TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Würzburg, Germany. 2015
Mural painted for Street Meet festival at Mainfranken Theater.
This mural is inspired by an old photography took by James Lafayette of Sarah Bernhardt performing Hamlet around 1900.
Since the first time that I saw this photo, for me was really poetic, see in a photo a woman with really special life, intense, hard, full of difficulties and finally satisfactory life; performing Hamlet on the scene of the soliloquy “To be or not to be”.
For me this image is an icon of overcoming spirit of a person and always I wanted to do a personal interpretation of this photography.
"HAMLET: To be, or not to be–that is the question:Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortuneOr to take arms against a sea of troublesAnd by opposing end them. To die, to sleep–No more–and by a sleep to say we endThe heartache, and the thousand natural shocksThat flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummationDevoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause. There’s the respectThat makes calamity of so long life.For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumelyThe pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,The insolence of office, and the spurnsThat patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,When he himself might his quietus makeWith a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscovered country, from whose bournNo traveller returns, puzzles the will,And makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,And thus the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,And enterprise of great pitch and momentWith this regard their currents turn awryAnd lose the name of action. – Soft you now,The fair Ophelia! – Nymph, in thy orisonsBe all my sins remembered."
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)
