play right now too. What this speach is about is Hamlet contomplating death. To be or not to be. To die or not to die. He is later on speaking of what awaits a person after death. He talks of dreams or the fact that there may be nothingness. Pretty cool speach if you ask me.

The theme of the whole thing is, am i going to live with this cruel world or be done with it.

Also, to add to this question of death. Hamlet was quite religious in the sense that he would not kill himself because he knew that he would not go to heaven if he did. At the end of the play, however, as he dies from poison, he speaks “the rest is silence.” This can be interpreted to mean that there is no afterlife for him.