"To Be or Not to Be" Soliloquy

I am obsessed with Hamlet, and have been since I first read it when I was seventeen.  I memorized this soliloquy after I'd read the play the first time, in fact.  

Is it poetry?  Well, it's definitely blank verse.  It's poetic.  It's beautiful and deep and endlessly quotable.  So we'll read and study it today.

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. To die, to sleep; 

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; 

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 

Must give us pause: there's the respect 

That makes calamity of so long life; 

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, 

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, 

The insolence of office and the spurns 

That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 

When he himself might his quietus make 

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, 

To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 

But that the dread of something after death, 

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn 

No traveller returns, puzzles the will 

And makes us rather bear those ills we have 

Than fly to others that we know not of? 

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, 

And enterprises of great pith and moment 

With this regard their currents turn awry, 

And lose the name of action.

     --Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

Discussion Questions:

1.  What lines or phrases from this have you heard before?

2.  What is Hamlet talking to himself about here?  (A soliloquy is something a character says to themself during a play, but out loud so the audience can hear his thoughts.)  What is his decision by the end of it?

3.  What poetic devices does Shakespeare use in his blank verse here?