Douglas Bruster

TO

OR
NOT
> Or Not To Be
Series edited by: Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie

Shakespeare Thinking Philip Davis

Shakespeare Inside Amy Scott-Do
Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators ‘i
Z

Godless Shakespeare Eric 5. MV

Shakespeare's Double Helix Henry S. Turner
Shakespearean Metaphysics Mich
 Jr Not To
Be

Douglas Bruster

Xs
continuu
m
Continuum
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 794
London New York
SE1 7NX NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com

© Douglas Bruster 2007

Douglas Bruster has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as Author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-8997-4

PB: 0-8264-8998-2
ISBN-13: HB: 9780826489975
PB: 9780826489982

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts.

Printed and bound by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear
 Contents

General Editors’ Preface vii

i Inthe Shakespeare Museum 1

2 What are the Questions? |

3. There’s the Rub 13

4 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 43

The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 65

6 Not One Speech but Three, or “There’s the Point’ 87

7 Consummation (Some Conclusions) 101

% Acknowledgments and Further Reading 105

Index ,107
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2023 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https ://archive.org/details/tobeornottobe0000brus
 General Editors’ Preface

Shakespeare Now! represents a new form for new approaches. Whereas

academic writing is far too often ascendant and detached, attesting all
too clearly to years of specialist training, Shakespeare Now! offers a
series of intellectual adventure stories: animate with fresh and often
exposed thinking, with ideas still heating in the mind.
This series of ‘minigraphs’ will thus help to bridge two yawning
gaps in current public discourse. First, the gap between scholarly
thinking and a public audience: the assumption of academics that
they cannot speak to anyone but their peers unless they hopelessly
dumb-down their work. Second, the gap between public audience
and scholarly thinking: the assumption of regular playgoers, readers,
ot indeed actors that academics write about the plays at a level of
abstraction or specialization that they cannot hope to understand.
But accessibility should not be mistaken for comfort or predict-
ability. Impatience with scholarly obfuscation is usually accompanied
by a basic impatience with anything but (supposed) common sense.
What this effectively means is a distrust of really thinking, and a
disdain for anything that might unsettle conventional assumptions,
particularly through crossing or re-drafting formal, political, or
theoretical boundaries. We encourage such adventure, and base our
claim to a broad audience upon it.
Here, then, is where out series is innovative: no compromising of
the sorts of things that can be thought; a commitment to publishing
powerful cutting-edge scholarship; but a conviction that these things
vii Yo Be Or Not To Be

are essentially communicable, that we can find a language that is

enterprising, individual, and shareable.
To achieve this we need a form that can capture the genuine
challenge and vigour of thinking. Shakespeare is intellectually excit-
ing, and so too ate the ideas and debates that thinking about his work
can provoke. But published scholarship often fails to communicate
much of this. It is difficult to sustain excitement over the 80—120,000
words customary for a monograph: difficult enough for the writer,
and perhaps even more so for the reader. Scholarly articles have
likewise become a highly formalised mode not only of publication,
but also of intellectual production. The brief length of articles means
that a concept can be outlined, but its implications or application can
rarely be tested in detail. The decline of sustained, exploratory
attention to the singularity of a play’s language, occasion, or move-
ment is one of the unfortunate results. Often ‘the play’ is somehow
assumed, a known and given thing that is not really worth exploring.
So we spend our time pursuing collateral contexts: criticism becomes
a belated, historicizing footnote.
important things have got lost. Above all, any vivid sense as to
why we are bothered with these things in the first place. Why read?
Why go to plays? Why are they important? How does any pleasure
they give relate to any of the things we labour to say about them? In
many ways, literary criticism has forgotten affective and political
immediacy. It has assumed a shared experience of the plays and then
averted the gaze from any such experience, or any testing of it. We
want a morte ductile and sensitive mode of production; one that has
more chance of capturing what people are really thinking and read-
ing about, rather than what the pre-empting imperatives of journal or
respectable monograph tend to encourage.
Furthermore, there is a vast world ofintellectual possibility— from
the past and the present — that mainstream Shakespeare criticism has
all but ignored. In recent years there has been a move away from
‘theory’ in literary studies: an aversion to its obscure jargon and
 General Editors’ Preface ix

complacent self-regard; a sense that its tricks were too easily

rehearsed and that the whole game has become one of diminishing
returns. This has further encouraged a retreat into the supposed safety
of historicism. Of course the best such work is stimulating, revelatory,
and indispensable. But too often there is little trace of any struggle;
little sense that the writer is coming at the subject afresh, searching
for the most appropriate language or method. Alternatively, the prose
is so labored that all trace of an urgent story is quite lost.
We want to open up the sorts of thinking — and thinkers — that
might help us get at what Shakespeare is doing or why Shakespeare
matters. This might include psychology, cognitive science, theology,
linguistics, phenomenology, metaphysics, ecology, history, political
theory; it can mean other art forms such as music, sculpture, painting,
dance; it can mean the critical writing itself becomes a creative act.
In sum, we want the minigraphs to recover what the Renaissance
‘essay’ form was originally meant to embody. It meant an ‘assay’ — a
trial or a test of something; putting something to the proof; and
doing so in a form that is not closed-off and that cannot be reduced to
a system. We want to communicate intellectual activity at its most
alive: when it is still exciting to the one doing it; when it is questing
and open, just as Shakespeare is. Literary criticism — that is, really
thinking about words in action, plays as action — can start making a
much more creative and vigorous contribution to contemporary
intellectual /7fe.

Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie

To be or not to be

To be, or not to be, that is the question: 55

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 mote, and by a sleep to say we end 60
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’. To die, to sleep —
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 65
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,
TH oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 70
The pangs of despisd love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, 1
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, 80
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 oer with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment 85
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.
1 In the Shakespeare
Museum

Imagine finding yourself in the Shakespeare Museum. You walk

through its vast marble hallways, looking into entire rooms set aside
for Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and even characters. Here you find a
gallery of artefacts from _A Midsummer Nights Dream — among them
editions, portraits and costumes. Across the hall an equally large
Macbeth room presents the daggers, witches’ cauldrons, and crowns
used by hundreds of actors down through the centuries. Continuing
on, you encounter a sizeable space for Juliet and Romeo, and then a
separate gallery for the Sonnets. As you move from room to room,
taking in these sights, you realize with some amusement that you
have also been listening to Shakespeare’s words. Everywhere snatches
of songs and familiar speeches float through the air. In this hallway,
Ariel sings The Tempest’s haunting melody, ‘Full fadom five? Around
the corner you hear the stately cadence of ‘Friends, Romans, coun-
trymen from Julius Caesar.
Just ahead, though, you catch sight of the most arresting thing of
all. For here, off the Museum’s expansive Hamlet wing, you come
actoss an entire gallery devoted to the “To be or not to be’ speech.
Walking past rows of skulls, rapiers, and portraits of Hamlets gone
by, you step into this shadowy room set aside for Hamlet’s famous
soliloquy.
As you enter, the exhibit springs almost magically to life. From the
2 To Be Or Not To Be

darkness, the afternoon sun comes up on an Elizabethan production

of the play. Standing near the front of a wide wooden platform, an
actor in hose and doublet begins the famous soliloquy: To be . . . Before
he can finish this line, another stage in a different part of the room ts
illuminated, this time by torches.
You turn your head and see the same
actor delivering the speech less broadly, his voice lowered for what
appears to be a more intimate setting: or not to be... Both Hamlets
speak at once, and are joined in quick order by a third figure: that zs the
question. Dressed less formally than the others, this Hamlet bobs up
and down slightly as he gives his lines. You note with some surprise
that he stands on the deck of an Elizabethan ship. More strange still,
this ship — from what you can tell of the distant background — seems
to be anchored off coastal Africa.
The words of this familiar speech unfold while your eyes and ears
dart from Hamlet to Hamlet, taking in differences among their cos-
tumes, stages, and manner of delivery. When a fourth and fifth actor
appear, you realize that you are seeing and hearing productions of
Hamlet from Shakespeate’s time forward. For a brief moment they
continue the speech as a small group: whether ’tis nobler in the mind ...
And as you watch and listen to them you notice something interest-
ing. Even as they deliver the lines to unseen audiences, many of these ,
Hamlets peek at the actors who have come before them. Although
they cannot avoid adding their own style to the performance, each
tries to do what his predecessors have done.
The speech continues, and this room — which you now recognize
is enormous — begins to fill up with more Hamlets and more stages.
They appear in a faster tempo, and, as the decades pass, the differ-
ences among them increase. The stages, once thrust out into the
crowd or even a part of the audience’s own space, have been pulled
back and crowned with high, arched fronts. In contrast to the sun-
light shining on the first actor, candles — literally footlights — illum-
inate many of the dozens of Hamlets now speaking. Their costumes
have changed as well. Unlike the hose and doublets of the first
 In the Shakespeare Museum 3

Hamlets, the more recent actors wear‘coats and wigs of the eight-
eenth century. They still pay attention to those who have started
before them, but instead of imitating their predecessors these actors
strive to be slightly different. One speaks his lines in an easy, almost
conversational way: fo suffer the slings and arrows ofoutrageous fortune ...
As the eighteenth century gives way to the nineteenth, the words
of the soliloquy continue, but not as coherently as before. Most of the
Hamlets perform in a more formal, declamatory style: or bytaking arms
against a sea of troubles ... Your attention lingers on one of these
Hamlets, for you note with interest a woman costumed as the Prince.
She catches your eye as she says and by opposing, end them.
More Hamlets appear. Their costumes and the scenery they stand
before vary from what has come earlier. Some stages present the
battlements of a castle, others the interior of a medieval court. A few
of these stages are cavernous, dwarfing their speakers. Still more
come into view, and in ever quickening succession. The words of the
soliloquy start to run together as you grow overwhelmed by the
number of actors. A man speaking in Romanian joins the bevy of
European performers reciting the speech in their own languages; he
keeps pace with the French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Italian
Hamlets already speaking.
Suddenly, in another corner of this room, a spotlight picks out a
gramophone. Out of its horn-shaped speaker a scratchy, unreal voice
joins the chorus: To sleep, perchance to dream... Behind this machine,
others start into motion as if by magic. Their needles ride the grooves
of thick black records rotating slowly atop turntables, adding more
voices to the chorus you hear: ay, there’ the rub...
Still other machines materialize as the twentieth century dawns.
An illuminated screen begins to glow on one of the gallery’s walls.
Its images of a darkly garbed Hamlet pulse with the uneven rhythms
of early film. You see his lips move in synch with the words of the
speech, but you do not hear his voice. Instead, the sequence cuts to a
subtitle. You read the words of the soliloquy in an elegant white font
4 Te 8e Or Not To Be

against a decorated black square: For who would bear the whips and
scorns of time...?
Before you can finish reading even a few words though, a radio
crackles to life in the foreground, its ghostly broadcast of Hamlet’s
words joining the hundreds already audible. Other screens continue
to flicker on, drawing your attention. The first glow silently with
subtitles, but soon others burst into life with the sounds of recorded
speech. You recognize a few of these voices and faces, marveling not
only at how young these actors looked in their prime, but also at the
fact that the Hamlets themselves have become younger. The men
and women you have encountered so far have tended to be middle-
aged and older. These modern Hamlets are in their thirties, even
twenties.

The sheer number of Hamlets performing all around you makes

things almost too much to process. Even as new machines join the
chorus, stages continue to pop up, some quite barren, some decor-
ated very imaginatively. Screen after screen cascades into life, and
soon the walls of the gallery are filled with hundreds of different
Hamlets delivering their lines: the andiscoverd country... If the earlier
actors had glanced at their counterparts while speaking, these latest
Hamlets strike you as looking almost wildly around them. Like you,
they seem intimidated by the number of speakers who have come
before. Their response is fairly uniform. These Hamlets struggle to be
different. Some speak directly to the audience; one to Ophelia. They
change their gestures and the cadences of their lines, delivering them
in slightly improbable postures as though trying to prevent you from
imitating them or predicting their action.
Even the relationship of actor to speech changes now. Where the
Hamlets of early film had moved their lips silently to the speech, one
of the more recent screen-Hamlets seems to ‘think’ it. His lips do not
move, but some of the words are audible as an interior monologue.
You watch in amazement as the four walls of this room throb with
 In the Shakespeare Museum 5

light: the pale cast ofthought ... Many dozens of screen and television-
Hamlets add their versions to the choir already speaking.

Finally, startlingly, the speech comes to an end — Soft you now, the fair
Ophelia. Like a wind-up toy, the soliloquy eases to a halt. The stages
and screens go dark as silence fills the room again, which now feels
empty and cold. You are left alone with your thoughts. As you turn to
leave, a small plaque near the door catches your eye. It describes the
speech in the compressed language of museum exhibits everywhere:

“To be or not to be’

This soliloquy by Prince Hamlet stands as one of Shakespeare's most cele-

brated speeches. From the time it was first heard on Elizabethan stages, it
has been imitated, translated, venerated, and parodied. In the process, it
has become a symbol for theatricality, the Shakespearean, philosophy,
and even literature itself. The speech has been set to music many times, and
each of its phrases has been borrowed for the title ofa subsequent creative
work. Hamlet’ speech is recited on stage and in classrooms worldwide ona
daily basis. Actors and audiences alike recognize it as a masterpiece of
dramatic writing.
To be or not to be

To be, or not to be, that is the question: 55

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 mote, and by a sleep to say we end 60
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wishd. To die, to sleep —
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 65
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,
Th oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 70
The pangs of despisd love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, aS
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, 80
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 oer with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment 85
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.
2 What are the Questions?

If there were a Shakespeare Museum like the one described here, it

would definitely have some kind of Hamlet wing, so central is this
play to Shakespeare’s achievement. And this Hamlet wing would in
turn be likely to reserve a great deal of space for the “To be or not to be’
soliloquy. We have imagined a special room in which all the perfor-
mances of this speech down through history were played in over-
lapping sequence. This cumulative staging is one way of coming to
grips with a speech that lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s most revered
play. Hamlet was most likely a triumph for Shakespeare as a play-
wright, and its subsequent success has made it a metaphor for his
larger achievements. As delivered by such star performers as Richard
Burbage, David Garrick, Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore,
Laurence Olivier, and Kenneth Branagh, this speech has proven
integral to the public’s image of Shakespeare.
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the speech has
helped shape the way the theater, acting, and even thinking itself have
been conceived in the West. Indeed, while the “To be or not to be’
soliloquy works as a metaphor for both the play and the playwright, it
also stands in for a certain version of his culture.We could recall, for
instance, that Hamlet was performed aboard the Elizabethan ship
named the Red Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607 — per-
haps the first time the play was staged outside England. To keep in
mind a mental picture of that gently rolling deck so far from home
may help us imagine the larger stage of Western culture, and
8 Yeo Be Or Not Yo Se

Shakespeare’s place on it. His stand-in on this crowded platform is

Hamlet, both play and Prince. Like an Elizabethan ship hundreds of
miles from home, Shakespeare’s words have traversed the world. And
if Hamlet has been a central emissary of that journey, the “To be or not
to be’ soliloquy has become a vetsion-in-miniature of this most
celebrated writer’s most celebrated play and character.
Even in its flattering description of the speech’s monumental nat-
ure, though, the tidy version of this soliloquy that we have read in our
museum’ placard tells only half the story. For instance, if the speech is
a‘masterpiece’ — which suggests a work to which the artist has applied
finishing touches — why have actors had to work so hard to find
meaning in it? We could consider the odd fact that the more Hamlets
there were in our museum scenario, the less comfortable they seemed
to be with the speech. The most recent Hamlets, in particular, seemed
to carry upon their backs the burden of all the earlier performances.
‘How can I make it new?’ each seemed to ask.‘How am I to deliver the
speech, when it has been delivered so many thousands of times
before?”
They would have a point in asking ‘How can I say these words at
all? While Hamlet’s “To be or not to be’ soliloquy remains one of the
central speeches in all of Western culture, it is also one of the most
mysterious. There are reasons for this mystery. Unlike the description
on our placard, the speech as a whole is actually quite messy. And its
beginning (the most orderly part of the soliloquy) seems so familiar
that we think we know the entire speech better than we do. No matter
how many times we hear it begun, though, it is easy for us to get lost
in its middle and end. The disorder of this speech, in fact, can pro-
duce a kind of trance in its readers and hearers. As we will see, the
speech turns on itself time and again, sometimes like the back-and-
forth rallies in a tennis match, at others like the coils of a snake
moving sideways through the grass.
It is important to realize straightaway that the overwhelming
question usually asked of this speech — ‘Is it about suicide?’ — is
 What are the Questions? 9

hardly the most interesting thing it asks us to ask. In fact, one could
say that the speech does not ask us to think much about suicide at all.
There is suicide 7” the speech, clearly, but Hamlet is interested in so
many other things, and interested in them so profoundly, that calling
“To be or not to be’a suicide speech is to miss the point. It is to dwell
on the pedestal of an imposing monument in order to avoid the ver-
tigo that comes from looking up at its heights.

Other puzzles seem more pressing. Among these:

Why have so many actors sought to play Hamlet, only to struggle

with this speech?

How could the most famous speech in literature be so mysterious,

and so poorly understood?

But these are only a few of the uncertainties we may have. The soli-
loquy produces some troubling contradictions, things that don’t
seem to fit. We could phrase these as follows:

Why has this extremely public document come to serve as our

most important declaration of the private?

Why has this account of the failures of the self become a verbal
shrine to selfconsciousness?

And, finally, perhaps the most troubling of all:

What does it mean that the central speech of the central character
in the central play of the language’s central author is all but useless
to its speaker and story? ‘

Even a much longer book on the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy would
ptobably be unable to answer these questions with any finality. This is
the nature of literature generally, and perhaps of Hamlet in particular.
Where it is able to provide answers, this short book gives mainly
10 Fe Be Or Not Yo Be

provisional ones. But it does seek to discover and share some ways of
wrestling with such questions. It attempts to do so by looking care-
fully at the speech from a number of angles.We will begin with what
the soliloquy may mean.
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To be or not to be

To be, or not to be, that is the question: 55

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 mote, and by a sleep to say we end 60
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wishd. To die, to sleep —
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 65
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,
Th opptressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 70
The pangs of despisd love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, 15
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, 80
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 oer with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment 85
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.
3 There’s the Rub

What does the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy mean? Eventually we will
ask this question in other ways. We will pay special attention to how
this speech means (its style, structure, and rhythms), where it does so
(in a story and often on a stage), and for whom (Hamlet, among others).
Ideally, we could look at all these things at once. And in reality, the
how, where, and for whom all have an important role in the what of the
speech’s meaning. To separate these things is to postpone issues that
can help us toward deeper understanding. But obviously the solilo-
quy is complicated. And taking its various aspects and contexts one
by one seems a good way to address its complexities. This focused
approach is particularly helpful in relation to the interpretation of the
speech that one hears so often: that it is a ‘suicide speech’ There are
suicide speeches in Shakespeare, and perhaps even in Hamlet, but this
is not one of them.We will see, in fact, that this speech runs counter to
the clichéd reading. Let us look at it and listen to it closely, rewinding
it (only to play it again) in the pages that follow.
Our main version of the speech comes from The Riverside
Shakespeare, 2nd edition. All the Shakespeare citations in this book
refer to this edition. For the record, the Riverside bases its text of
Hamlet primarily on the second Quarto (abbreviated as ‘Q2’), origin-
ally published in 1604/5. Three versions of this speech survive from
Shakespeare’s time. Two — that from Q2 and the First Folio (‘F1)
published 1623) — are almost exactly the same. Another version of
Hamlet — probably a kind of ‘bootleg’ edition — was printed in 1603;
14 ¥o Be Or Not To Be

this is called the ‘bad quarto’ or, less prejudicially, the ‘first quarto’
(Q1). We will look at its less familiar version of this speech later in this
book. For now, it is enough to observe that in standard editions the
speech itself occurs approximately 60 lines into the first scene of Act
3; in our text, it is printed at lines 55 through 89. To make the fol-
lowing analysis easier to read, subsequent quotations from the soli-
loguy will be bolded, and the blank verse’s capital letters will be
retained only if they begin a sentence — thus Whether ’tis nobler
becomes whether ’tis nobler. Clearly, suppressing the capitalization,
like losing the line breaks themselves, lends ease to the reading pro-
cess at the expense of the verse lines. It is a calculated trade-off.
Finally, you may notice that while the text here (like most modern
editions) features a comma after “To be, this book follows conven-
tional practice in referring to the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Here is
the speech itself:

To be, or not to be, that is the question: a)

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 60
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish. To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 65
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,
Th oppressot’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 70
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
 There's the Rub 15

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, wh)
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, 80
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 oer with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment 85
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.

The architecture of the speech will concern us more in the next

chapter of this book. But noticing a deep symmetry may immediately
shed some light on the first line’s power. Hamlet’s first line — perhaps
the most famous in all of literature — breaks in half, and each of its
halves breaks in half again:

1 | 2

To be, or not to be that 1s the question

1 2 1 on

The line’s familiarity may derive in part from its perfectly symme-
trical nature. Its balanced halves (To be, or not to be, / that is the
question) themselves balance atop a middle word (or) or words (is
the). Another structure comes into play as well. Like the total in a
16 To Be Or Not To Be

mathematical equation (2 + 2 = 4) or the reckoning in a shop’s tally

sheet (5p + 5p = 10p), the last word sums up the line’s first half.
But what is a question? This word meant something particular in
Shakespeare’s time. It referred to a formal issue for meditation or
debate. Students at university or law school in the Elizabethan era, for
instance, would typically be required to argue an announced ques-
tion. These ‘questions’ ranged from the practical — such as “whether a
man should marry’ — to the more speculative — for instance, ‘whe-
ther there be more worlds than this one’As it does in Hamlet, the form
of the question trickled into many Elizabethan writings. One finds a
contemporary author wondering, for example, whether poetry or
philosophy has more force in teaching. In another text, a character
asks whether it is better (on one hand) to revel in one’s youth and later
regret one’s sins or (on the other hand) to postpone the enjoyment of
pleasure. Clearly these ‘questions’ balance alternatives, and ask that we
consider each point of view. The alternatives of such ‘questions’ mean
our line’s items diverge as well as combine. Thus not only 2 + 2=4 but
2, —2= 7
Surprisingly, the speech begins to get complicated with the
apparently simple word that. For this word does two things at once,
and neither of these things makes matters clearer. First, it prevents the
line from gaining clarity — the kind of clarity that could result, for
instance, had Shakespeare finished the line with something like “To
be or not to be melancholy is ..? That is, had he completed the line
not with a characterization (that), but by making clear what To be and
not to be mean. Second, it misleads us by implying that what comes
before it (To be, or not to be) has the clarity it does not provide.
The first halfof this line zs a question. It is a question, though, not
only in the sense of an academic alternative, but also in posing a
puzzle that asks to be solved. What does Hamlet suggest when he sets
out the alternative of To be, or not to be?
By to be, Hamlet could mean (among other things) ‘to live’ or ‘to
exist, with not to be thus implying ‘to die’ or ‘to cease to exist? It is
 There’s the Rub 17

important to note that the division here — being and not being — was
one of the stable alternatives in philosophy at the time. Doctor
Faustus, the cerebral title character of Christopher Marlowe’s great
tragedy (written about a decade before Hamle#), actually takes up this
question in its Greek form — on kai me on (‘being and not being’ —
pronounced ‘own kai may own’). Faustus attributes this issue to
Aristotle, and discards it as not pragmatic enough for his tastes. In
this philosophical register, To be, or not to be provides a mutually
incompatible contradiction; things have to be one way or the other:
either they exist or they do not. A contemporary form of Hamlet’s
proposition in Latin reads est aut non est: that is, the question of whe-
ther something ‘is or is not?
So far so good. But this apparently straightforward choice needs to
be qualified with other possibilities. This is especially the case
because the speech’s next lines include yet another alternative. It may
be helpful to represent this alternative by means of a diagram. Here
the well-known whether clause supports a balanced set of choices:

whether ’tis nobler

in the mind to suffer to take arms against a

the slings and arrows or sea of troubles and by
of outrageous fortune opposing, end them.

These lines pose alternatives by means of memorable imagery. At

base, the choice is between stoicism (the commitment to accepting
what life brings one — whether good or ill — with equal indifference)
and heroism (the act of doing something decisive by means of per-
sonal force — the very opposite of indifference). The whether here,
like the that of the preceding line, implies that a problem is being
solved through definition. But this definition actually does the
opposite. Seemingly clarifying the alternative of To be, or not to be,
it multiplies possibilities rather than subtracting them. This multi-
plication of possibilities comes from the ambiguities of words (what
18 Yo Be Or Not Ya Be

being and not being mean, for instance) and reference (which of these
alternatives is being referred to by the whether definitions).
In addition to our ‘life or death’ reading, To be could mean some-
thing like ‘to act’and not to be, ‘not to act? This would connect To be
with to take arms and not to be with suffer. Thus To be could imply
the heroic possibility mentioned in the following lines and not to be
the stoic possibility. But — and this is crucial to note — the phrase To
be could also embrace the stoic possibility, in the sense that Hamlet
may mean the acceptance of not acting (against, say, the King). This
reading is especially relevant to the topic of suicide that comes up
later in the speech with the phrase his quietus make with a bare
bodkin: not only because inaction seems the opposite of suicide, but
because the result in each case may be the same. A bodkin is a short,
pointed weapon such as a dagger; it is bare because it has been drawn
from its sheath in order to be used.
By this point in the play, Hamlet has been confronted with a
number of challenges. The most important question he faces is whe-
ther he should act against the King (Claudius) as the Ghost has
instructed him. However ambiguous those orders may be, the plea to
‘revenge’ his father’s murder is urgent, as well as perilous. Hamlet is
initially alone among the living in suspecting that his uncle has
murdered his, Hamlet’s, father — the lawful monarch of Denmark. As
Hamlet discovers, gaining revenge will mean at the very least putting
his life on the line, and possibly sacrificing it. His accidental, careless
taking of Polonius’ life, for example, helps set in motion the forces
that will end his own.
To this dangerous action against the King, we may wish to add the
possibility of Hamlet acting in another way — against himself.
Whether intended, the mention of suicide later in his speech has led
many to interpret his initial alternatives in that light as well. This
multiplies the kinds of things that his opening words can mean but it
does not change the basic possibilities. These possibilities, as we have
seen, are generated in part from the verbal ambiguity (what being and
 There’s the Rub 19

not being mean) and in part from which of these terms pairs,
respectively, with the stoic (in the mind to suffer) and heroic (to take
arms) explanations. ‘
Here are some of the possibilities set out in a chart, with the
subcategories represented in their own complexity:

To be not to be

la live/exist lb die/cease to exist

@eroic) (toic)
2a act (against King) 2b not act (against King)
2a" act (against self) 2b' not act (against self)

(toic) @eroic)
3a accept not acting (against 3b refuse inaction (against
King) King)
3a' accept not acting (against 3b! refuse inaction (against
self) self)

The middle rows above (‘act/not act’) show us that, depending on

how we trarislate his words, Hamlet’s heroism may lead to death (not
to be) as well as life (To be), and that stoicism may likewise lead to his
death (not to be) or allow him to live (To be). That is, we recognize
here that each of our terms (To be and not to be) can be read to imply
one thing and its exact opposite. The paradox is that the middle cate-
gories (2a and 2b) contradict those that sandwich them. Thus a
‘heroic’ reading of To be (2a and 2a') gives us a Hamlet who will die
(that is, 1b, our first-level interpretation of not ... be) through his
murderous action against the King (revenge — which may lead to his
own death) or himself (suicide). Likewise a stoic not to be (2b and 2b')
gives us a Hamlet who may live (1a, our first-level reading of To be)
through not acting against either himself (suicide) or the King
(revenge).
20 Yo Be Or Not To Be

Hete is the same chart with the contradiction represented by means of

arrows:

To be not to be

la _live/exist 1b die/cease to exist

@eroic) (toic)
2a act (against King) 2b not act (against King)
2a' act (against self) 2b’ not act (against self)

(stoic) @eroic)
3a accept not acting (against 3b__ refuse inaction (against
King) King)
3a accept not acting (against 3b’ refuse inaction (against
self ) self }

It is vital to recognize this contradiction because the “To be or not to

be’ soliloquy exposes us to this kind of puzzling logic at several other
key moments.We can see it at work, for instance, in the very next stage
of the speech.
Hamlet builds on the word end in the phrase and by opposing,
end them. At this point he says to die, to sleep — no more... In both
the second quarto (Q2) and Folio version, this line is given without
punctuation as to die to sleep no more. One reading of no more sees
Hamlet as summarizing the state he has earlier set out as not to be (as
in,‘I would be no more’). In part because Hamlet will go on to envision
death as a kind of sleep, many editions of the play, including the
Riverside from which we have drawn our text, represent the phrase no
more as Hamlet interrupting himself. Perhaps he may be talking to
himself like a writer or rehearsing speaker. Like all of us, such figures
may chide themselves for starting down a path without being ready to
do so. Hamlet interrupts himself in this manner when reciting a
passage from the Player’s speech earlier in the play:
 There’s the Rub 21

If it live in your memory, begin at this line — let me see, let me

see:

The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’ Hyrcanian beast —

Tis not so, it begins with Pyrrhus:
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms...
(2.2.448-52)

This seems precisely the kind of false start that Hamlet gives us with
no more. He may step outside himself as if to admonish himself or
drive a thought out of his head. This emphasis on his thoughts comes
out, of course, in the puzzling phrase nobler in the mind to suffer:
we can take this to mean ‘suffering X seems nobler in one’s mind, or
‘suffering in one’s mind (rather than externally) seems nobler? In part
because Hamlet speaks to and with himself, his meaning remains
ambiguous.
Hamlet imagines death as a kind of sleep. This sleep, again,
restates the ‘end’ of by opposing, end them. He makes the analogy
pointedly with the phrase by a sleep to say we, just as we could say,
for instance, ‘by X here I mean Y’ As we have seen, the speech begins
with careful if complicated alternatives, visible in the first line’s
pivotal or and expanded by the subsequent whether clause. But this
has now given way to extensive restatement. Where the first line
restated its alternatives as a single question, the next section of the
speech restates again and again, as though Hamlet is dissatisfied with
the initial results. Taking up the end that comes from opposing a sea
of troubles, he asks us to imagine, with him, a sleep that will end the
heart-ache and thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. His
mode of restatement continues when heart-ache and natural shocks
pick up the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Even as for-
tune inevitably throws hardships at our persons (the metaphor of
slings and arrows is a powerful one here), so does being in a body
make one heir to spiritual and physical troubles. The heart-ache and
shocks may function as the imagined result of the slings and arrows.
22 Yo Be Gr Not To Be

Hamlet appears to conclude his line of thinking in the same way

he ends his first line, with a summation of sorts: "tis a con-
summation devoutly to be wish’d. This resembles and echoes that
is the question but shifts from an academic register (raised by the
debate-word question) to a religious one with the words con-
summation and devoutly. Hamlet means something like ‘this is a
goal worth wishing for? Separately, consummation and devoutly
could be read without reference to religion. But together (and we
will notice that Hamlet pairs them in his sentence), they invite us to
consider the subject of death (To die, to sleep) in a religious context.
The word consummation recalls the Latin form of Christ’s last
words on the cross: ‘Consummatum est; ot ‘It is finished’? We can sense
the power this phrase had for the Elizabethans in the fact that
Marlowe has his eponymous character blasphemously parody them
in Doctor Faustus, as he finishes signing a contract with Satan. By
itself, the word devoutly would not necessarily invoke a religious
context. In the immediate company of consummation here, how-
ever, it suggests to be wish’d may be a form of prayer, translated
froim a sacred to a secular domain.
At this point, the soliloquy appears to have settled its thoughts
about the sleep of death. Hamlet has for a few lines taken up the
metaphor ofdeath as a kind of sleep, and has further entertained the
notion that such a sleep would end the troubles of life. He has
expressed these troubles as heart-ache and the thousand natural
shocks that flesh is heir to. But having closed that line of thought by
characterizing it as a secular prayer, something devoutly to be
wish’d, he returns to it once more. The implication is that he is not
satisfied with such an easy conclusion. Perhaps this lack of satisfaction
centers on the word wish’d, for this can be taken in at least two ways.
First, with its attendant words to be, it can suggest that such a con-
summation shou/d be desired because it is a very desirable end. The
phrase to be wish’d would thus have the force of something that
needs to be done, in our sense of an item on a‘to do’ list. But this word
 There’s the Rub 23

and phrase could also suggest that such an end must remain ov/y a
desire because it is ultimately too good to be true.

Hamlet will go on in the next section of the soliloquy to give us

reasons this may be so. First, though, we could notice that he begins
all over again with the same words he has used before: To die, to
sleep—. Where he had earlier settled on no more as a stopping point,
going on to imagine that To die is to experience an untroubled sleep,
here he takes up sleep as a state of existence that shares with life the
possibility of heart-ache and natural shocks. This trouble may come
through dreams. Instead of imagining sleep as putting an end to
such troubles (as he has done through his self-conscious definition,
and by asleep to say we end .. .), Hamlet repeats his initial metaphor
(death as a kind of sleep) and follows out its implications. ‘If we say
that death is like sleep? we can imagine him thinking, ‘should we not
be honest and admit that, just as when we slumber while’alive, the
sleep of death may bring dreams?’ However seriously, Hamlet has
already told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he could be content
in life ‘were it not that I have bad dreams’ (2.2.254—6). Dreams were,
for Shakespeare, a powerful, even central part oflife. A later reader of
Shakespeare’s works, Sigmund Freud, saw dreams as one of the proofs
that we have an unconscious, a faculty which steers us in ways we
cannot, by definition, imagine. Unpredictable, dreams can terrify as
well as soothe us with images over which we have no control. To be in
the grips of a nightmare, as everyone knows, is to be absolutely
helpless.
Thus when Hamlet begins his meditation over again, he re-defines
sleep as an activity and experience rather than an end: To die, to
sleep — to sleep, perchance to dream ... Just as we have heard him
talk to himself almost from outside himself in the ‘Pyrrhus’ rehear-
sal — ‘let me see, let me see’ — Hamlet stops momentarily to assure
himself (as well as us) that he is now on a more fruitful track: ay,
there’s the rub.
24 Yo Se Gr Not To Be

This phrase has become so much a part of our language that we

can misunderstand its meaning in this context. The term rub comes
from the sport of bowling, where it was an obstacle to the bowler.
Sometimes we use this phrase, there’s the rub, as though it means
merely ‘there’s the point? We are perhaps tempted to do so by its echo
of that is the question, but it means something different. In fact, we
lose much of its significance if we take rub to mean merely ‘point’or
‘matter? Calling upon its sense of ‘obstacle’ or ‘impediment’ — a
simpler synonym would be ‘block’ — Hamlet lets us know that he has
discovered something troubling. The possibility that the sleep of
death may lead one to dream unsettles his first fantasy of death
ending life’s troubles. Revisiting his earlier analogy (where death is an
untroubled sleep), Hamlet finds its blind spot, the rub that stands in
the way.
The problem, Hamlet realizes, is that we dream. The end of life
should not be imagined as the end of troubles, for even as our flesh is
heir to a thousand natural shocks, so is our sleep not within our
control. The next step in his soliloquy renders this fear apparent: for
in that sleep of death what dreams may come... He makes the
metaphor explicit: the sleep of death. Just as the word that worked to
bring ambiguity to the soliloquy’s first line, the word what (in what
dreams may come) produces remarkable uncertainty. There are at
least four things we could imagine arising from it; four ways that its
sentence could end.

First, we could be tempted to read and hear it as signaling a question,

as in “For in that sleep of death what should one do if. . .?” The word
dreams immediately following it closes down that possibility, of
course, but leaves others open. For instance, the word what may lead
us to imagine a question about the &ind of dreams that could arise, as
in “What dreams come to us? True ones? False ones? Terrifying ones?
Pleasing ones? This second possibility finds itself joined by a third
reading, in which the word what is an intensifier, as in “What bad
 There’s the Rub 25

dreams I just had! These latter readings remain in play until the word
must two lines later, when we realize that Hamlet has another, fourth
meaning in mind: what dreams may come, when we have shuffled
off this mortal coil, must give us pause. He makes a declaration
rather than asking a question. We could paraphrase it loosely as ‘we
have to consider seriously the possibility of dreaming after death’
Thus what dreams means something like %he fact that dreams [may
come]’ in addition, perhaps, to the second reading suggested above,
the one involving the &imd of dreams that may come. But it does not
mean either of these things, we have noticed, until the sentence nears
its end.
Hamlet means no more and no less than ‘died’ with the rich and
poetic phrase shuffled off this mortal coil. But, like there’s the rub,
this phrase has become so much a part of our language that we have to
work to hear its original contexts. These contexts are by no means
simple. The phrase shuffled off, in fact, remains one of the most
puzzling in the soliloquy. We share with the Elizabethans several
senses of ‘shuffle? Like them, we ‘shuffle’ cards (a transitive use of
‘shuffle’), and when we move our feet quickly along the ground we
also speak of ‘shuffling’ them (an intransitive form of the verb). Which
of these does Hamlet mean? We could start by noticing what they
have in common: both of these actions involve a quick alternation of
things (feet, cards).
To these senses, we could add another that Shakespeare uses in
Twelfth Night when Sebastian complains about ‘good turns’ that ‘Are
shuffled off with such uncurrent pay’ (3.3.15-16). Because ‘uncurrent
pay’ means coins that are no longer valuable, Sebastian seems to be
describing good deeds that are rewarded with underhanded (‘shuffled
off’) trickery. Perhaps the act of shuffling cards — a moment where
trickery has often transpired — influenced this sense of the verb, by
which one could ‘shuffle off’ as a form of deception. Today we might
say ‘fob off? ‘pass off? or even ‘palm off’ to convey this (Shakespeare
used a form of ‘fob off’ in several of his plays). Sebastian’s ‘shuffled
26 to Se Or Not Te Be

off’ may be linked to card-playing by these activities’ basis in manual

trickery: one gives someone false currency and false cards by hand, in
close proximity.
Should we take shuffled off to be something done with the hands
(the transitive sense) or the feet (intransitive)? Both senses seem to be
present, especially when we compare uses of the word in con-
temporary texts. An anonymous play written about two decades after
Hamlet, for instance, has a stage direction in which a character ‘shuf-
fles in? Yet a pamphlet from roughly ten years prior to Shakespeare’s
play (a pamphlet famous for its early, mocking mention of the play-
wright) has a character promise to ‘shuffle out’ two unsavory figures
for consideration. In this latter instance, we would say something like
‘display’ or ‘parade before; though the Elizabethan sense of having
two misfits step humbly out is perfectly clear. In The Merry Wives of
Windsor (written, like Twelfth Night, at about the time he wrote Ham/ef),
Shakespeare has Fenton remark that Ann Page’s mother so favors
another of her daughter’s suitors that she has ‘appointed’ this suitor to
‘shuffle her away, / While other sports are tasking of their minds’
(4.6.28-30). Fenton’s word picture, like the stage business that follows
in his play, asks us to envision characters in disguise hurrying here
and there around Windsor. This and other uses we have seen suggest
that, with shuffled off this mortal coil, Hamlet may want us to
imagine both someone stepping off the face of the earth — whether
alternating their feet quickly, on purpose, or dragging them reluc-
tantly — and someone getting rid of or otherwise dispensing of this
mortal coil.
Shakespeare typically uses coil to refer to fuss and busy trouble, as
when Ariel describes the confusion he has caused aboard ship in The
Tempest, and Prospero responds ‘My brave spirit! /Who was so firm, so
constant, that this coil / Would not infect his reason?’ (1.2.206-8).
Shakespeare has Hamlet add mortal to the mix, extending the chaos of
coil to the whole of our existence. The phrase this mortal coil, then,
could be paraphrased as ‘this troubling planet’
or ‘this turbulent life?
 There's the Rub 27

And Sebastian’s ‘shuffle off’ gives us another sense to consider, a

sense in which shuffled off means something like ‘deceived through a
simple trick? The trick here would be dying. In what way could dying
ptove deceptive? If we take Hamlet’s cue and see death as a kind of
sleep, perhaps by dying we ‘trick’ the world into believing that we are
merely sleeping. In so doing, we have shuffled off the hubbub of our
mortal coil with the false appearance of temporary (rather than per-
manent) rest. In this reading, while mortal coil refers primarily to
‘human strife (or trouble); there may be in coil a suggestion of ropes,
which can coil around what they hold. Hamlet could be imagining
life as a kind of bondage not only to be stepped away from, but to be
wriggled out of by the trick of the sleep ofdeath. If coil does succeed
in asking us to imagine this, it adds to Hamlet’s analogies. Where
death is like sleep, life (a word he will use for the first time two lines
later) is like being tied up in a coil that must eventually be shuffled
off.
We can take Hamlet’s must give us pause as meaning ‘makes us
stop, or ‘leads us to halt to consider’? The possibility that we dream
after death leaves his first consummation as something that can only
be wish’d. The pause comes from, and will explain, the rub. Even as
he has carefully summarized various of his points already, Hamlet
stops to explain the problem of dreams in the sleep of death: there’s
the respect that makes calamity of so long life. By respect here
Hamlet seems to mean ‘circumstances, ‘regard’ or, less elegantly, ‘the
fact in relation to which? His meaning may ask us to recognize the
word’s roots in Latin re + spectare (to look back at, regard, consider).
We would perhaps say perspective or regard rather than respect. Like
question in the first line, respect has a formal, even academic ring to
it. But it may also carry our more general sense of respect as some-
thing 0 be respected. Hamlet’s choice of words may thus imply that
what dreams may come in the sleep of death should be — may have
to be — respected. We respect something we fear, and, as we have
seen, nightmares are among the most frightening of natural shocks.
28 Yo Be Gr Not To Be

Mentioning life for the first time in this next line, Hamlet does so ina
negative context. Echoing the first,‘m... k’sounds of mortal coil, he
tells us that respect we have (whether as perspective or fear) for what
may come after death makes calamity of life. The phrase of so long
life may mean, literally, something like ‘of life, which seems long’ But
it suggests as well that having more time on earth means having more
troubles, that life may be /vo long.

Hamlet’s first line ends with a colon in the Folio version ofhis speech.
As we saw, the whether clause appeared to explain (or to try to
explain) that line’s meaning. In the same way, both the Q2 and Folio
versions of the speech have a colon following calamity of so long
life:. This can tell the reader, actor and — through the actor — audi-
ence that what follows may explain or amplify his respect clause. Like
that is the question, the phrase there’s the respect both points back
at what has come before and looks forward to something that comes
after; as Hamlet puts it in a later soliloquy: ‘such large discourse, /
Looking before and atter’ (4.4.36—7).
What comes after there’s the respect is a 13-line rhetorical ques-
tion.We have two questions really, compounded in a long chain of
negative instances:

Question no. 1:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despisd love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin;
 There’s the Rub 29

Question no. 2:

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 ?

Like all rhetorical questions, Hamlet’s queries here are actually

statements in disguise. That is, when one asks, with exasperation,
‘Well what did you expect to happen when you did X ?; or ‘Who walks
from here to there in the middle of the night?’ one is declaring a
position rather than asking for real answers. The force of the ques-
tions is to state, respectively, “You should have known that X would
happen (anyone would)! and ‘It is foolish to walk so far at that hour?
Hamlet’s rhetorical questions detail the slings and arrows of out-
rageous fortune. He even repeats the form of his earlier metaphor in
the phrase the whips and scorns of time. His question begins with
the word For, which, we soon see, introduces a logical explanation for
the must give us pause; there’s the respect line.
We encounter, in the phrase for who would bear, an unusually
important word: bear. Hamlet will use the word twice more in this
speech — and perhaps even more than that, when one observes the
bare of bare bodkin, and the buried past tense of bear that may
appear in from whose bourn no traveller returns. Early on in the
soliloquy Hamlet has had the opportunity to use this word, but used
suffer instead. Perhaps he did so because suffer best introduces the
theme of pain and trouble developed over the first part of the speech.
But in the following 13 lines he will speak more specifically of things
that we put up with — choose to suffer — in life, and so he uses the
more general bear.
30 ¥o Be Or Not Teo Be

This allows him to extend the walking theme that has come into
the speech with shuffle. Of course, bear can mean metely ‘to
endure’ or ‘suffer? But, as we will see, it can also refer to one carrying
a heavy load from one place to another. Hamlet invokes the first
meaning — the suffer sense — in this section’s first seven lines. In
them, he writes a morality play of sorts, in which an Everyman
figure undergoes the trials of a cruel and unfair life: a morality play
without morals. We can read this section as making particular the
otherwise generalized metaphors that began the speech: the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune, the sea of troubles, and the
heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
Hamlet seems consciously to ease us into the specifics of his list by
beginning with whips and scorns of time. The echoes here of
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune link what follows to the
earlier section even as they prepare us for another round of restate-
ment or explanation. We can see this shift occurring within the
phrase whips and scorns itself. That is, where slings and arrows
offers two parallel weapons (with sling standing in for things that a
sling propels), the phrase whips and scorns puts two different
kinds of things together. A whip is an instrument to cause pain and
suffering, just like slings and arrows and the bodkin that will fol-
low. But scorns ate something that come from people: mocks,
gibes, insults. Joining them with and, Hamlet creates a transition
between things that hurt the flesh and actions (or inactions) that
give us heart-ache.

The contrast is between things done with physical weapons and

things done (sometimes by omission) through human actions, rela-
tionships, and institutions. Throughout this section, he ascribes
wrongs to persons and personified agents: time, love, law, office, th’
unworthy. In the morality play of life, according to Hamlet, we
experience things and individuals acting against us:
 There’s the Rub 31

time [wields] whips and scorns

an oppressor [commits] wrong

the proud man [exhibits] contumely

despis’d love [brings us] pangs

law delay[s] [justice or satisfaction]

office [shows] insolence

th’ unworthy [give] spurns [to] patient merit

The schematic morality play represented here features, again, a

combination of actions and inactions. Where time, an oppressor, and
office do things, love, law, and th’ unworthy bring suffering by ot
doing things. Although spurns seems a potentially active word, the
force of patient in the phrase patient merit connects this idea with
the pangs and delay of despis’d love and law, respectively.
Individually, each of these scenarios describes a wrong that produces
heart-ache and suffer[ing]. Together, they add up to a level of misery
that, for Hamlet, has a philosophical force.

We will come to the shape of this philosophical insight shortly, but

first let us look at how Hamlet seems to conclude his train of thought:
when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin. He
may add the himself here to avoid confusion following the com-
plexity of the previous line: that patient merit of th’ unworthy takes.
Hamlet wants to be clear that the he of this next line is the he who has
experienced the bad things in life that Hamlet has detailed in his
catalogue. Hamlet brings this litany to a head, posing a rhetorical
question as a forceful appeal: who indeed would bear all these
things — perhaps amy of these things — if that person could his
quietus make with a bare bodkin?
The word quietus comes from a more formal register than even
32 ¥o 8e Or Not Te Be

question, of which it is certainly a sound-echo and even perhaps a

loose anagram. Almost all the letters in question reappear in quietus,
with the leftover letters being ‘n’ and ‘o? which appropriately spell no,
the word and theme that preoccupy Hamlet in this soliloquy. The
word quietus was part of a formal Latin phrase, guzetus est, used to
declare an account ‘paid in full?a debt cleared. Recalling the phrase
consummatum est noted above in relation to consummation, we can
sense how Shakespeare and Hamlet are asking us to think about for-
mal conclusions to things. The formal end to a financial relation-
ship — a loan of money or other kind of debt — stands in for the ‘debt’
we owe to God: out life. (Clearly the kind of debt we are not allowed
to clear with money. The fact that the Elizabethans pronounced
‘debt’ and ‘death’ in similar ways allowed Shakespeare to pun on the
words’ relationship in many of his works.
His logic in this section of the soliloquy follows the kind of rea-
soning one encounters in the ‘syllogisms’ popular in Elizabethan
schoolbooks. A familiar form goes as follows: All men are mortal;
Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. Hamlet’s reasoning is
never tidy, but we can see that it follows an initial chain here:

We seek the good.

To have an end of troubles is good.

Therefore we should seek an end of troubles.

We have already considered Hamlet’s catalogue of the sea of

troubles that life brings us. To be in society is to suffer from its
institutions, including the law, high office, and any powerful
oppressor. To be human is to suffer unrequited love, the whips and
scorns of time, the contumely of the proud man and the spurns of
th’ unworthy. Contumely means contempt or scorn, and the kind of
treatment that accompanies such contempt. Hamlet knows as well as
anyone that these rise to the level of profound troubles and together
can make life miserable. Yet he has, as early as the phrase perchance to
 There's the Rub 33

dream, recognized that the ultimate problem is not with the sea of
troubles. The ultimate problem lies with the idea of the end, a word
and concept that, as we have seen, have appeared throughout the
soliloquy not only in the word end but in die, sleep (provisionally),
consummation, shuffled off, and quietus.
The rub, or blocking point, to Hamlet lies in the possibility that
death will not end our troubles.We could phrase his doubt as follows:

To have an end of troubles is good.

But it is not certain that the end of life brings an end of troubles.

Therefore we should not end out life.

As we have seen, every rhetorical question disguises (however thinly)

a statement (in Hamlet, the reverse may be true as well). The statement
Hamlet makes here is that “Life is indeed miserable? This statement
comes in support of Hamlet’s thinking about life, death, and misery.
But we should be careful to observe his conclusion: while to be done
with troubles is devoutly to be wish’d, the nature of the dreams that
may come after death gives us pause in hoping for a quicker end to
out heart-ache.

The next part of his extended rhetorical question restates this

beginning even as it adds to it. When Hamlet asks who would fardels
bear he makes more concrete the bear with which he began (for who
would bear the whips and scorns of time). A fardel is a burden.
Where bear had meant merely suffer, Hamlet now invites us to ima-
gine ourselves loaded down with a heavy pack or burden. Burdened,
we grunt and sweat under a weary life. The word under here mieans,
first, ‘in the context of}? ‘while experiencing or conducting’ Like a
person struggling under a heavy load, we live a weary life while
shouldering the fardels of our troubles. But just as so long life hinted
that life itself was ‘oo long, the word under smuggles in an image of
an oppressor (perhaps a personified life) adding to our burden by
34 ¥o Be Or Not To Be

weighing things down. It is almost as though life were perching atop

the pack that we bear, or were the baggage that we carry. We might
think here of Atlas struggling under the weight of the Earth — an
image traditionally believed to have been painted over the entrance to
the Globe Playhouse. The first part of this section looked back to the
respect for its conclusion; the question becomes rhetorical because
this answer is known in advance. The next section of the soliloquy, in
contrast, depends on what comes later in the question.
In its most compact form, what follows supplies a rationale: but
that the dread of something after death ... puzzles the will.
Hamlet has earlier spoken of the sleep of death, raising the possibi-
lity that if we dream, those dreams may be horrifying, more trou-
bling than the sea of troubles we experience in life. His return to the
subject of the afterlife is less explicit here — something after
death — even as he grows clearer about the feeling one experiences:
dread. This sensation delivers a stronger way of putting things than
must give us pause, of course. Hamlet’s more specific language may
come from his pondering the middle section of this passage: the
undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.
Earlier, again, he has imagined death as sleep. With the metaphors of
movement and walking that have crept into his speech — we could
consider shuffled off and the picture of someone grunting and
sweating while bearing a heavy load — Hamlet now imagines death
as a kind of journey. Taken by all mortal things, this journey is toa
destination we know nothing about. The afterlife is thus an undis-
cover’d country the same way a country ot continent is not discover’d
until a traveller brings back news of its existence and details about its
landscape or residents. The word bourn means ‘boundary’ or ‘fron-
tier, and may signify here the general region of death — whether we
imagine it to be Heaven, the Elysian Fields, or something else. We
have already seen that this word echoes the bear/bare pairing (he will
use the former word again presently) and ironically gestures toward
the land of death with a word commonly connected with birth.
 There’s the Rub 35

The phrase puzzles the will perfectly describes one under-

standing of Hamlet’s situation in the play as well as one of the effects
his speech has on its readers and listeners. The strong verb puzzles
suggests bewilderment, being so baffled that one’s will — the place or
faculty of self-determination — cannot function. This state of inaction
means we accept things as they are, however unbearable they may
seem. The dread of an unknown something after death not only
puzzles the will, but in so doing makes us rather bear those ills we
have than fly to others that we know not of. That is, we endure the
evils that we have as preferable to ills we can only imagine.We could
note that Hamlet’s metaphors of movement have so increased their
energy that now he imagines that we do not shuffle or trudge while
bearing a burden, but fly (that is, rush or hasten) toward a destination.
It is as though he pictures us throwing off our heavy load of fardels
and, newly lightened, hurrying toward loads that may be even heavier.
Hamlet’s tendency to restate, characterize, and sum up continues
in the speech’s next sentence, which begins with the connective word
Thus. The fact that we do not — cannot — know what comes after
death both gives us pause and, mote strongly, puzzles the will. We
accept the status quo for fear that the irreversible change of our death
may be a change for the worse. No one knows, for no one has
returned — can return — from the undiscover’d country. As Hamlet
continues, he attributes this fear to conscience: Thus conscience
does make cowards of us all. With conscience, Hamlet doubtless
refers to our innermost thoughts, the voice inside us that speaks to us
as though in conversation. It can also refer to the very capacity to
know, and to know oneself. Perhaps the internalized voice of con-
science comes with some irony, counterpoising the theme of her-
oically taking arms against a sea of troubles. Certainly from a heroic
point of view any dread would indeed make cowards of those who
acted out of fear rather than bravery. Only one who believes in
heroism has the confidence to label another person a coward, and
Hamlet may use a hero’s voice to disparage our fear to act.
36 ¥o Be Or Not To Se

We may well hear this heroic strain in the longer, repeated version
of this line when Hamlet continues and thus the native hue of
resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought ... By
native, Hamlet refers to that which is innate or instinctive: we are
naturally disposed to act, he implies. A hue of resolution is a meta-
phor that combines our innate appearance or complexion (hue) with
another attribute, that of resolution — the resolve to do things, which
the puzzled will does not do out of dread and a cowardly con-
science. Shakespeare combines hue and resolution so Hamlet can set
up a double contrast:

pale is to native hue

as
cast of thought is to resolution

With its unusual verb, the phrase sicklied o’er presents an image of an
otherwise healthy-looking resolution — naturally healthy, the word
native suggests — made sick-looking by the pale cast of thought. We
may hear, too, in the close conjunction of o’er and cast a buried
metaphor (that of an ‘overcast’ or cloudy day) that adds to the effec-
tiveness of the larger image. Taken as a whole, Hamlet’s sentence
suggests the sickly eclipse of health by doubt.
Hamlet has begun to criticize himself — and us all as well — in
this Thus section. But the heroic strain becomes most alive in the
concluding lines of the speech: And enterprises of great pitch and
moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the
name of action. We can hear an echo of slings and arrows of out-
rageous fortune in the phrase enterprises of great pitch and
moment, which reverses the order of the earlier phrasing. This
resemblance seems more than accidental, for enterprises are things
to be done, just as the first section of the soliloquy saw the counter-
point of suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as
being the taking up of arms against a sea of troubles. In the next
chapter, we will look more closely at the heroic register of these
 There’s the Rub 37

words. But for now, it is enough to say that the enterprises Hamlet
describes are no ordinary ones. He uses the doubled phrase of great
pitch and moment to magnify the importance of his subject. The
word pitch can mean ‘height; and had a special application in the
sport of falconry, where it described the highest part of a hawk or
falcon’s flight just before swooping down on its prey. The word
moment, for its part, signifies ‘importance’ or ‘consequence’ and has
within it earlier senses (from Latin and Romance languages) of both
weight and movement — even weight that implies or entails move-
ment.
The phrase with this regard recalls for us there’s the respect, and
means ‘in the face of this fact’ or ‘in consideration thereof? It will be
important to notice that, so thoroughly has the heroic register of
speech taken over Hamlet’s diction, the enterprises of great pitch
and moment cannot be described as overcome by things external to
them. Instead, they are like rushing rivers that decide on their own to
seek another channel: with this regard their currents turn awry.
Hamlet has earlier asked us to imagine the fanciful (if heroic) scene of
someone taking arms against a sea of troubles. Here his water
metaphor finds expression so strongly that we may not notice who or
what is doing the acting. The enterprise-rivers turn ... their cur-
rents... awry, that is, aside, with the suggestion of error or mistake.
By doing so, they lose the name of action. Here name most likely
means ‘credit’ or ‘honor; suggesting that in turning awry from their
original goals, the momentous enterprises have lost any capital
(including honor, reputation, fame, and renown) that they could have
gained by staying the course. The word name may also convey the
simpler sense of what something is called, and we will remember
how important names are to all Shakespeare's characters.

We could take the concluding words of Hamlet’s soliloquy as Soft you

now, the fair Ophelia. Although technically they mark a departure
from his main topic, they seem, like his other words and unlike the
38 Yo Be Or Not To Be

lines that immediately follow them, to be addressed to himself. In

particular, they may recall that part of Hamlet who stands outside
himself (or inside himself, like conscience) and says such things as no
more and ay, there’s the rub. As we will see at more length in the next
chapter of this book, though, he introduces the word you for the first
time in these lines, perhaps because someone very important to him
on a personal level has drawn his attention. It is easy to speak of we
and us when philosophizing; it is difficult not to speak personally
when speaking of love. The word Soft here works primarily as a
command. With it, Hamlet tells himself (you) to ‘hold on, or ‘wait a
moment. But it also combines with the word fair and the name
Ophelia to make his speech end with a suggestion of the pleasant,
tender, and personal. The introduction of self-reference here (you) as
well as the invocation of another (Ophelia) effectively marks the end
of the soliloquy by changing its language.
Throughout this soliloquy we have heard Hamlet restating what
he has said. These restatements often make things less — rather than
more — clear. Paraphrase, saying things again in a different way,
always runs this risk, for different words take us to different places.
Good readers have long resisted paraphrases of poetry, for poetry
often succeeds precisely by being less than clear to begin with. That is,
it can strive to say not one thing only, but many. Changing a poet’s
words can shut down meaning even as we seek to clarify it.
Hamlet’s “To be or not to be’ soliloquy is a prime instance of apoem
that says many things at the same time. So paraphrasing it means
reducing that complexity. But in the interest of making concrete at
least one possible reading among the many we have explored here, it
may be helpful to repeat it, in modern language, from start to finish:

‘To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether it’s better to suffer in one’s head
The outrageous wrongs that life brings us,
Or to take matters in our own hands and oppose
 There’s the Rub 39

These troubles, thus ending them. To die may be

Like sleeping; and perhaps this sleep would end
The heart-ache and thousand pains that come
With being alive; if that were true, it would be something
To wish for indeed. But if we say dying is like sleeping,
That sleep may bring dreams. Yes, that’s the problem,
For in that sleep of death the kind of dreams that may come,
When we have shuffled our way off this troubling planet,
Must make us stop and think. There’s the painful fact
That makes our long lives so troubling:
For who would bear the torments that come over time —
Being wronged by those in power, looked down on by the
proud,
The broken hearts of unrequited love, injustice,
The arrogance of bureaucrats, and the stuff we put up with
Patiently from those who aren’t worthy in any way —
When we could put an end to ail this by killing ourselves
With a nice knife? Who would carry this load,
Grunting and sweating through this weary life,
If it weren't the case that the fear of something after death
(That place we know nothing about, for no one has
Ever returned from the grave) freezes us into inaction,
Making us accept the ills that we have rather
Than to rush toward those we know nothing about?
Conscience makes cowards of all of us this way,
And the innate capacity we have to do things
Is made ineffective by our thinking too much;
The great things we could do
Are also diverted by this,
And lose the chance for acting. — But hold on,
Here’s the fair Ophelia.
40 Yo Se Or Not To Be

An immediate and sincere apology is called for. This paraphrase

attempts to preserve the visual aspects of the soliloquy in a line-for-
line restatement, but obviously loses Shakespeare’s poetry when it
discards Hamlet’s metaphors, imagery, and word-music. When com-
pared with the plodding language above, the original speech’s quality
becomes even more apparent. For instance, trading a phrase like
native hue of resolution for ‘innate capacity we have to do things’
means sacrificing creative brilliance for plain, even ugly restatement.
Paraphrasing this speech asks us to make choices among the many:
possibilities we saw for most of its lines, phrases, and even words.
Truth be told, the speech could have been paraphrased in hundreds of
different ways, each of which would offer a different interpretation
through its choice of words, images, and emphasis. One thing not
fully addressed by keeping the speech’s initial words is the long-
standing belief that this is a suicide speech. It is important to recog-
nize that Hamlet proposes suicide clearly only one time in his
soliloquy: in lines 74-5, when he says when he himself might his
quietus make with a bare bodkin. Many readers shift this instance
to account for more generalized passages earlier and later in the
speech. Perhaps this is unavoidable, and even a part of the speech’s
mystery. That is, because the soliloquy is so puzzling, it tempts us to
find a word, experience, thought, or action that will explain things,
once for all — and in a conclusive way. Thus saying ‘it is a speech about
suicide’ seems to put a quietus of our own on the soliloquy’s diffi-
culties.
Attending to the contours of the speech as written and delivered
shows us that if this is a speech ‘about’ suicide, it is also about other
things — things even more terrifying than that subject (and which in
fact scare us out of thoughts of ending our lives). In fact, we could
draw a useful analogy between this soliloquy and the frightful head of
Medusa that populates so many Renaissance books and paintings.
Like the horrifying visage of this monstrous, snake-haired Gorgon,
the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy has the power to ‘freeze’ those who
 There's the Rub 41

encounter it. As Macduff puts it after coming across the corpse of

Duncan, Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight / With a new
Gorgon’ (Macbeth 2.3.71-2). As the following pages mean to show,
Hamlet’s soliloquy stuns us in a similar way, chilling us with its cold
images and rhythms. Yet it does so less suddenly than what Macduff
sees, working its fearful magic through the ebbs and flows of intel-
lectual activity.
If there is one thing this formidable speech does well — and it does
many things well — it is to introduce us to the process of its speaker’s
thoughts, thoughts that admittedly take many forms in this play. As
we will see, the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy asks us to participate in
Hamlet’s logic, his way of seeing the world. It also leads us to feel what
he and other characters in the play experience. To get to the some-
times terrifying logic and experience represented by the speech, the
next chapter of this book takes up not the speech’s what but its hom,
examining the soliloquy as a kind of poem.
To be or not to be

To be, or not to be, that is the question: 55

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 60
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wishid. To die, to sleep —
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 65
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,
Th oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 70
The pangs of despisd love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of oftice, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, %
To grunt and sweat undet 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, 80
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 pitch and moment 85
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.
4 How Does it Mean? |
(The Speech as Poem)

Looking at what Hamlet’s speech means, we were forced to confront

how it means.We observed, for instance, its continual restatements and
its clarifications that only made things more complex. We saw that its
famous first line has a cleverly balanced architecture, dividing in half
with each of its halves dividing that way again. We saw the soliloquy
mixing homely words like rub and fardels with academic terms, such
as question and respect, with religious words, such as consumma-
tion and devoutly, and even the commercial-legalistic quietus.
Along the way, we saw that these and other elements could not be
separated from the meaning ofthe speech. If our awkward paraphrase
of the speech showed anything, it is that what Hamlet says cannot be
distinguished from the manner in which he says it. The words,
phrases, lines, images, sounds, and structures are not only the means
through which his speech works; they are the speech itself. Outside
them, it does not exist.
If the how of Hamlet’s speech continually crept into our attempt to
understand its meaning, we will also find out that the reverse istrue.
The what of ‘To be or not to be’ invariably comes into play when we
turn to questions of form and structure, as will issues of performance
and story. Where we began our quest for meaning by reading the
speech in slow motion, as it were, an analysis of how it works will
need to cut back and forth between ‘close ups’and ‘framing shots. We
44 fo Be Or Not To Be

will alternate focusing on such things as specific words and sounds

with consideration of larger elements like form and genre.
We could begin by pointing out the obvious: the “To be or not to
be’ speech is a soliloquy. Like almost everything connected with what
Hamlet says and does, however, even this observation has been
challenged. As we will see in the next chapter of this book, some
believe that other characters overhear Hamlet as he speaks, and others
believe that he is both overheard and aware of this. Still others feel
that he speaks his speech intending to be overheard. Whatever the case
may be, it can help to start with a definition. The term ‘soliloquy’
comes from Latin so/us (alone) + /ogui (to speak), and commonly refers
to dramatic speeches delivered by a character in solitude. To those
who talk to themselves on a daily basis, the convention of dramatic
characters speaking alone may not in itself seem unusual. What is
different, of course, is that those of us who speak to ourselves rarely
tise above muttering, while the characters of Shakespeare and his
contemporary playwrights are typically quite eloquent in their soli-
loquies. Seemingly trained (as were most of the playwrights) in the
atts of rhetoric, they commonly announce a problem or topic and
work through it thoughtfully in a kind of dialogue with themselves.
Often they conclude a formal speech — however productively — with
a ‘capping couplet’ (that is, two lines of rhyming verse) that seems to
signal a recognized end to their train of thought and speech. The
capping couplet may also have had a theatrical purpose, announcing
to the next actor who speaks that it is time for him to enter and/or
begin delivering his lines.
Hamlet delivers a number of soliloquies: six or seven, depending
on how one counts them. Four of these finish with capping couplets,
such as “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’, which ends with the
well-known lines ‘the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the con-
science of the King’ (2.2.604—5). For various reasons, the “To be or not
to be’ soliloquy does not end so tidily. For one thing, Hamlet is
interrupted by (or interrupts himself to notice) Ophelia, who occu-
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 45

pies a position on stage as well as in the final lines of his speech.

Perhaps the speech could not end neatly for thematic reasons as well.
Settling upon the reality of our all too human fears, Hamlet cannot
wrap them up with a bow the way he is able to with some of his other
speeches. In addition to the ‘conscience of the King’ ending, he gives
us:

How in my words somever she be shent,

To give them seals never my soul consent!
(3.2.398—9)

My mother stays,
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.
(3.3.95-6)

O, from this time forth,

My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
(4.4.65-6)

Unlike these soliloquies, Hamlet’s “Io be or not to be’ speech is

interrupted, and concludes not by gaining a rhyme but with an
acknowledgement of /oss: and lose the name of action.
These couplets show us something important about soliloquies:
they are typically quite personal. One could notice the personal
references in the lines quoted above: J7// catch the conscience; my
words’ and ‘my soul; ‘My mother; ‘My thoughts’ Turning to “To be or
not to be, we notice a surprising fact. Unlike every one of his other
soliloquies, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be’ speech uses no first person
pronouns: no I, no me, no my ot mine. When he speaks directly to
Ophelia to end the soliloquy, he says, of course, ‘Nymph, in thy ori-
sons be all my sins remembered’ (this line follows the materials we
ended with in the previous chapter). But in the heart of the speech
recognized as his most famous soliloquy, a literary form that all but
defines the personal, we encounter a strangely zwpersonal choice of
words. Hamlet says, for instance, when we have shuffled off this
46 Ye Be Or Not To Be

mortal coil, that this gives us pause, that a hypothetical /e would be

likely to commit suicide, that this make us rather bear the ills we
have than fly to others that we know not of, that conscience does
make cowards of us all. In each of his sentences, Hamlet has the
opportunity to personalize his remarks. He declines to do so, instead
generalizing what he says so that it applies to us all.
This strangely impersonal cast to his soliloquy is one of the things
that make it float above the rest of the play. He speaks in the general
language of philosophy about deeply human matters. It is possible, of
course, to apply various subjects in his soliloquy to specific parts of
his dramatic ‘life’? Thus the insolence of office, for example, could be
taken to refer to Claudius’s arrogant assumption of and behavior in
the ‘office’ of King. But to search for such individualized applications
in Hamlet’s speech seems to go against its grain. Throughout, he
strenuously avoids referring to himself. This, again, contrasts with
what he does in every other soliloquy he utters. We could consider
such lines as (to give only these): ‘no more like my father /Than I to
Hercules’ (1.2.152-3); ‘And shall I couple hell?’ (1.4.93); “Why, what an
ass am I! (2.2.582); ‘Now could I drink hot blood’ (3.2.390); ‘How all
occasions do inform against me, /And spur my dull revenge!’ (4.4.32—
3). These examples confirm our sense that Hamlet’s soliloquies tend
to be intensely personal. And while we have seen Hamlet appearing
to step outside himself to say no more and there’s the rub, this
uttering of asides does not translate into declaring himself the subject
of his speech.

The “To be or not to be’ soliloquy — perhaps the most resonant pre-
sentation of the personal in all of literature — achieves this resonance
in part by avoiding reference to Hamlet’s own person. Shakespeare
makes Hamlet’s concerns available to readers and audience members
by strategically using pronouns (we, us, and he) that allow Hamlet to
speak for us. Calling the soliloquy a ‘secular prayer’ may not do justice
to its philosophical and dramatic textures, but this label does succeed
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 47

in capturing its resemblance to a prayet’s script-like openness. The

speech itself is followed closely by references to Ophelia’s own pray-
ers: her ‘orisons’ Save for actors portraying these characters, no one
tepeats the lines of Horatio, Malvolio, or Pistol on a regular basis. Yet,
like the Lord’s Prayer (‘Our Father .. . ovr daily bread’), Hamlet’s soli-
loquy is repeated somewhere on earth daily. Unlike his more personal
soliloquies, which have his character and the play’s plot inscribed on
their surfaces, the “Io be or not to be’ soliloquy shares with most
prayers a general applicability. Anyone can insert him/herself into the
speech because Hamlet avoids talking only about himself.
Six working parts define the soliloquy. As we will see, each of
these parts contributes something different and significant to the
speech:

1. To be, or not to be shrough opposing, end them. (4.8 lines; 39

words)
2. To die, to sleep ¢hrough devoutly to be wish’d. (4 lines; 33 words)
3. To die, to sleep ¢hrough so long life: (5.4 lines; 45 words)

4. For who would bear “hrough bare bodkin; (6.5 lines; 50 words)
5. who would fardels “+rough we know not of? (6.5 lines; 51 words)
6. Thus conscience ¢hrough The fair Ophelia. (6.5 lines; 50 words)

There are of course several other ways to divide the soliloquy, but this
division captures its primary units of thought and expression. It espe-
cially indicates the even balance of what we could call Hamlet’s ‘thought
paragraphs, the building blocks of his soliloquy. We could note that each
of his soliloquy’s parts falls between four lines and six-and-a-half lines,
and uses between 33 and 51 words. Even though they mirror each other
in structure and theme, it is surely an accident that sections 4 and 5 of
the soliloquy as divided above occupy exactly the same number of lines
and use almost the same number of words. But that accident reinforces
our sense of the symmetry we have seen at work as early as the first line,
with its compellingly balanced architecture.
48 fo Se Or Not To Be

Glancing at this division, we can see that repetition is key to the

speech. We have already noted the deep symmetry of the soliloquy’s
opening lines, and it seems clear that this symmetry continues
throughout the speech in the form of repeated words, ideas, and struc-
tures. To begin with the most apparent structural repetition, we could
note that in the division above the three parts are balanced in each of the
speech’s halves. Several of the sections repeat (both internally and
externally) various words, phrases, and ideas. We have the repetition of
To be ... to be with To die, to sleep ... to be wish’d and To die, to
sleep; the second half witnesses the repetition of For who would
bear in the punning bare of bare bodkin, as well as the doubling of
this opening question in the second query, who would fardels.
Within such instances of balance as well as between the speech’s
sections, we encounter a peculiar, almost hypnotic rhythm. This
rhythm will be one of the keys to the speech’s ‘mystery, as it were.
Anyone who has ever spoken the soliloquy’s initial line senses that it
begins with a back-and-forth movement: To be, or not to be. It is easy
to feel the swing from To be, to its opposite, not to be. The speech
begins, then, almost like an antique clock, with its pendulum-like
movement marking the dwindling minutes of our existence with its
balanced alternatives. This ebb-and-flow feeling will characterize
many moments in the speech, with a movement out balanced by an
equal pulling back. We sense this, for instance, in the balance of the
whether clause, and in the rhetorical questions that answer them-
selves: For who... when and who would ... but.
We could also see the famous first line as taking its balanced
structure from the morality play, a form we noticed in the last chapter
when we examined the afflicted journey that Hamlet’s imagined
human takes through life. One of the common features of the
English morality play was a debate-like confrontation between two
entities — Doctor Faustus represents them as a ‘Good Angel’ and an
‘Evil Angel’ — who actively struggle for the protagonist’s soul. The
technical name for this struggle is psychomachia, literally a war for the
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 49

psyche or soul. Where Faustus’s angels stand on either side of him to

make their cases (he is wooed one way and then the other), Hamlet’s
To be / not to be division internalizes this debate structure: the twin
angels are no longer outside our protagonist; they are between his
ears and in his soul.
But these images — the pendulum and psychomachia — can only
take us so far. For one of the things that makes this soliloquy so
peculiar is that it introduces us to a series of pairs, only to ask us to
imagine a third item. Instead of ‘item, here, we should say ‘place} for
the experience of reading, listening to, and even speaking the “To be
or not to be’ soliloquy is like moving quickly and even uncertainly
from one place to another. Hamlet has himself given us a version of
this rapid movement in Act 1, Scene 5, when he moves Horatio and
the soldiers around on stage in response to the voice of his father’s
Ghost booming from below: ‘Hic et ubique? Then we'll shift our
ground’ (156). Like the Latin question here, “To be or not to be’ takes
us ‘Here and everywhere’ We could compare it to leaping among the
mossy stones of a fast-moving stream at dusk. Standing on the phrase
To be, we jump fairly confidently to another spot, not to be. Rather
than returning safely to the comfort of the original spot, or (even
better) landing with both feet squarely on each stone, we find that the
line’s end, that is the question, makes us leap to yet another rock.
When we encounter the whether clause, we repeat this motion, all
the time moving forward, and are forced to land on yet another third
space with end them. We follow out the steps of this risky game all
over again with To die and to sleep, this time stepping twice on to
sleep, before hopping to another rock with perchance to dream. So
we continue, moving downstream uneasily. At the speech’s midpoint
we begin to take comfort in the resumed, easy, back-and-forth of the
catalogue: oppressor’s wrong is one stone, proud man’s contumely
another, and so on through bare bodkin.
We start to repeat these motions when Hamlet begins this question
all over again, but then he changes the rules of the game. The phrase
50 Ye Se Or Not To Be

weary life leads us to think that a new catalogue is starting, but this is
not the case. We are relieved to sense that life and death are an easy
pair — a step here, a step there — but country abandons the pair pat-
tern and gives us four verbs in a row, with each new step harder to
make: returns ... puzzles ... makes ... fly. The easy pair of con-
science does make and resolution is sicklied lulls us into false
confidence once again, but this gives way to an and pattern: and thus
... and enterprises... turn... and lose... Just as we have mastered
this, the speech suddenly asks us to leap in an entirely new direction:
Soft you now, the fair Ophelia. And a new game begins.

Before we proceed, we could return to something we have only

touched upon in the breakdown above. That is, the abundance of the
word to in the first three sections. Like the intensive pairing and
repetition in the soliloquy generally, to is partnered with many other
words. The soliloquy features 13 instances of the word to prior to
there’s the rub, and only two after that (in one case, in the phrase
than fly to others). Only one of these initial uses is not the infinitive
or verbal to (the phrase That flesh is heir to).We could illustrate this
feature as follows:

be
not be
suffer
take arms
die
sleep
TO say
; be wish’d
die
sleep
sleep
dream
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 51
/

Why this preference for to forms in the first third of the soliloquy, and
why does it fall off after this point? Perhaps Hamlet uses the to form
not only because this word helps describe action, but because to
renders that action strikingly impersonal. Such impersonality char-
acterizes a later use of this form in his speech, when he asks, for
example, who would choose to grunt and sweat under a weary life.
We could notice that he is doubly impersonal: a weary life. It is the
life of not only the unidentified who, but anyone. Hamlet’s use of the
to form allows him to capture the very kind of impersonality we
employ, for instance, in such proverbial sayings as “To err is human; to
forgive, divine, and in giving directions: “Io get to The Fishes pub,
take the Willow Walk just south of Botley Road Park? Each of these
sentences remains open for anyone to step in and perform its action
(erring, forgiving, walking). In the same way, the first third of
Hamlet’s soliloquy offers a menu of actions. As we have seen, the
speech slowly closes this menu, ultimately withdrawing it at and lose
the name of action.

We will take up the role of repetition in these sections, and in the

speech as a whole, in a moment. First, though, we should ask what
Hamlet seeks to accomplish with each part of his speech. The first
section clearly introduces alternatives, and goes on, with its whether
clause, to define those alternatives (however mysterious the defini-
tions are). The end of the first section’s final line seems to prompt the
sleep of death analogy taken up in the second, a section that con-
cludes by stating the desirability of ending things without further
trouble. As though nagged by doubt that such an easy conclusion
could be possible, Hamlet returns to the sleep of death analogy with
the exact same words of the previous section: To die, to sleep. In this
third section, though, he concludes that his first answer was too easy,
for our dreams may be even more troubling than our long life. The
next two sections ask rhetorical questions — For who would ... ? -
that work to intensify his earlier indictment of life’s sea of troubles
52 Yo 8e Or Not To Se

even as they lead toa larger, more formal conclusion about our human
fears. With its two uses of thus, the sixth section of his speech sum-
marizes why we lose the name of action, allowing enterprises of
great pitch and moment to turn awry. Noticing Ophelia’s presence,
Hamlet closes his train of thought with self-address: Soft you now,
the fair Ophelia.
One ofthe key things we have begun to notice about the structure of
Hamlet’s soliloquy is how much it employs repetition. Clearly we
remember the speech by its famous first words, which give us the

repetition with a difference of To be, or not to be. A version of this

kind of repetition appears in the speech’s many and phrases, such as
slings and arrows, whips and scorns, grunt and sweat, and pitch
and moment. At first we may see these pairings as very different from
To be, or not to be. Using and rather than or, for instance, they avoid
the negation of the first line to offer us similar things. Although
logically each member of the pairings can be distinguished from one
another — a sling differs from an arrow, whips from scorns, and so
forth — they fall so closely in Hamlet's vision and so quickly in his
speech that they come close to redundancy. These phrases are almost
unnecessarily repetitious, as though a kind of rhetorical overkill.
In this repetition, they perhaps ask us to see the phrase To be, or
not to be differently. Rather than o/y a balanced alternative, this
famous phrase could be read as combining as well as separating its
items. Such, at least, is one implication of the line’s end: that is the
question. Seeing this introductory phrase as joining in addition to
distinguishing its possibilities allows us to hold it as a part of Hamlet's
habit, in this speech, of thinking in pairs that are neither the same nor
absolutely different. Is being all that different from not being? Can we
be mote certain about one than the other? This was, in fact, the
burden of our diagram in the book’s last chapter, where we saw that
the stoic and heroic interpretations of the whether clause criss-cros-
sed, not only logically but also verbally, with the soliloquy’s famous
opening line.
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 53

Other kinds of repetition lend the soliloquy an intricate pattern-

ing as well. Hamlet repeats the phrase To die, to sleep verbatim, for
instance, and then repeats to sleep a third time, only to qualify it with
a further option: to dream. He repeats the word for in the lines for in
that sleep of death and for who would bear, and continues to chain
his lines by repeating the latter’s who and bear in the phrase who
would fardels bear. We have already noticed the uncanny repetition
of bear, in various forms, in the speech. Earlier, we noticed as well the
repetition of the w... & beginning in wake cowards and makes
calamity. To these, we could add dreams may come, mortal coil,
and wan’s contumely. We could also observe lingering if inexact
echoes of this cluster in such phrases as woment ... currents, guie-
tus make, and name... action, and note its exact inversion in such
words and phrases as consummation, contumely, and conscience
... Make, as well as within the very word make itself. The repetition
of soft ‘m’ and hard ‘c’/*k’ sounds here could be seen as the sonic
equivalent of the opposites we get in be and not... be.
These dozen or so instances of mw... & and its inversion could lead
us to declare this arrangement of consonants as something like the
‘secret sound’ of “To be or not to be? It may be an accident that so
many words and phrases in this short speech deploy this sound clus-
ter, backwards and forwards. But it could have been more than that.
The author of Hamlet — a writer who sometimes puckishly played
with the names of not only family and friends in his works but his
own — would have been used to joining these very sounds every time
he said his name: ‘williaM shaKespeare’ So when we hear mortal coil
and other such pairings of these consonants, we may be hearing an
echo (however deliberate) of the playwright’s name: a kind of sonic
signature at the heart of his signature soliloquy.
We noted that this speech does not conclude, as several of Hamlet’s
soliloquies do, with rhyming lines. But rhymes of a different sort add
a poetic dimension to his speech, including repeated sounds within
lines, such as sleep and dream, hwe of resolution, and of office; sounds
34 Yo Se Or Not To Se

repeated at the ends of lines, such as takes and make; and those more
loosely related, such as the will and those ills, which resonate both in
their ‘th’and ‘ill’sounds. Early on in the speech, we get a version of sot
to be in the next line’ nobler, and the repetition of sounds such as
what we have in sleep and say is not uncommon in the speech, as one
can see from such phrases as shuffled off, oppressor’s ... proud,
Jove and /aw, and conscience and cowards, to cite only these.
In addition to these sounds, the speech’s words affect us in other
ways as well. Counting the compound heart-ache as a single word,
we could say that the speech has 267 words, many of them used more
than one time. As could be expected, such words as the (22), of (15), to
(15), and (12), that (7), and a (5) appear most frequently. But after that,
the frequency of some words may surprise us. For instance, Hamlet
uses Sleep five times, and we four times; death and life each appear
twice, as do (among others) die and died, end, makes and make,
who, would, thus, and both no and not.

We will return to these last two words, but for now we should notice
that the speech mixes shorter and longer words to great effect. The
initial nine words of its famous first line, for instance, have a single
syllable each: To be, or not to be that is the . .. Then we get question,
which was probably pronounced with two syllables — QUEST-ion —
rather than with three as in qui-E-tus (that is,‘qui-4 ¥-tus’) or QUF-e-
tus. Throughout, the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy alternates the
simple diction of ordinary life with the more complex Latinate
vocabulary of the learned orders. We can see this in Hamlet’s use of
both there’s the rub and the terms respect, regard, consummation,
and resolution to discuss the business of deciding upon action and
the ins and outs of action itself. Examining these shorter, simpler
words over and against their more elaborate cousins helps reveal one
source of the speech’ strength. Here are a few of the soliloquy’s
shorter words, followed in parentheses by the number of times they
appear in the soliloquy:
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 55

Short Words :

a (5); and (12); ay (1); be (3); but (1); by (2); die (2); for (2); have
(2); he (1); his (1); in (2); is (3); may (1); of (15); or (2); say (1); so
(1); that (7); the (22); this (2); those (1); thus (2); ’tis (2); to (15); us
(3); we (4); who (2); with (3); would (2); you (1)

We could contrast the above with some of the words of two or more
syllables in the soliloquy, each of which is used only once:

Longer Words

calamity; conscience; consummation; contumely; devoutly;

enterprises; insolence; natural; Ophelia; opposing; oppressor;
outrageous; question; quietus; resolution; traveller; undiscov-
er’d; unworthy

Hamlet often sets these long and short words in opposition. Just as
we have seen question stand out at the end of its line (in fact, it makes
the line ‘irregular’ by exceeding ten syllables), he will begin a line
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a only to end it with consummation. In the
same way the proud man’s balances contumely, the phrase native
hue of precedes resolution, and enterprises is followed by of great
pitch and moment. We could take this as the verbal side of the
speech’s pendulum-like movement. Just as the mw... & pairing bal-
ances through consonants what the first line does with logic, so do
these shorter and longer words offer a patterned contrast that works
upon the listener in a fairly unconscious way.

The words of the soliloquy fall into a number of overlapping thematic

categories. There are many ways to define these themes, of course,
and most of the speech’s words involve more than one grouping. For
instance, we have seen that rub comes from the realm of pastimes and
56 To Be Or Not To Be

games. Hamlet uses this bowling ball or other object that blocks the
way as a metaphor for a logical impediment. But as a projectile
(something to be thrown by hand) we could also see it as analogous to
arms, slings and arrows, whips and scorns, and bodkin — a kind
of hand property, that is, in Hamlet’s imaginary theater. Or we could
choose to see rub in terms of the debate words (question, respect,
regard, thus) that come up time and again in the speech. Thus each
word may fall into several of many dozens of thematic categories that
organize the speech. The following seem primary among these cate-
gories: TROUBLE; HESITATION, ERROR, and UNCERTAINTY;
THE BODY; DEATH and ENDINGS; THOUGHT; THE LAW,
DEBATE, and OFFICE; and WEAPONS. Below are the categories
represented in columns, with their various terms:

Trouble oppressor Hesitation, Error,

outrageous Uncertaint
ache (from heart- g y
pale
ache) awry
; pangs
against but
} puzzles
calamity cowards
: rub
coil delay
scorns
contumely dread
a shocks
despis'd meee no
E sicklied
die not
spurns
dread r pause
suffer
fortune perchance
runt pies, uzzles
1
3 troubles P :
ills questions
: unworthy
insolence something
weary E
lose undiscover’d
wrong
mortal unworthy
opposing whether
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 57

would Death and respect |

wrong Endings _ thought
wish
after
The Body
consummation
The Law, Debate,
ache (from heart- death
and Office
ache) die
arms (metonymy for end heir
weapons) heir law
bare (for bodkin) lose office
flesh mortal question
grunt pale quietus
heart (from heart- sleep regard
ache) resolution
hue Thought respect

mortal
conscience
pale Weapons
dream
sicklied
know arms
sweat
mind arrows
weaty
puzzles bodkin
question scorns
regard slings
resolution whips

These categories, again, could be defined differently. And certain

words within each of these groupings belong to one or more of the
other groupings. But they help us get at some of the most important
themes in the soliloquy, including its emphasis on death, the trou-
bles of long life and the interrelation of thought and hesitation,
error, and uncertainty. The predominance of words related to trou-
bles suggests this idea lies at the center of the speech’s concerns.
Words remain the building blocks of the soliloquy. But how
Hamlet arranges them deserves our full attention. We have already
58 Teo Se Or Not To Be

observed his preference for balancing elements, a balance that often

leads to a third thing that does not quite represent the pair it seems to
summarize.We have seen his tendency to use duplicated phrases, such
as slings and arrows and whips and scorns. We have also looked at
the walking imagery that gradually creeps into the speech, almost
desperately turning into the verb fly toward the end of his soliloquy.
To these features we could add Hamlet’s use of explicit metaphors like
sea of troubles and sleep of death, metaphors in which he plainly
combines one item (the sea, sleep) with another (troubles, death) to
produce a third thing that asks us to look at each ofits elements anew
even as it makes an argument about them. ‘One’s troubles can be so
daunting that they are like the sea’? Where another speaker might have
compared these troubles to the sands of a beach (in that they seem
innumerable), Hamlet perhaps recalls anecdotes about classical fig-
ures whose insanity led them to advance on the ocean with drawn
swords. We may find a hint of personification in the phrase out-
rageous fortune, the figure of Fortune wielding slings and arrows.
This may operate as well as in the parallel whips and scorns of time,
in which we could imagine a personified Time flailing away at us
through agents that Hamlet goes on to catalogue: an oppressor, a
proud man, a diffident love[z], and so forth.
This weary life is like a journey, Hamlet suggests with his meta-
phors, in which we bear the heavy pack of misery.We could choose to
end this journey ourselves, he continues, were death not like travel-
ing to an undiscover’d country from which no one has ever returned.
Our natural or native capacity to resolve upon action is made sick by
too much thought. And to the extent that great plans ate like
onrushing rivers, conscience induces them to turn away from their
proper goal.
Even in this last summary, we sense the power of aheroic mode of
expression in the soliloquy. This mode asserts itself through the
imagery of weapons, of course: the slings and arrows, arms, whips
and scorns, and the bare bodkin. It also finds itself strengthened by
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 59

some of the less apparently martial terms in the speech, by such words
as coil, calamity, and even the notion of far-flung exploration com-
ing from undiscover’d country. This register becomes strongest
toward the end of the speech. Hamlet seems most commanding, in
fact, when he begins the last section of the soliloquy: Thus con-
science does make cowards of us all. Hamlet’s pale-faced resolu-
tion — like someone whose visage is sicklied o’er with thought —
anticipates Macbeth’s angry words toa Servant near the end of his play.
The Scottish tyrant returns again and again to the image of fear
making the servant pale: ‘thou cream-fac’”d loon, he begins, ‘Go prick
thy face, and over-red thy fear ... those linen cheeks of thine / Are
counselors to fear ... whey-face’ (Macbeth 5.3.11—-17). Like Macbeth,
who has earlier meditated on the ends of action with a soliloquy on
‘the be-all’ rather than “To be or not to be’ (1.7.5), Hamlet ends his
speech sounding like an angry military officer. Unlike Macbeth,
however, the coward he criticizes is not a nameless servant but him-
self — and, by extension, us all.
When we replace nobler in Hamlet’s second line with the less
specific ‘better’ (as in the last chapter’s paraphrase), we lose the
important sense of distinction and hierarchy that weaves itself
throughout his speech. Distinction occupies Hamlet’s mind when he
catalogues the wrongs we often undergo in life at the hands, for
instance, of an oppressor, a proud man, or a scornful love[r]. But it
works most strongly in the soliloquy’s final section, where distinction
is not only implied by such terms as coward, but also stated power-
fully by the epic phrase enterprises of great pitch and moment. This
epic strain finds itself resolved in the image of rivers turning their
currents aside, and in the emphatic final word of the soliloqty
proper, action.
But the name of action is of course lost. The soliloquy as a whole
often works through negation, through things that are not, or are
taken away. We saw many terms connected with such negation in the
list of TROUBLE words given above. Even this list, though, fails to
60 Yo Be Or Not To Be

do justice to the speech’s reliance on negatives.We think immediately

of the famous negation in the initial line — not to be — as well as
such phrases as no more, But, no traveller, know not of, and the idea
of negation built into such words as opposing, end them, die,
shuffled off, oppressor’s, quietus, and lose. Added to this are pre-
fixes like wmworthy and undiscover’d.We even have echoes of this
negation, of course, in the no sound in zobler, and know not. Each of
these last instances comes in the close context of more apparent
negations (not to be, not of )to produce what we could call a cluster
of denial. The last chapter described quietus as a loose anagram of
Hamlet’s more famous question minus the letters n and o. Ifm... kis
the secret or signature sound of this famous speech, its key word is
clearly no.
The most important no of the soliloquy is hidden in plain sight,
concealed in the implied answers to his rhetorical questions: For who
would bear... and who would fardels bear. . .? The answer to these
questions is of course “No one? If Hamlet, internalizing his two
angels, utters an ‘everyman’ soliloquy whose truths pertain to us all,
the negation at its heart transforms it into a pendulum-like speech:
about ‘no one’ In Hamlet’s eyes no one has the courage not to be
before one’s time because no one living knows, by definition, what it
is like to be dead. A simple truth, it is for Hamlet what defines our
humanity and makes our common life a journey in which we grunt
and sweat each weary step toward the undiscover’d country of
death.
With this ‘end’ of Hamlet’s journey, we are approaching the end of
our own examination of how his speech works. It seems the right
time, then, both to summarize a few of the things we have observed
about the speech and to return to some of the questions we asked
about it in this study’s second chapter.

To gather our answers to this chapter’s central question ‘How does this
soliloquy work? we could contrast it with how other soliloquies
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 61

work. Soliloquies often draw on conventional literary and rhetorical

forms, and can thus work like logical arguments, complaints, medi-
tations, prayers, or satires, to name only these. Many soliloquies in
Shakespeare and in the plays of his contemporaries reason through
particular problems or issues. As we have seen, they sometimes
indicate their conclusions or resolutions (or lack thereof) by means of
a capping couplet — two rhyming lines such as “The play’s the thing /
Wherein I'l! catch the conscience of the King! That we have no such
conclusion in the “Io be or not to be’ soliloquy does not mean that
Hamlet has not come toa conclusion. In his Thus... thus ending we
seem to get a conclusion regarding the shared cowardice that derives
from the conscience of introspection.
Yet the soliloquy’s refusal to give us a conventional, gift-wrapped
ending is surely emblematic of a larger truth about how this speech
means. Hamlet continually gives and takes away, starting down one
path only to reverse directions. Eventually we feel that, while not
quite traveling in circles, we are seeing landmarks for the second and
even third time as we go over increasingly familiar terrain. At the
same time, seeing these landmarks again and again means that they
are unfamiliar, even uncanny.We hear its words and know that we have
heard them before, but the fact that they mean something else now
takes away the purchase they may have with us. Reading, hearing, and
speaking this soliloquy is like opening the same door repeatedly, only
to discover unaccountably different things behind it each time. Other
analogies touch on this sense of surprise. The speech sometimes
seems to undulate, like a snake; at other times, the back-and-forth
quality of rallies in a tennis match seems the best analogy. If the “To be
or not to be’soliloquy is like a tennis match, we need to see that every
now and then a shot is hit not where we expect it, but to an adjoining
court — whereupon the point does not end but continues anew.
In its hypnotic back-and-forth motion we may locate one of the
secrets of the soliloquy, as well as answers to some of the questions
that we asked about this speech earlier. Actors have found this speech
62 ¥o Se Or Not To Be

difficult for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is its celebrity:

Hamlet’s soliloquy has been spoken so many times, by so many actors,
that ‘owning’ it onstage is nearly impossible. In truth, it cannot be
owned, only rented.
But it is problematic for actors for other reasons as well. Actors are
often unhappy about giving this speech because it has been detached
from Hamlet so often that it has become both monument and cliché.
Richard Burton, who played Hamlet in several productions, saw the
soliloquy as hopelessly familiar:

Has there ever been a more boring speech, after 400 years of
constant repetition, than “To be or not to be’? I have never played
that particular speech, and I’ve played the part hundreds and
hundreds of times, without knowing that everybody settles down
to a nice old nap the minute the first fatal words start.

For Ben Kingsley, the ‘fatal words’ had a more horrifying effect.
Kingsley speaks for many actors when recalling, of his 1975 turn as
Hamlet, that the “Io be or not to be’ soliloquy produced a ‘wave of
terror’ in him: ‘the whole event, the audience out there, knowing you
have the most famous soliloquy in the world to do’
Thus an answer to our question,‘Why have so many actors sought
to play Hamlet only to struggle with this speech?’ helps solve our
second puzzle: “How could the most famous speech in literature be so
mysterious, and so poorly understood?’ Its monumental status can
make it seem either comic (too familiar to look at) or tragic (too
painful to revisit). The undulating movement of this soliloquy — its
emphasis on repetition, pairing, and negation — also contributes toa
hypnotic and disorienting effect. Like audience members and read-
ers, actors can struggle with a speech that swings back and forth like a
hypnotist’s gold watch. Sometimes we break this recursive pattern,
but even the heroic language of its conclusion builds to an anti-cli-
max. Though a key last word is action, it is action, Hamlet tells us,
that we have lost in name and deed alike.
 How Does it Mean? (The Speech as Poem) 63

This speech’s mystery has other sources. A large part of its mystery
comes from its concern with the great unknown of all our lives: our
inability to know what dreams may come in our sleep of death; the
unspecific dread we have of something after death; the nature of the
undiscover’d country. This part of being human puzzles the will,
Hamlet tells us. If Plato’s fable of the Cave has us living ignorantly save
for what we can tell of the shadows cast before us (the shadows of we
know not whom or what standing behind us), Hamlet’s soliloquy
insists that we are more ignorant still.We may or may not have dreams
after we die; if we do, these dreams may or may not be our afterlife. If
they come at all, they may be nightmares. We see no shadows in
Hamlet’s soliloquy. Even these would be a comfort, for they would
indicate something or someone to share out emptiness with. Instead,
we are afraid — have dread — of what may come as dreams. More
dreadful than shadows is nothing. Hamlet’s speech is mysterious,
then, in large part because of its concern with life’s mysteries. This
concern and these mysteries reverberate through the speech. If
Hamlet is agnostic about the afterlife, this lack of knowledge brings
him no comfort.
Hamlet’s great speech — perhaps the central speech of Western
literature — succeeds by denying greatness, by testifying to the
unattractive truth that we have survived as human beings by being
unable or unwilling to transcend our fears. Life is uncertain and
weary in Hamlet’s account. What his soliloquy manages to convey in
its alternately somber and frenetic insights is the repetitive nature of
this weariness. This ‘high’ register speech, so celebrated for its pro-
fundity, succeeds by advancing its gray and chilling knowledge
through the simple vocabulary that defines our existence: be, suffer,
die, sieep, dream, lose. In these words we recognize Hamlet’s
understanding of this morality play of out life.
‘RD be or not to be

W by oF not to be, chat is the question:

Whether is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or t take arms against a sea of troubles,
Agad by opposing, end them, PR dig, to sleep =
No more, aad by a Seep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That Resh is heir tos tis. a Consummation
Devoutly to be wishd), To die, to sleep
®D sea perrhance to dream = ay there’ the rab,
Bor in that Seep of death what dreams may come,
Wher we have shatiled off this mortal coil,
Must give uy pauses theres the respect
That makes calamity of 90 long lite:
Bor who would bear the whips and scomys of time,
TYoppressord wroag, the proud man’s contamely
The pangs of degpisdd love, the law delay
The insolence of offices, and the sparns
That pationt merit of tY unworthy takes,
When he hieaself might his quietas make
Wirth a bare bodking who would fardels bear, fh)
® grant and oweat under a weary life,
Bar that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’dl country from whose bourm
No traveller retary, pagzies the will,
Aad makes us rather bear those ils we have,
Than By to others that we know not of?
Thas conscience does make cowards of us alll,
And thas the native hue of resolution
Ws Sichlied ob with the pale east of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents tara awry
And lose the name of action, — Soft you now,
The fiir Ophelia,
5 The Name of Action |
(The Speech in Context)

So far we have looked mainly at the speech ‘itself? exploring what and
how it means by taking up its words, phrases, and structures. Reading
the speech closely like this can tell us a great deal about what the “To
be or not to be’ soliloquy is, at base. Much more than a frozen con-
glomeration of words, the speech, as we have seen, has an internal
dynamic, a set of motions and counter-motions scripted within its
lines. To begin to understand its compelling nature, we looked at the
structures that lend the speech its uncanny power.
But the meaning of Hamlet’s soliloquy depends on more than its
words. Where the speech is, as well as from and for whom it is spoken, has
a clear role in its meaning as a dramatic and theatrical utterance. This
chapter will focus, then, on some contexts for the speech. We will
concern ourselves with three areas in particular: the role of Hamlet’s
biography in relation to the speech; the place of the speech in the play
(including who overhears it); and, finally, reversing this question, the
place of the play in the speech.
We could begin by noticing that Hamlet’s ‘biography’ is ,in his
speech, even as his speech is in his biography. The speech and the
character define one another. Just as we saw that the speech exists
only in and through its words, so does our understanding of Hamlet’s
character (even our acceptance of him asa character) revolve around
this speech. Similarly, however often we encounter this speech in
66 fo Be Gr Not Te Be

advertisements and other cultural venues, it is never fully detachable

from Hamlet. Nor can it be separated, in the end, from our recogni-
tion of Hamlet’s sway upon our shared culture itself.
How can one talk about the biography of a character in a play? Very
carefully, clearly, for the word ‘biography’ presupposes a life sub-
stantial enough to have a story that can be told. And Shakespeare’s
characters are no more and no less than dried ink, figures in scripts
that, while often exceeding the ‘two hours’ traffic’ of an afternoon’s
performance, do not stretch much further than that. The detail we
find about characters in many novels is simply not a part of drama
from this era. At the same time, though, these plays can give us the
feeling that we know a great deal about the characters they present,
allowing us to imagine ‘back stories’ to the actions we see as well as
sequels or dramatic afterlives.
That said, the facts of Hamlet’s biography would scarcely fill a
paragraph. And some of these seem contradictory. Different parts of
the play, for instance, imply a different age for him. This ambiguity
seems more the rule than the exception where Hamlet is concerned.
Indeed, a newspaper obituary could be expected to be quite brief:

Prince of Denmark; scholar. Born to the Danish King ofthe same name, and
Queen Gertrude. Upon his father’s untimely death, interrupted study at
Wittenberg before witnessing Gertrude’ marriage to his uncle, Claudius,
which complicated his own access to the throne. Alternately melancholy,
jocular, sincere, disrespectful, murderous, and stoic, Hamlet died in the
infamous palace massacre at Elsinore. He is survived by his close friend and
classmate Horatio.

Clearly Hamlet is many things, and various characters in the play

perceive him differently at different moments. He is interesting in
part because so much is kept back from us.

Ophelia gives us a list of his multiple roles — real, potential, and

imagined — when she characterizes him after his wild ‘Get thee to a
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 67

nunn'ty’ behavior. This violent sequence comes, of course, just after

he has broken off his “To be or not to be’ soliloquy to acknowledge her
entrance. Her familiar catalog laments his decline into what seems
insanity:

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th expectation and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
TR observd of all observers, quite, quite down!
(3.1.150—4)

We may hear in her ‘noble mind’an echo of Hamlet’s own nobler in

the mind. Ophelia has watched Hamlet lose his ‘noble and most
sovereign reason’and has witnessed his ‘unmatchd form and stature of
blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy’ (3.1.150—60).
Along with ‘reason, the most important part of her capsule bio-
graphy may be the word ‘scholar’s, which, in Ophelia’s rendering, can
be understood to join with ‘eye? This line, significantly, jumbles its
roles and qualities: we expect ‘courtier’s... tongue, ‘scholar’s.. . eye,
and ‘soldier’s ... sword) as this is a conventional set of attributes for
the respective roles. But Ophelia re-orders the objects so that no
logical pattern underlies their relation to presumably corresponding
roles. In another play and another scene this re-ordering could cause
more uncertainty than it does here. Ophelia is only following the
ecology of the play, however, in disordering the description of a dis-
ordered mind — Hamlet’s. For Ophelia to follow ‘1, 2, 3’ (the order of
the agents: courtier, scholar, soldier) with neither ‘1, 2, 3’ (the order of
their attributes or faculties) nor ‘3, 2, 1’ (a perfect inversion) but ‘3, 1, 2’
(a puzzling disorder) is to engage in the very repetition-with-a-
difference that we have seen Hamlet himself use in his soliloquy. It is
as though in this line Ophelia reveals that she has been infected by
Hamlet’s penchant for setting up a pattern only to defy our expecta-
tions.
68 Yo Be Or Not To Be

Whatever its disorienting dynamics, Hamlet’s speech is clearly

sttuctured by his scholarly background. A kind of formal disputation,
the soliloquy points at the schoolroom where, as we have seen, stu-
dents were commonly asked to debate one or both sides of a ‘ques-
tion? One of the foundational problems of all philosophy has been the
nature of our existence. As we have noted, the question of ‘being or
not being’ was almost clichéd in the philosophical and logical tradi-
tions of both Greece @” kai me on) and Rome ¢st aut non est).
But the soliloquy can be seen as coming from more than a gen-
eralized schoolroom. Hamlet, we are told, studies at Wittenberg.
During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the university at Wittenberg was
known for producing free thinkers, individuals who were not reluc-
tant to struggle against the received opinions of their day, or to call
into question the very premises upon which others lived their lives.
Many in Shakespeare’s audiences would have associated two notor-
ious free thinkers with Wittenberg: Doctor Faustus and Martin
Luther. Each of these figures called orthodoxy into question, with
momentous results. Those English subjects familiar with Christopher
Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, for instance, would remember that the
Wittenberg scholar had learned so much through study and teaching
that he was dissatisfied with the sum total of knowledge available to
human beings. Selling his soul to the devil, Faustus gained the whole
world only to watch his contract come due while he was still unsa-
tisfied. Martin Luther, to anyone valuing religious and political sta-
bility, forged a similarly dangerous challenge to authority with his
equally radical inquiry. Almost single-handedly ushering in the
Reformation — arguably the greatest revolution in Western history —
Luther was notorious for casting off the bonds of conventional
thinking.
For Shakespeare to identify Hamlet’s and Horatio’s university as
Wittenberg is to give them a home in a European hub of radical
thought. As we have seen, conventional academic questions could
encompass fairly esoteric matters: for instance, whether one should
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 69

sow one’s wild oats while young, or whether there are other worlds
than this one. Hamlet’s question, instead, goes to the very heart of
our life, raising issues of existence, agency, and the afterlife. The
playwright appropriately credited Wittenberg, the spiritual nursery of
these two figures, with producing their intellectual cousin, Prince
Hamlet.“To be or not to be, then, is a student’s speech, and the speech
of a student who has been encouraged to think in radical ways.
Hamlet himself speaks of his ‘inky cloak’and his ‘customary suits of
solemn black’ (1.2.77—8), and the black garb that has long since been
the costume of bohemians remains something like an identifying
badge for his melancholy. Indeed, in addition to his status as a stu-
dent, Hamlet’s melancholy often plays a role in how his actions and
words are interpreted. In an interview given about portraying Hamlet
in his film version of the play, for instance, Mel Gibson related that he
based his performance in part on what he learned about the character
by looking up the word ‘melancholy’ in a dictionary. What he found
there — definitions centering on such words as ‘sad’and ‘gloomy’ — is
not necessarily untrue to the shapes of Hamlet’s personality in the
play. There are moments when these terms perfectly describe Hamlet’s
actions and words. Perhaps ‘melancholy’ even describes Hamlet’s state
of mind during the soliloquy.
But ‘melancholy’ meant more than merely ‘sad’ for the
Elizabethans; it encompassed a broad pattern of behavior that
included bursts of utter creativity and genius. One of the pseudo-
Aristotelian philosophical ‘problems’ that students were asked to
wrestle with in their debates, in fact, concerned why it is that all great
thinkers, artists, generals, and political leaders have been melancholy
in nature. That is, while a‘melancholy’ person may strike modern-day
culture as a depressive in need of medication, Shakespeare’s age was
ready to recognize a melancholic as possessing one of the pre-con-
ditions of genius. The sub-culture of academic Humanism, in fact,
nurtured the cult of melancholy in part by encouraging meditations
on one’s mortality. Skulls — like the one Hamlet will speak to in his
70 Ye Be Or Not To Be

famous encounter with the Gravediggers (5.1) — became something

like a token of one’s intellectual seriousness. They were reminders of
death’s presence in our lives: memento mori. Together with his inky
cloak, melancholy, and address to Yorick’s skull, Hamlet’s “To be or not
to be’ soliloquy marks him as a figure of the radical, doubting, even
malcontented intellectual of post-Reformation Europe.
If Hamlet’s ‘biography’ informs his speech in this way, the solilo-
quy also completes his biography. Our picture of Hamlet usually
involves him either holding a skull or speaking this speech.
Frequently, advertisements and other parodies have him doing both
simultaneously. Why has this soliloquy come to serve as an essential
part of his biography? And in what way does this soliloquy complete,
ot at least add to, our understanding of his dramatic life? First of all, it
stands as a metaphor of what we see throughout the play: Hamlet
often keeps his words to himself. His first line in the play, as set in
most editions, is an aside: ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’
(1.2.65). And, as we have noticed, the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy is
one of a half-dozen soliloquies he speaks in Hamlet. If we needed a
better example of Hamlet’s intellectual, spiritual, and social solitude,
Shakespeare would have been hard pressed to provide it.
But this soliloquy is particularly good at showing something for
which Hamlet is notorious: his indecision. Laurence Olivier’s film
version of Hamlet summarizes a common understanding of Hamlet’s
character by intoning, at its opening: “This is the tragedy of a man
who could not make up his mind? As a reading of either Hamlet or
Hamlet, such leaves a little bit to be desired. Yet Olivier’s sentence
accurately characterizes one line of thinking about the play and its
central figure: Hamlet is an indecisive intellectual, a man who knows
too much, who is paralyzed by the weight and results of thought. In
this interpretation, thinking is not only a mode of life that Hamlet
embraces, but forms an unhealthy addiction. It would be much better
(this interpretation tends to suggest) if Hamlet were to act as Othello
acts, killing Claudius at some moment in Act 3 and sending everyone
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 71

home early. In this reading, the soliloquy stands as a capsule summary

of what remains wrong with Hamlet: he cannot bring himself to do
what he needs to do because he is thinking about doing rather than
doing. He substitutes, for the action of his body, the action of his mind.

As we have seen, though, the speech has more than thought in it. Or
rather, Hamlet makes thought a kind of action. The heroic register the
soliloquy builds up to— enterprises of great pitch and moment — is
not only rousing in itself but gives us reason to think that Hamlet has
action within him. As Ophelia’s catalog suggests, Hamlet is part sol-
dier in this play, that itself begins and ends with soldiers.We see him
willing to act at various moments in the play, and he draws his sword
on a number of occasions before dueling with Laertes and killing the
King at the play’s climax. We will return to the way this soliloquy
captures larger elements of the play within it, but for now it is
important to acknowledge that it focuses on more than indecision. In
its gradually escalating language of action, it doubles the trajectory
that Hamlet himself will follow in the play.
Action, indecision, melancholy, solitude: these are a few of the
things that the speech represents for Hamlet’s character. But it is not
safe to assume that the speech means only privately, for and about
Hamlet. That is, while we have called this speech a soliloquy
throughout this book, a number of critics (and certain theatrical
productions) have suggested that Hamlet’s speech is less private than
is widely believed. To the biographical context, then, we need to adda
theatrical and dramatic one. This context may help us address an
important question: Who hears Hamlet’s speech, and how do we
know what they hear? é
Obviously we hear the speech, regardless of whether Hamlet
delivers it, in the theater, directly to us, speaks it to himself, or
combines these two modes — sharing certain words, phrases, or
sentences with us, that is, but speaking others to himself, as though in
dialogue with what Philip Sidney calls one’s ‘inward guest’ In a basic
72 ¥o Be Or Not To Se

sense, then, Hamlet 7s overheard as he delivers this soliloquy. But do

any of his fellow characters in the world of Hamlet overhear him? This
is a more troubling question than is sometimes acknowledged, for
while we understand soliloquies to be moments of private speech and
thought, the court of Elsinore in Hamlet is a place of almost constant
surveillance: almost without exception, the play’s major characters
watch each other in hope of gaining information that can be
employed for advantage. And as Claudius remarks prior to Hamlet’s
speech,

we have closely sent for Hamlet hither,

That he, as *twere by accident, may here
Affront Ophelia. Her father and myself,
We'll so bestow ourselves that, seeing unseen,
We may of their encounter frankly judge,
And gather by him, as he is behavd,
If ’t be th’ affliction of his love or no
That thus he suffers for.
(3.L.29-36)

Clearly the King intends this to be a kind of ‘mousetrap’ for Hamlet.

His fellow voyeur, Polonius, cannot guess Claudius’s real reason for
wanting to know the source of Hamlet’s ‘suffer[ing]? And although
these men have presumably ‘bestow[ed]’ themselves somewhere close
to the place Hamlet delivers his soliloquy, it seems unlikely that an
audience would see them during the speech itself, or that we would
benefit from such a spectacle.
Basing their understanding of this scene on the King’s intent to
‘frankly judge’ Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s ‘encounter; some critics have
held that we must take their spying into account when we read and
hear the “To be or not to be’ speech. Others venture further, suggest-
ing that this spying does not go unnoticed by Hamlet himself. In fact
there are a number of ways to read the speech in relation to its
immediate dramatic context. Here are a few:
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 73

1. Hamlet is not overheard as he speaks,

2. Hamlet is overheard as he speaks, but is unaware that he is over-
heard.
3. Hamlet is overheard as he speaks, and is aware the entire time that
he is overheard.
4. Hamlet is overheard as he speaks, and becomes aware during the
speech that he is being overheard.

Of these four, again, no. 1 seems supported by much of what sur-

rounds the speech. Claudius, we will recall, states that they will judge
‘seeing unseen, a phrase that we could take to suggest that they will
hide and watch from some distance (most likely offstage) — pre-
sumably checking to see if Hamlet acts the way jilted lovers typically
act.
But there is more to the scene than that. After the loud ‘nunn’ry’
exchange, the King and Polonius enter and both claim that they
have heard what Hamlet has uttered.“You need not tell us what Lord
Hamlet said, Polonius tells Ophelia, ‘We heard it all’ (3.1.179-80).
Claudius speaks of this at more length:

Love? his affections do not that way tend,

Nor what he spake, though it lack” form a little,
Was not like madness. There’s something in his soul
O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger...
(3.1.162—7)

It is not clear whether we are supposed to believe that Claudius and

Polonius have heard everything that Hamlet has said after they hide
themselves, ot whether the “To be or not to be’ speech has been largely
ptivate, with Hamlet’s remarks in prose to Ophelia forming the bulk
of what the older men overhear. Readers and actors sometimes fasten
upon Hamlet’s unprompted question to Ophelia — ‘Where’s your
74 fo Be Or Not Te Se

father?’ (129) — as indicating a sudden awareness, on Hamlet’s part,

that he is being watched. This ‘aware’ Hamlet then turns his angry
rematks toward the pait’s hiding place as he threatens ‘I say we will
have no moe marriage. Those that are married already (all but one)
shall live, the rest shall keep as they are’ (147-9).
It is just as unclear what the interpretations that see Hamlet as not
only overheard but conscious of being overheard would mean for the
structure and delivery of the soliloquy. One can, of course, take the
heroic register in the speech’s final lines as an anticipation of the
blustery language Hamlet will deliver in his ‘no moe marriage’ lines.
But his diction in “To be or not to be’ is really so generalized that it is
difficult to imagine Claudius understanding the speech as a personal
threat to his, Claudius’s, hold on power. Of course, Claudius’s char-
acterization of Hamlet following the nunnery exchange is also a good
description of Hamlet’s state as he delivers his soliloquy: “There’s
something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood’
(164-5). The arresting image Claudius gives us of Hamlet is one in
which an unidentified ‘something’ resides, egg-like, in Hamlet’s
‘soul; on this egg Hamlet’s ‘melancholy’ sits, like a hen, waiting for it
(even as it helps it) to hatch.
The King’s eventual solution to the problem of Hamlet is to send
Hamlet to England with a sealed letter instructing the English
monarch to execute him. It seems unlikely that all this certainty
comes from the “To be or not to be’ speech, which, while it testifies to
the prince’s melancholy, seems a less specific spur to Claudius than the
‘no moe marriage’ comment. If Hamlet is clearly shown to be over-
heard, and if he likewise clearly realizes he is overheard, this probably
happens after, rather than during, his famous soliloquy. The presence
of a perceived audience onstage would change our sense (as well as
Hamlet’s) of the direction and function of his words, adding yet other
layers of potential manipulation to the speech. It may be permissible
to think that the soliloquy has enough thought in and around it —
prompts so much thinking and interpretation on its own — that we
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 75

ate allowed, with Hamlet, momentarily to forget that he may be

ovetheard at his most intimate moment.

If we temporarily lose track of the play around Hamlet’s speech, we

should not miss the way in which Hamlet itself is in this soliloquy. We
have already seen that so much of Hamlet’s ‘biography’ seems to be in
his speech. There is another sense in which we can take Hamlet, the
play, to be in the soliloquy — a presence that is as great as if not greater
than the unfolding of the prince’s biography in it. Almost every
important structuring device in Hamlet, from the level of character-
ization through thought, language, and action itself, is present in the
“To be or not to be’ soliloquy. In this way, Hamlet’s famous speech
works as something like a miniature version of the play itself. As the
Prince himself might put it,“To be or not to be’ is Hamlet ‘bounded in
a nutshell’ (2.2.254).
We can perceive how the soliloquy incorporates these external
structures by examining, in quick sequence, some of the parts that we
discerned in the last chapter. Take, for instance, the way in which
opposition structures the first part of the soliloquy:

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.

This passage does many things. One of the things it does most clearly
is foreground conflict and opposition. From its initial opposition of
To be with not to be, and its balanced alternatives (Whether . .. Or),
to its concluding use of the word opposing, the first four-and-a-half
lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be’ soliloquy structure his options in
terms of conflicting, binary divisions. Hamlet can either take arms
against his troubles or continue to have such arms — figured as
slings and arrows — used against him.
76 Yo Be Or Not To Be

All drama centers on conflict. But as a revenge tragedy, Hamlet

seems especially full of the oppositions and conflicting pairs that we
see in this speech’s opening section. Putting aside Hamlet’s own
motive for revenge, we notice that the international conflict in the
play’s ‘overplot’ (a structural division between states, cities, institu-
tions, or families) sets Denmark in direct opposition to Norway.
Horatio tells us that, ‘prick’d on by a most emulate pride, old
Fortinbras challenged Hamlet’s father to single combat; his defeat in
that conflict has led his son, young Fortinbras, to seek to regain the
lands his father’s risky duel has cost him (1.1.83). For its part, Laertes’
grudge against Hamlet will close the play by surfacing in what Osric
will dub ‘the opposition of your person in trial’ (5.2.171-2). The kind
of stark ‘opposition’ characterizing these duels finds embodiment not
only in the soliloquy’s central distinction between thought and
action, but in nearly every one of the play’s scenes.We could think of
the way Hamlet hectors Gertrude to “Look here upon this picture,
and on this, /The counterfeit presentment of two brothers’ (3.4.53-4),
a moment when productions have typically offered physical repre-
sentations (portraits, miniatures) to set out the differences between
what Hamlet feels to be absolutely different brothers. Likewise
another of the drama’s use of stage properties, Hamlet’s celebrated
address of Yorick’s skull, puts into play the stark differences between
the past and the present, the living and the dead.
We could multiply instances of opposition, for it is not only classic
cinema that gives us black-and-white memories of the play.
Throughout, Shakespeare’s tragedy relies on vivid instances of con-
trast. These instances are gathered — and many of them are summar-
ized — by the balanced oppositions of the beginning of Hamlet’s “To
be or not to be’ soliloquy.
But, as any reader of Hamlet also knows, the play tends to collapse
such oppositions almost as soon as they are constructed. The won-
derfully complex beginning of the play, for instance, creates an initial
opposition of guard and stranger that resolves itself into a fearful
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 77

conversation between comrades and ‘rivals’? Likewise the appearance

of the Ghost calls into question any easy opposition between the liv-
ing and the dead (even as it effectively nullifies, of course, the truth of
Hamlet’s remark about the undiscover’d country, from whose
bourn no traveller returns). The dividing line between the quick and
the dead becomes blurred, too, when Yorick’s skull mocks Hamlet
with death's role in our every move, with the inescapable presence of
the skull beneath our skin. And one point that we may take from
Hamlet’s blustery encounter with his mother is that, however differ-
ent he considers old Hamlet and Claudius to be, Gertrude finds it
easy to replace brother with brother in her bed.

Along with oppositions in this play, then, we need to consider the

function of its intensive pairings and resemblances. Hamlet is
uncannily concerned with doublings, with pairs and partners, and
near twins. We could take the almost inseparable Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern as a central example of this tendency, but this duo is
only one instance of what we see throughout Hamlet. The father-son
relationship of old and young Fortinbras is replicated in the Danish
pair of old and young Hamlet. The brother—brother pairing of old
Hamlet and Claudius finds replication not only in the play-within-
the-play’s story of regicide, but in the pair of gravediggers and in the
relationship of Hamlet and Horatio, whose friendship is nearly the
last sutviving bond we encounter in the play. This patterning-by-twos
is also present with the two men who love Ophelia — Laertes and
Hamlet — who of course wrestle in her grave before dueling with
foils. If Hamlet gives us many stark oppositions, it is also concerned, as
a drama, to show us pairings and resemblances, and moments where
things that have seemed to be different come to reveal their similarities.
Following the speech’s initial emphasis on opposition, the second
section of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy asks us to think about such
resemblance through its use of the conventional ‘death as sleep’
metaphor:
78 fa Se Or Not To Be

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 wishd.

We have already examined the kinds of things that the first lines of
this section could mean: whether we are to take No more, for
instance, as a phrase of self-reproach, or whether with it Hamlet is re-
stating To die (that is, death as a state in which one would be No
more). Regardless of which option we feel best captures the meaning
of these lines, it is clear that they rely on the death as sleep’ pairing — a
pairing that allows us to tell ourselves that a corpse in a coffin looks
like it is ‘sleeping, or that we are putting a pet ‘to sleep’ The notion of
an easeful death briefly comforts Hamlet as he imagines that this will
end both heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is
heir to. The hoped-for partnership of die and sleep will overcome
the established pairing of flesh and shocks. At the end of the second
line here we have the word end, followed two lines later of course by
consummation, which also ends its line. In his thought-experiment,
Hamlet seems to be trying out ideas in a quest for certainty about
something,
Yet it is in his nature as a character, even as it is in the nature of
Hamlet as a play, to derive no certainty from either resemblances or
oppositions. With Hamlet, as with Hamlet, all structures seem to be
continually dissolving into something else: we could recall the “Very
like a while’ sequence in which Hamlet teases Polonius about inter-
preting the shapes of clouds (3.2.376—82). Thus the ‘death is sleep’
metaphor cannot provide Hamlet with a peaceful or harmonious
partnership, any more than the terms of an opposition can remain in
tension with one another without revealing their similarities. The
next section of his soliloquy stages something we see throughout the
drama generally — the inability of settlements to stay settled:
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 79

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:

Hamlet’s rub functions as a center for this thought. Referring, as we

have seen, to the block or impediment in a game of bowls, this word
stands in for the insight that has just come to Hamlet: that the death
as sleep’ partnership is not necessarily any more free from trouble or
strife than sleep is in life. Hamlet fears (at the very least, acknowl-
edges the possibility of) the bad dreams that may characterize any
afterlife we have. Even as resemblances throughout the play — of
brother to brother, father to son, lover to lover — not only fail to
produce peace or harmony, but in fact tend to generate or continue
opposition, so does the resemblance of sleep to death work to pro-
duce the rub of Hamlet’s provisional solution to the famous question
of his soliloquy.
The word question brings us to the next sections of his speech,
here combined as 13 lines which contain paired rhetorical ques-
tions:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despisd love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ 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,
80 Yo Se Or Not To Be

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of ?

The word question in his soliloquy’s opening line refers, again, to the
topic of an academic debate, but at its root lies the same grammatical
form of inquiry that appears in queries about (for instance) the time of
day.We have seen that these lines pose rhetorical questions, effectively
masking (or not masking, as the case may be) statements: “No one
would bear X, if Y weren’t the case? Yet it means something that
Hamlet has begun his soliloquy by announcing a question, and goes
on to pose a pair of questions (what the Riverside presents as a single
two-part question) in the longest sentence of his speech.
Questions make Hamlet into a dramatic mystery, with Hamlet as
the play’s central detective.We could notice how often he interrogates
those around him.‘[A]re you honest?’ he asks Ophelia in the ‘nunn’ry’
exchange following his soliloquy, Are you fair?’ (3.1102, 104). We per-
ceive something central to Hamlet’s character — and to the play that
bears his name — when we track his responses to Horatio’s stunning
news about the Ghost. Like a seasoned interrogator trying to find
inconsistencies in a story, Hamlet suspiciously probes Horatio for
specific details:

Saw, who?
The King my father?
For God’s love let me hear!
But where was this?
Did you not speak to it?
*Tis very strange.
Indeed, indeed, sits. But this troubles me.
Hold you the watch tonight?
Armd, say you?
From top to toe?
Then saw you not his face.
What, look’ he frowningly?
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 81

Pale, or red? :
And fix’d his eyes upon you?
I would I had been there.
Very like, very like. Stay’d it long?
His beard was grisl'd, no?
(12:190--239)

His utterances here, marked by 12 brief but insistent questions, con-

trast formally with his more leisured soliloquies. His longest sentence
is six words long, and his shortest — ‘Saw, who?’ — only two.
Yet what this interrogation has in common with not only the
soliloquy but the play as a whole is its emphasis on questioning. Like
its title character, the tragedy is dedicated to inquiry. Hamlet sets out
to solve the mystery of his father’s murder, a mystery which will bring
him face-to-face with questions concerning his own identity and
human existence generally. His quest will create a mystery (‘Is Hamlet
mad, or feigning madness for a reason?’) that others (both inside the
play and out) will try to solve: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will lose
their lives, as Hamlet puts it, for their attempt to ‘pluck out the heart
of [his] mystery’ (3.2.365-6). For his part, Polonius treats his son
Laertes’ courseof study at Paris as a mystery not to be solved but
created; he instructs his spy Reynaldo to spread rumors of Laertes’
potential misdemeanors in hopes of finding corroborating witnesses
to any wrongdoings his son may have committed, or be about to
commit. He characterizes these attempts with a summary that has
since become part of our language: ‘And thus do we of wisdom and of
reach, /With windlasses and with assays of bias, /By indirections find
directions out’ (2.1.61—3).

The moment when one may ‘find directions out’ — the end of the
detective narratives we see throughout Hamlet — comes when, and
only when, the questioner feels confident in drawing a conclusion.
Such confidence is rarely complete, not only because of Hamlet’s
82 Yo Be Or Not To Be

indecision but because there are few straight lines to follow in this
play — instances, that is, where characters may freely step from A to B
and draw conclusion C without hesitation. Even a ghost coming back
from the dead to recount the gory details of being murdered provides
no certainty for his listener. It may be no accident that Polonius’s
summaty includes not only ‘windlasses,? which the Riverside defines
as ‘roundabout methods, but also the phrase ‘with assays of bias; an
image which comes, like there’s the rub, from the game of bowls. The
wotd ‘bias’ refers to the unequal weight of a ball and/or the uneven
surface of the bowling surface. Polonius’s ‘assays’ probably means both
measuring or gauging any uneven distribution of weight or unlevel
playing surface and the act of trying to bowl successfully using the
imperfections of such a ball or surface to one’s advantage. A more
accessible image is that of a golfer putting a lopsided ball on a sharply
breaking green. The many conclusions in Hamlet that characters and
readers seek come through, and only through, these kind of ‘indir-
ections.
The final section of Hamlet’s soliloquy contains within it versions
of these conclusions even as it foregrounds the play’s emphasis on
consequence and causation:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied oer with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.

Hamlet’s Thus... and thus savors of the schoolroom, of course, and

his soliloquy’s grounding in academic debate. But it also signals the
play’s larger interest in drawing conclusions and seeking out causes.
The initial dialogue between the Gravediggers comes close to pat-
odying this emphasis. The first Gravedigger sounds like Hamlet as he
 The Name of Action (The Speech in Context) 83

says Tl put another question to thee, and throughout uses the chop-
logic of stage clowns to solve riddles of legal. complexity and social
life alike. As he expounds to his fellow worker:

Here lies the water; good. Here stands the man; good. If the man
go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes,
mark you that. But if the water come to him and drown him, he
drowns not himself; argal, he that is not guilty of his own death
shortens not his own life.
(6115-20)

Likewise, his question concerning strong builders: ‘What is he that

builds stonger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpen-
ter?’ (41-2). It is worth paying attention to the fact that this ‘low’
character in Hamlet seems to revel in his question-posing ability. This
may be not only because in posing questions he is doing precisely
what Hamlet and so many of the play’s other characters do (that is,
exercising a certain kind of authority), but also because the goal of his
questions is finding answers. His ‘argal’ is a clown’s version of the
Latin ergo or ‘therefore;
and his answer to his own riddle (‘say “a grave-
maker”: the houses he makes lasts till doomsday’ [58—9]) is also a
conclusion depending on logic.
The Thus...and thus portion of Hamlet’s soliloquy encapsulates
the larger drama’s tendency to make inferences based on observa-
tions, and to draw conclusions from what seems probable. Things are
famously ‘out of joint’ in Denmark. Even the soldiers who begin the
play — we will recall the opening line “Who's there” — press Horatio
to explain what they have noticed not only in the fact that they have
been put to ‘strict and most observant watch’ but also that Denmark
seems to be preparing feverishly for war. Marcellus’s question, struc-
tuted ‘Why... Why’ over ten lines (1.1.70—9) can be seen as the same
form that Hamlet answers with his Thus ... and thus section.
Marcellus’s question concerns why so much is being done, why so
much seems to be in preparation to do something else. For its part,
84 Teo Be Or Not To Be

Hamlet’s answer points to the way such preparations for the heroic
always go awty.
We could adduce many further examples of correspondence
between the sections of the soliloquy, and the larger play of which it is
a part. The preceding points, though, may serve to suggest the deep
presence of the play in the soliloquy. We have seen that Hamlet’s
biography is in the speech to an extent that rivals the speech’s presence
in his biography. And while the soliloquy is in the play the play is also
in the soliloquy: ‘To be or not to be’ succeeds, in fact, by folding
within its lines many of the major themes and structures of Hamlet.
Whether centering on oppositions, resemblances, questions, or con-
clusions, each of its sections contains within it hints of the modes
explored by the speech’s other parts. But in featuring a central mode
of thought, being, or action represented in the play, each works to
ensure that the tragedy of Hamlet is not only around the soliloquy, but
in it.
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To be or not to be

To be, or not to be, that is the question: 55

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 mote, and by a sleep to say we end 60
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wishd. To die, to sleep —
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 65
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,
TI oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 70
The pangs of despisd love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, 75
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, 80
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 pitch and moment 85
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.
6 Not One Speech but Three,
or ‘There’s the Point’

Earlier we noticed that more than one version of the “To be or not to
be’ soliloquy was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. We remarked
that the speech commonly read and acted comes from the second
quarto (known in abbreviated form as ‘Q2’), published in 1604/5, and
the First Folio, published in 1623. While the First Folio was a lavish,
costly volume, quartos were fairly inexpensive texts, the paperbacks
of their day. The name ‘quarto’ comes from the number of leaves
produced when a sheet of paper was folded to make a book’s pages —
in this case, four. As we saw, the first text of Hamlet we have — that of
Q!1 or the first quarto of 1603 — may have been an unauthorized
publication. Its version of the “Io be or not to be’ speech differs
drastically from the better-known form examined in the preceding
pages.
But even the more favorably received texts have some differences
worth noting. In fact, the most familiar version of “To be or not to be’
does not exist in any text from Shakespeare’s time. Instead, it has been
produced by conflating the Q2 and Folio (F) editions of the play —
each of which has certain words and phrases not found in the other.
This is true of our text of the speech, which comes from the Riverside
Shakespeare, 2nd edition. For instance, the Riverside declines to adopt
Folio’s disprizd Love, keeping despis’d love; likewise it does not
accept Folio’s ‘these fardels bear’ for fardels bear. It does, however,
88 Fo Se Or Not To Be

choose to print cowards of us all, where the line in Q2 reads simply

‘conscience does make cowards, and it also keeps Q2’s pitch and
moment instead of adopting Folio’s ‘pith and moment? An unin-
tentionally humorous reading in the Folio version of the soliloquy
gives ‘the poor man’s contumely’ for what Q2 has as the proud man’s
contumely. It is fair to call this humorous because it is hard to ima-
gine Hamlet, banker-like, including the ‘contumely’ of the poor in a
catalog of life’s great ills!
For the most part, the Q2 and Folio “To be or not to be’ have only
minor differences. In contrast, the soliloquy published in Ql Hamlet
is astoundingly different. It is reproduced here with spelling and
punctuation modernized to approximate the edited version of the
speech we have examined earlier:

To be or not to be, Ay, there’s the point:

To die, to sleep — is that all? Ay, all:
No, to sleep, to dream — Ay, marry, there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge
From whence no passenger ever returnd,
The undiscoverd country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who'ld bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the rich — the rich, cursed of the poor?
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wrong’d,
The taste of hunger, or a tyrant’s reign,
And thousand mote calamities besides,
To grunt and sweat under this weary life,
When that he may his full quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which puzzles the brain, and doth confound the sense,
 Not One Speech but Three, or ‘There’s the Point’ 89

Which makes us rather bear those evils we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of.
Ay, that: O, this conscience makes cowards of us all,
Lady in thy orisons, be all my sins rememb’red.

On the whole, this can seem pretty bad stuff. It seems especially
lacking when compared with the more familiar version of the speech.
There is good reason that QI has been called the ‘bad’ quarto of
Hamlet, Like much of the play we know through Q2 and the Folio,
this speech is Hamlet as though heard under water.
The best scholarship we have suggests that Q1 was constructed
from memory by the actor who played Marcellus, using an already
truncated and rearranged (for theatrical performance) version of what
would become the Folio Hamlet. This conclusion is based in part on
the fact that the lines the Marcellus-actor speaks in the longer ver-
sions of the play, as well as those he would have heard just before and
after he entered various scenes, are very close to the way they read in
Q2 and F. The longer the Marcellus-actor was away from the action,
however, the less Q1’s lines have in common with Q2 and FE leading
scholars to conclude that Q1 is a ‘memorially reconstructed’ text: a
text, that is, constructed from someone’s memory — in this case, that
of the actor who originally played Marcellus.

If Q1 is a ‘bootleg’ version of Hamlet, we could unpack the analogy as

follows. Imagine a modern-day recording engineer. Having helped
record an album, he has heard the songs so many times that he is able
to reproduce many of their melodies, chords, and lyrics from mem-
ory. On his own, and perhaps at the urging of co-workers, he recon-
structs an approximation of it, re-ordering some of the songs and
changing others’ names. This bootleg version has some of the mate-
rial from the original version he has worked on, and is delightful in
its own way. When compared with the original versions, however, it
seems inferior. The mystery about Q1 Hamlet is not so much ‘how’ or
90 toa Re Or Not To Be

even ‘wher’ it was produced, but ‘why’? Why would the Marcellus-
actor choose, or be asked, to reconstruct the Hamlet he had per-
formed in? Perhaps the 1603 outbreak of Plague in London prevented
the players from having access to their playhouse’s books. Perhaps Qi
was the product of a rogue player or group of players who felt this was
a good way to turn a profit, however meager. We may never have a
good answer to this question. For more information on this fasci-
nating topic, the reader is urged to consult the anthology on QI
mentioned in the Further Reading section at this end of this book.
But should we be satisfied merely to call this speech (and Q1
generally) ‘bad’? Probably not, for even if we accept scholarship’s
theory of how Q1 and its ‘There’s the point’ soliloquy came to be, we
can learn from the speech. To begin with, it is not every day that we
get an Elizabethan actor writing down what he remembers of per-
forming Shakespeare’s most famous play. So even though the version
of the speech he constructed is inferior to the speech we know (per-
haps because it is inferior in certain ways), it can tell us what the more
familiar “To be or not to be’ soliloquy is by showing us some of the
things it is not. Some of the ways, that is, in which Shakespeare could
have written the soliloquy but seems not to have.
Second, the ‘There’s the point’ soliloquy can highlight various
things that appear to have struck the Marcellus-actor as being
important: key words, phrases, and ideas. Imagine, for instance, that
you were asked to reconstruct Hamlet’s soliloquy, or another impor-
tant passage in Shakespeare’s works. What mixture of Shakespearean
and non-Shakespearean phrases would you produce? Would you be
able to reconstruct Macbeth’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow’ soliloquy
(Macbeth 5.5.19—28)? Many of us would handle the first line adequately,
and could even finish strongly with ‘It is a tale /Told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’? But what about the material
between its beginning and end? If we recalled the lines ‘a poor player,
/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage; would we likewise
remember ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘And then is heard no
 Not One Speech but Three, or ‘There’s the Point’ 91

more’? What about the other words and phrases? The version of
Macbeth’s speech we would produce, like the version of Hamlet’s
soliloquy reconstructed by an Elizabethan actor, would probably
diverge from Shakespeare’s better-known words. But what we did
remember could well tell others what we found important or other-
wise memorable about the speech.
So just ow the Q1 speech turns awry is significant. Therefore let us
examine two versions of the “To be or not to be’ speech side-by-side.
We will begin with the received version based on Q2 and Folio
Hamlet. It is the soliloquy reproduced and studied in the preceding
pages. In the reproduction here, the material that Q1 did of take up is
italicized. The words and phrases shared by the traditional version
and the Q1 version are bolded in both versions of the speech.
Following the traditional version of the soliloquy is the Q1 version.
So that readers can better discern its original material, words and
phrases unique to it have there been underlined.

Traditional Version; material shared with Q1 bolded

To be or not to be, shat 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 oftroubles,
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 wishd. To die, to sleep —
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’ the rub,
For in that s/eep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled offthis mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there’ the respect
92 Yo Be Or Not To Se

That makes calamity ofso long life:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong the proud man’ contumely,
The pangs ofdespis‘d love, the law’ delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would farde/s bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But shat the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No /raveller returns, puzzles the w7//,
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 ofthought,
And enterprises ofgreat pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name ofaction. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia. Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins rememb’red.

Q1 Version; shared material bolded, new

material underlined

To be or not to be, Ay, there’s the point:

To die, to sleep — is that all? Ay, all:
No, to sleep, to dream — Ay, marry, there it
goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge
From whence no passenger ever returnd,
 Not One Speech but Three, or ‘There’s the Point’ 93

/
The undiscover’d country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn‘.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who’ld bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the rich — the rich, cursed of the poor?
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wrongd,
The taste of hunger, or a tyrant’s reign,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweat under this weary life,
When that he may his full quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which puzzles the brain, and doth confound the sense,
Which makes us rather bear those evils we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Ay, that: O, this conscience makes cowards of us all,
Lady in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

We could start our comparison of the two speeches by observing that

Q!1 shortens the traditional version. Including the orisons line (with
which Hamlet addresses Ophelia), the Q1 version has 188 words, as
against the traditional version’s 276, and 23 lines vs. 35 lines. It is, in
short, roughly 2/3 as long as the traditional version (68 per cent as
many words, 65 per cent as many lines). QI greatly truncates the
speech until undiscover’d country (for reasons we will examine) but
then amplifies it. It remains suggestive of something foundational to
the speech that the cue in each version is the same: my sins remem-
bered.
Indeed, the Q1 soliloquy reproduces the beginning and end of the
traditional version almost perfectly, and takes up many of its words
and phrases intact. But only one line is wholly unchanged in the
entire QI speech: Than fly to others that we know not of. The Ql
composer almost got the preceding line right, too, save for replacing
94 Fo Be Or Not To Se

ills with evils. Of course, we can still hear ills within the latter word:
evils, and this echo may help to explain the word that was eventually
substituted. But a question about Than fly to others that we know
not of: Why should this line, of all the lines that have since become
famous from this speech, have been taken over without changes?
Perhaps because it is metrically regular, with eight simple,
monosyllabic words. On the whole, the Q1 speech tends to have
simpler vocabulary than its counterpart.
Take the infamous Ay, there’s
the point for the traditional version’s that is the question. This
foregrounds something we see throughout QI: its preference for
easier words. Another instance comes with the traditional version’s
bourn (a noun, as in ‘boundary’), which becomes borne (a verb, as in
‘carried before’) in borne before an everlasting Judge. Shakespeare’s
noun is the less usual of the two words, and, just as it prefers point to
question, Q1 remembers the more common borne over bourn. Q1
also shows a preference for the kind of monosyllables we see in Than
fly to others that we know not of. Of 19 polysyllabic words in the
traditional version of the soliloquy, Q1 retained 8, or 42 per cent (a
lower rate than the 68 per cent of its total words when compared with
the traditional version). Ql omits such words, for instance, as con-
tumely, devoutly, enterprises, insolence, natural, opposing, out-
fageous, question, resolution, traveller, and unworthy. But we
should note that while the composer of Q1 on the whole lacked
Shakespeate’s extensive vocabulary — or, at least, chose to keep the
diction of his soliloquy simpler — he does substitute passenger for
traveller and flattery for the traditional version’s shorter whips.
One other phrase that remains largely intact is the suicide cue: his
-.. quietus make, with a bare bodkin. This is perhaps owing to the
nature of the image. One of the most serious and frightening lines in
the soliloquy, its reliance on the very unusual phrase quietus make
probably contributed to its survival in QI. This may be a case of a
word and image being so unusual that the line is difficult to forget.
Likewise, Ql keeps some of the traditional soliloquy’s and pair-
 Not One Speech but Three, or ‘There’s the Point’ 95

ings, such as grunt and sweat, and refashions a new one: scorns and
flattery, But it drops many of the traditional version’s reduplications,
pairings like slings and arrows, heart-ache and ... shocks, whips
and scorns (as an exact phrase), and pitch and moment. One could
argue, of course, that these pairings are present in material that the Q1
composer chose not to reproduce (or was unable to recall), and are
thus absent from Q1 merely because that material is absent. But surely
this argument is circular (or, at least, potentially circular): it avoids the
possibility that phrases such as pitch and moment are one of the
reasons the Q1 composer either chose not to include the material or
could not remember it in the first place. These phrases, again, seem
‘redundant’ in a poetic way. It is difficult not to feel that by themselves
they come close to defining what poetry zs by forcing us to examine
the relation between similar-but-different words. Given only the
traditional soliloquy, we could be tempted to say that its poetry lies in
such phrases as slings and arrows and pitch and moment. Their
absence in Q1 highlights its lesser interest in the imagination.
Q1 is shorter and simpler in its vocabulary, and it is also less
dedicated to what we have earlier called ‘thought? Many of the tradi-
tional version’s ‘thought’ words (words concerning the intellect, the
imagination, and point of view) are missing in Q1. The latter keeps the
words conscience, dream, and know — and even adds sense and two
hopes (for wish) — but omits the words mind, question, regard,
resolution, respect, and thought. In its substitution of brain for
mind, in fact, we can see the larger tendency of QI! to simplify the
abstractions it encountered in the traditional soliloquy. A brain is a
physical part of the body; the mind is a concept.
We observed that the traditional version of the soliloquy had a
number of artful repetitions. Q1 has some repetitions as well, but they
often four Ays — its Hamlet talking to himself — versus only one in
Shakespeare’s version. A change in emphasis is this soliloquy’s key
word — Ay — versus the no of the traditional version. Perhaps this
comes in part from Q1’s abandoning (or forgetting) the traditional
96 Yo 8e Or Not To Be

version’s debate structure. QI does not have the traditional version’s

whether clause (this is one of its most extensive omissions, in fact).
Nor does it have several of its defining clauses: by a sleep to say,
Thus, thus.We could say that Q1’s Ays, as well as its final O, stand in
for these terms, just as the somewhat artless repetition of itsWhich...
which stands in for Thus ... thus. In each instance, Q1 replaces the
stronger, coordinative terms of argument (whether, thus) with
weaker, declarative alternatives: Ay, which, O.
The two speeches differ significantly in how they relate to hier-
atchy and power. The traditional version has a tacit acceptance of
social hierarchy at its close. It follows its satirical complaints (inso-
lence of office) with a deployment of heroic terms: action, take
arms, enterprises of great pitch and moment, and so forth. Ql
omits most of these terms, and on the whole it seems more deferential
to power of a religious nature. In its soliloquy, in fact, we wake up
from death to face an everlasting Judge, and are divided into the
happy and the accursd. This serves as a conventionally Christian
portrait of the afterlife. As such, it comes in stark contrast to Hamlet’s
agnosticism in the traditional “To be or not to be’ speech. There, as we
have seen, he insists that the only thing we can be sure of is our dread.
It seems no accident that QI replaces dread with a hope of some-
thing after death. The word hope, in fact, is used twice, once as a
joyful hope. Ql] also tells us that happy souls smile in the afterlife. This
is perhaps not very surprising. Q1’s scenarios of the sufferings of this
life are simpler and melodramatic: the rich scorn us, the poor curse
the rich, widows ate oppressed, orphans wronged, and hunger
obtains generally. Life is hard, but the afterlife will be a happy place
for the happy. This confident religious sentiment jars (to say the least)
with the suicide material that Q1 oddly retains from the traditional
version.
One of the most revealing changes in the entire speech comes at its
end, in a seemingly minor word. QI replaces Hamlet’s Nymph with
the term Lady. The two sentences finish the same way:
 Not One Speech but Three, or ‘There’s the Point’ 97

Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins rememb’ted.

(traditional version)

Lady in thy orisons be all my sins rememb’ted.

(Q1 version)

The change is more than cosmetic. Or, if it is cosmetic, the choice of

words tells us something more profound about the two soliloquies
than one might guess. Hamlet has a number of options for addressing
Ophelia. One of them is Q1’s Lady, which in Shakespeare’s time was a
respectful term of address for a female aristocrat. It is much less
‘marked’as a term than the traditional version’s Nymph, which comes
from the realm of pastoral poetry. It is the word that a young male
courtier (such as Hamlet) could use flirtatiously in reference to a
young, attractive female. Richard III uses this word sarcastically when
he notes that he is not made for a lover’s life. He complains that he is
unable to ‘[caper] nimbly in a lady’s chamber / To the lascivious
pleasing of a lute, or to ‘strut before a wanton ambling nymph’ (1.1.12—
1ST).
However Hamlet intends this word, when he addresses Ophelia as
Nymph he calls up the scene that Richard mocks, and reminds us
that he is a courtly aristocrat — in fact, a prince. If QI has decided that
its “To be or not to be’ speech will be delivered by a more con-
ventionally religious Hamlet, one not as concerned with thought and
philosophy as the figure we get in the Q2 and Folio texts of Hamlet, it
also works to downplay Hamlet’s positive version of hierarchy —
replacing it with a simpler, more conventionally Christian version of
the afterlife. In QI, the emphasis is not on the uncertainty of this life
(and what it makes us endure here) but rather the certainty of the
afterlife, where we get separated into the happy and the accursd.
Some will be smiling, others not.
For Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is no reason for any of us to smile.
This enormous change in the outlook of QI is matched by an equally
important change to the Hamlet who utters it. In the traditional ver-
98 Yo Be Or Not To Be

sion of this speech, Hamlet is a skeptical aristocrat who, weighed

down by his all-too-human conscience, speaks the language of a
philosopher. In Q1, Hamlet has become a Baptist who counts himself
among the happy who will smile for all eternity in the undiscover’d
country. Although he speaks his speech more plainly, it is his differ-
ent understanding of life, more than the changes in words between
the two speeches, that makes the Q1 version much less mysterious
than the “To be or not to be’ that Shakespeare wrote.
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 To be or not to be

To be, or not to be, that is the question: aye

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 mote, and by a sleep to say we end 60
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, 65
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,
Th PP oppressot’s wrong,g the Ppproud man’s contumel Ys 70
The pangs of despisd love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
_ With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear, 75
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, 80
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 oer with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment 85
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia.
 Consummation
(Some Conclusions)

This book began by imagining we could watch and listen to many

thousands of performances of the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy down
through history. As these images and sounds unfolded, we pictured
ourselves taking note of the changing interpretations of the speech.
The precedents that had once seemed to reassure performers later
became problems, as actors strived to make their versions different
from those that had come before. Four hundred years of perfor-
mance history seemed to weigh on the most recent actors. Hamlet’s
own complaint about trudging wearily through life, weighed down
by burdens, serves as a good description of the weight that many feel
in relation to this soliloquy.
This is as true for readers as for actors. It is almost impossible today
to avoid feeling the gravity of this speech, for the play’s influence over
four centuries has ensured it a primary place in our collective imagi-
nation. The “To be or not to be’ soliloquy, in fact, has become some-
thing like an unofficial metaphor for ‘culture’ in the West. Whatever
else it is about, Hamlet’s speech — residing at the heart of our most
celebrated writer’s most recognized play and character — is about
culture itself.
This is one reason the most famous speech in the English lan-
guage is also the most mysterious, and often poorly understood. Like
many of our icons, we treat it with alternating reverence and satire.
102 Yo Be Gr Not To Be

Thus it is at one and the same time solidly monumental, like an

enormous marble statue, and humorously overinflated, like a helium
balloon regularly punctured in the popular media. Taken at these
extremes, “To be or not to be’ can remain as elusive as the character
who speaks it.
As we have seen, though, there are other reasons for the speech’s
difficulty. We compared its repetitions and recursions to several
things: to an internalization of the dueling angels of the morality
play tradition; to a snake’s winding coils; to the challenge of hopping
from stone to stone in the midst of a moving stream; to watching a
tennis match that moves unpredictably from court to court while a
point is in progress. In its chilling philosophy, we saw, the speech
worked as a rhetorical version of Medusa’s petrifying gaze. So com-
plicated and intricate is the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy that each of
these analogies seems incomplete without the others. We called it a
‘messy’ speech, but its messiness is not only disorder. It is a disorder
that hypnotizes — even freezes — us with unpredictable rhythms and
patterns.
We all struggle with the speech in part because its speaker strug-
gles as he delivers it. Actors tend to dislike this speech not only
because of the weight of precedence it carries with it, but also because
its complicated rhythms and directions are notoriously difficult to
master. As we have seen, Shakespeare puts something like the whole
of Hamlet within its lines; this abundance of material means that
delivering the soliloquy is tantamount to performing a play within
the play. This complex compression is another reason the most
famous speech in literature is so poorly understood: like the play of
which it is a part, the soliloquy has an epic reach and scope.
This quality makes the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy difficult to
see clearly. We noted that the ‘suicide’ interpretation had become a
shortcut for many readers. The awful truth the soliloquy advances is
different. Hamlet’s regret over the role that thinking takes in our
life offers a more painful insight into the human condition.
 Consummation (Some Conclusions) 103

Hamlet’s inward guest works as a kind of grinning skull that mocks

human achievement and ability. Far from a hymn to self-con-
sciousness, Hamlet’s soliloquy expresses profound misgivings
about the process of thinking ‘too much’ If the ‘suicide’ inter-
pretation is an error in one direction, the ‘Hamlet as philosopher’
reading makes a mistake the other way.
A difficult question we asked at the outset of this book has gone
unaddressed until now. What does it mean that the central speech of
the central character in the central play of the language’s central
author is all but useless to its speaker and story? Unlike some of his
other soliloquies,“To be or not to be’does little if anything for Hamlet
or his play. He enters, speaks, and breaks off when Ophelia walks in
view, and what he has said concerning dread and death produces few
if any reverberations in the world ofthe play. It is, instead, a kind of set
piece or jewel, a rhythmical grumble that has survived in our culture
even as it indicts the pettiness of survival. In its attainment of status,
gaining a reputation as a speech of great pitch and moment, “To be or
not to be’ has ironically done something that Hamlet says we cannot
do.
We should end this book, then, with the speech’s own relation to
books. Surely it means something that, in the Q1 version of Hamlet,
both Ophelia and Hamlet are described as holding books in their
hands as this speech unfolds. This may be a recognition, by the actors
who remembered Shakespeare’s play, not only of the reading that
Hamlet does elsewhere, but also of the speech’s essentially literary
nature. The soliloquy’s triumph as a cultural document may depend,
as literature itself does, on the fact that it makes nothing happen. It is
necessary to neither Hamlet nor Hamlet. And it is not necessary to
them in precisely the way that literature is not necessary to life. One
secret of the “To be or not to be’ soliloquy is that it has survived as a
symbol of so much of our culture — literature, the theater, and phi-
losophy — by doing no more and no less than what these cultural
forms and activities themselves do. Play and character do not need the
104 Fo Be Gr Not Yo Be

soliloquy, but neither would they be imaginable without it. By put-

ting so much of a life and a play within the speech, Shakespeare has
ensured that — like play and character — it is both difficult and dur-
able.
 Acknowledgments and
Further Reading

Soliloquies can seem fairly isolated things, but no one who reads or
writes on Shakespeare’s works — least of all Hamlet — does so in iso-
lation. There is quite simply no end of scholarly comment on this
great work, so it is only proper here that I register my great debts to a
host of scholars and critics who have published on this soliloquy. I
should start by admitting that my favorite edition of any Shakespeare
play is Harold Jenkins’s Hamlet for the 2nd New Arden series (ori-
ginally published in 1982). Readers will sense my continual reliance
here upon his judicious scholarship and commentary. One of the
most stimulating re-interpretations of Hamlet and Hamlet in recent
years is that of my colleague Eric Mallin in Inseribing the Time:
Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (1995); readers will
notice that I have borrowed the idea of an infectious Hamlet from
Mallin’s book. I have also benefitted from Mary Z. Maher’s fine
Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies (1992), as well as from notes and
atticles by such critics as, among others, Henry Chadwick, James E.
Hirsh, E. A. J. Honigmann, Alex Newell, Vincent FE Petronella,
Irving ‘i. Richards, and Gary Taylor. Those interested in pursuing
these essays will be able to trace them through the World Shakespeare
Database, an invaluable online resource for research into
Shakespeare’s life and works. On Shakespeare’s soliloquies generally,
readers may consult Wolfgang Clemens’s Shakespeares Soliloquies
106 To Be Gr Not To Be

(1964). For the soliloquies in Hamlet, see Alex Newell, The Soliloquies in
Hamlet: The Structural Design (1991). Roland Frye’s The Renaissance
‘Hamlet’: Issues and Responses in 1600 (1984) and the journal Hamlet
Studies (1979) are extremely useful as well. Those interested in the
strange little book called Q1 are urged to consult a foundational col-
lection of essays edited by Thomas Clayton: The ‘Hamlet’ First
Published (O1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities (1992). In the pre-
paration of this book, I have been greatly aided by my student and
research assistant, Jennifer Dixon. It was Dixon who first taught me
the peculiar value of the speech in QI; in addition, the insight as to
Hamlet’s presence in the soliloquy is fully hers. Along with Dixon, my
colleagues Martin Kevorkian, Eric Mallin, and Elizabeth Scala read
this book in draft and offered characteristically generous and
insightful suggestions. I am glad to be able to express my debts to
them here.
Index

A Note to the Reader:

This index has two sections. The first section lists major subjects and themes related to the
“To be or not to be’ soliloquy itself. The second gives the names of real persons, characters
Srom “Hamlet; and other proper nouns mentioned in the text. For ease ofreference, the full
text of Hamlet's “To be or not to be’ soliloquy is printed before each chapter ofthis book on
pages x, 6,12, 42, 64, 86,100, and ispaired with the less familiar O1 version on pages 91—
3. Discussion of the meanings ofparticular words and phrases in the speech takes place
throughout the book, but is especially concentrated in chapter 3 (‘Theres the Rub’ ),pages
1341.

‘To be or not to be’: The Speech

actots and 1—5, 62, 101; see also under death and 77-8
the names ofindividual actors inthe death, ending words and 56—7
next index section dreams and 23-5
afterlife and 25-7, 94, 97
in Folio 13, 87, 88-9
balance in 15-16, 47—48, 52
body words and 57 and Hamlet’s biography 65~71
books and 103-4 heroic and epic register in 59-60, 61,
63,71
in context 65-84 hesitation, error, uncertainty words
contrast in see under “opposition(s) and 56
and’
culture and 7—9, 101-4 law, debate, office words and 57
108 index

longer words in 55-6 religion and 22-3, 95-6, 97

repetition in 23, 29, 34, 48—9, 50,
melancholy and 69-70 51-3 62, 67, 95-6, 102
as monument 8-10, 62-3, 102
as morality play 30, 31, 48, 63, 102 short words in 55
soliloquy form and 43-7, 60-3
negation in 28, 29, 51—2, 59-60, 62 sounds in 28, 53-4
stoicism and 17—20
opposition(s) and 15-19, 21-2, 36, suicide and 9, 13, 40, 102-3
75-7
overhearing and 71-5 thought words and 57
trouble words and 56—60
pairing(s) in 19, 22, 34, 48-9,
52-3, 62, 75-6, 77-8 verbal categories of 56—7 see also
paraphrased 38—9 under ‘trouble words and’,
parts of 47-52 ‘hesitation, error,
performance and see under ‘actors uncertainty words and} ‘body words
and’ and? ‘death, ending words and’,
as poem 43-63 ‘law,
and prayer 22, 23, 47, 61 debate, office words and’ ‘thought
words and’, and ‘weapon words
in Ql (the First Quarto) 14, 87, and’
88—98, 103 versions of 13-14, 87—98 see also under
in Q2 (the Second Quarto) 13, ‘in QL? ‘in Q2’and “in Folio’
87—8,89—98
questions and 15-17, 28-9, 80-1 weapon words and_ 57, 58, 95
People, Characters, Plays, and Things

Barrymore, John 7 Macbeth 1, 59,90-1

Bernhardt, Sarah 7 Maher, Mary Z. 105
Branagh, Kenneth 7 Mallin, Eric 105
Burton, Richard 62 Marcellus @vd Marcellus actor)
83, 89-90
Chadwick, Henry 105 Medusa 40, 102
Claudius 70,72—4, 77 Midsummer Nights Dream, A 1
Clayton, Thomas 108
Clemens, Wolfgang 107 Newell, Alex 105, 106

Doctor Faustus 48, 68 Olivier, Laurence 7,70

Ophelia 37-8, 52, 66-7, 71, 80, 97
Fortinbras (old) 76
Frye, Roland 108 Petronella, Vincent F 105
Plato 63
Garrick, David 7 Polonius 72-3, 78, 81
Gertrude 76,77
Ghost (old Hamlet) 77 Red Dragon (Elizabethan ship)
Gibson, Mel 69 5
Globe Playhouse 34 Richards, IrvingT. 105
Gravedigger 82 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
77
Hirsh, James EB. 105
Honigmann, E.A.J. 105 Sidney, Philip 71
Horatio 76 Sierra Leone 2,7—8

Jenkins, Harold 105 Taylor, Gary 105

Julius Caesar 1 Tempest,
The 1
Twelfth Night 26
Kingsley, Ben 62
Wittenberg 68-9
Laertes 76
Luther, Martin 68
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 NATIONAL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

PR Bruster, Doug
2807
.B77
2007 To be or not
to b
Series Editors: ‘Shakespeare Now! provides a much needed alternative to
Simon Palfrey, what we currently regard as “Shakespearean scholarship.”
University of Oxford At atime when most writing about Shakespeare seems
Ewan Fernie, hobbled by an imperative to recover historical microdetail,
Royal Holloway, University it is especially refreshing to find a forum that does not shy
of London away from big ideas, theoretical innovation, and creative
experimentation as equally legitimate scholarly responses to
the Bard.’ Jonathan Gil Harris, George Washington University

Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy is quoted more

Shakespeare *
often than any other passage in Shakespeare. itis
arguably the most famous speech in the Western world
— though few of us can remember much about it. This
book carefully unpacks the individual words, phrases and
sentences of Hamlet’s soliloquy in order to reveal how and
why it has achieved its remarkable hold on our culture.
Hamlet’s speech asks us to ask some of the most serious
questions there are regarding knowledge and existence.
In it, Shakespeare also expands the limits of the English
language. Douglas Bruster therefore reads Hamlet’s
famous speech in ‘slow motion’ to highlight its material,
philosophical and cultural meaning and its resonance for
generations of actors, playgoers and readers.

Douglas Bruster is Professor of English at The University

of Texas at Austin, USA. He is the author of Drama and the
Market in the Age of Shakespeare; Quoting Shakespeare;
Shakespeare and the Question of Culture; and, with Robert
Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre.

LITERARY STUDIES
ISBN 978-0-8264-8998-2

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