To Be or Not to Be

Lee Lady

(January, 2004)

One of the things that makes Shakespeare's characters seem so interesting is the opinions they express. With very few exceptions, these always seem to be a genuine manifestation of the individuality of the character, and not a case of Shakespeare simply using a character as a device to state opinions of his own. To me at least, speaking as someone who has spent a big part of his life in bars, listening to drunks tell me how the world could be a much better place if only they were running it, Shakespeare's characters ring true in the way they express their opinions.

When it comes to the long speeches, though, especially the "soliloquies," things are not so clear. To me, it makes the most sense to think of these as being analogous to the songs in a musical comedy. The actor playing the character does some grandstanding, making a speech with strong audience appeal, but which may or not be in character.

The most blatant case here is Porta's "Quality of Mercy" speech in The Merchant of Venice. Critics and actresses have struggled with this, but there doesn't really seem to be any way to make this speech represent the Portia who we see in the rest of the play.

And then there are cases like the "Seven Ages of Man" in As You Like It, which is clearly nothing but a piece of comic entertainment, having nothing to do with the action of the play. (True, some people try to present it as something profound rather than comic, which I find rather bizarre.)

Some people might also want to include Polonius's "To Thine Own Self Be True" speech in the same category, although the choice here is largely a matter of how the actor plays the role and gives the speech.

In the most famous Shakespearean long speech, Hamlet begins by saying,

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?

In terms of overt content, this speech says very little. The opening line is generally interpreted as meaning that Hamlet is debating whether to commit suicide or not, although so far, the lines as quoted above certainly don't confirm this. (However just after this there does exist an unmistakable reference to suicide.)

As most people read it, I think the content of the entire speech could be summed up very briefly: "Life is tough. Why do we go on with it, when it would be so easy just to kill ourselves?" Understood as such, the speech contributes nothing to the plot of the drama, since Hamlet in fact never engages in suicidal behavior. And by the same token, it tells us little about Hamlet's character. It might seem that one could leave it out of the play without doing any damage to the story.

But to simply understand this speech in terms of its paraphrasable content would be to miss its whole point. Look instead at the terms in which the message is stated.

It is common to use the term "soliloquy" for speeches like this, where the actor is alone on the stage. However, according to J.L. Styan ("Stage Space and the Shakespeare Experience," printed in Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, edited by Thompson and Thompson),

"Soliloquy" is a late 17^th or 18^th century literary concept (thus about a hundred years after Shakespeare), and `speaking to oneself' was not a device that Shakespeare or the Elizabethan stage would have recognized. However addressing the audience was a normal and constant activity. It was a convention by which an actor gave himself completely to the house, putting him in direct contact with the spectators; it was the primary device to encourage sharing. Alone on the great platform, a solitary figure made a powerful statement to the spectator, one not so much about the character's state of mind (the lines would do that), but about the actor's need to reach out to his audience with intimacy and immediacy.

The Shakespearean stage, lacking stage lights and surrounded on three sides (or even, some scholars claim, on four sides) by the audience, had no imaginary "fourth wall" maintaining an esthetic distance between the actors and the audience, as one finds in a modern theatre. Furthermore, members in the Elizabethan audience were not shy about making comments to the actors, and at times tried to climb onto the low stage themselves. For an actor on stage to maintain the pretense that he was alone would take a very great effort.

But aside from such historical considerations, if one looks at the rhythm and the style (especially the vocabulary) of the speech itself, one can see that it is not a meditation, but a speech addressed to an audience.

To start with, simply listen to the music of the speech, the rhythm. And by this I mean not only the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, but also the lengths of the syllables and their resonance. Simply look at the first line. There is a natural rhythm in which I think almost everyone reads this line on first encounter. (Contemporary actors, of course, often try to vary this in order to avoid sounding trite.)

The canonical pattern for a line in iambic pentameter is

Ta DUM/ ta DUM/ ta DUM/ ta DUM/ ta DUM /

If one reads Hamlet's speech this way, it becomes a bad schoolboy joke:

To BE / or NOT / to BE / that IS / the QUEST/(ion)

The extra little syllable at the end of the line can be semi-muttered. That is an acceptable variation in the pattern of Shakespearean verse. Furthermore, one acceptably can reverse the pattern in the fourth foot to become "THAT is," which improves things a little bit.

But that's still not the musical pattern inherent in the words. One has to notice that the stressed syllables are all long: quarter notes, whereas the unstressed syllables are, at best, eighth notes. And the first three of these syllables, BE / NOT / BE, are naturally resonant. ("Not" technically ends with a consonant, but in reading it, depending on one's accent, the final "t" might not be pronounced, being absorbed in the following "t" of "to.") And finally there is a caesura, a pause, following each "be," but especially the second one. So that the line breaks up something like this:

To BE
or NOT to be:
THAT is the
QUEST-ion.

The next two lines follow a similar pattern:

WHE-ther
'tis NO-bler
in the MIND;
to SUF-fer
the SLINGS and ARR-ows
of outRAGEous fortune

I hear the first syllable of "fortune" as accented, but not heavily, otherwise the effect is overly bombastic.  "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" is one line in the text (the semi-colon above marks the end of a line), so according to the rules "of" should be stressed, but clearly it will not be.

This is not to say that one should try to achieve a rigorous, mathematically determined toe-tapping (or rather table thumping) rhythm, If one does this, the speech soon becomes ludicrous. The point is not to turn the speech into bop, or rap, but to notice that there is a natural, although flexible, rhythm underlying it.

If one closes one's ears to the meaning of these words and simply listens to the music of them, I believe that one will hear a familiar pattern. One has strongly stressed syllables that one can really thump on resonantly. (But the syllables that are thumped on have to be ones that really deserve thumping.) This is the rhythm of a politician haranguing a crowd, or an old-fashioned preacher delivering a sermon.

Or, if the delivery is modified a bit, made less bombastic, then it can become something like a comic monologue.

Notice too that the second sentence (although it's grammatically not actually a sentence) presents a fake alternative.

Whether 'tis nobler [to suffer passively], or to take arms...

This is not a real choice that's offered. It might indeed be easier and more comfortable to accept the injustices that the world throws our way. But when it comes to the question of what is nobler, there is clearly only one choice.

This sort of fake alternative is quite typical of oratory.  ("Are we going to let the party in power continue to chip away at our precious liberties little by little, until one morning we wake up to find ourselves in chains,  or are we going to finally stand up and tell the bastards that we are sick of their manipulations?")

But then, starting at the end of the fifth line, this very odd speech abruptly changes direction and does indeed begin to speak of death.

     To die, to sleep ---
No more --- and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to.  'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.

Now we have an abrupt change of direction not only on the level of meaning, but also on the level of rhythm. These lines the oratorical rhythm is now lost. Yes, certainly, you can still choose an oratorical delivery here, as you can for most any speech in iambic pentameter, but it is no longer really natural.

And by a SLEEP to say we END
The HEARTache and the
THOUSand NATural SHOCKS
That FLESH is HEIR to.

No, this is no good. It begins to be bad oratory, like a preacher who is trying to use the power of his voice to overcome the lack of power in the text. This text does have power, of course, but it is no longer an oratorical power.

Now notice the interesting syntax at this point. Hamlet says that death is "a consummation devoutedly to be wished."  The construction is impersonal. We can choose to interpret this as meaning that Hamlet himself devoutly wishes for death. But one can also interpret it as making a general statement that, given that life is such a burden, any reasonable person would see death as a desirable alternative.

Notice that, in the whole speech, Hamlet never specifically talks about himself.

In the first five lines, Hamlet offered his audience a fake alternative. Now he says, "You know, it would be really nice to just lie down and die."  Are we to interpret this as a serious statement of a desire to commit suicide, or is this another fake alternative?

Our decision on this point will determine our interpretation of the whole speech. When Hamlet starts out by saying, "To be or not to be," is he presenting a real choice, i.e. the question of whether or not he should commit suicide? Or is he using an oratorical device, basically saying "The situation we are [I am] now faced with amounts to a choice of life or death,"  except that what he actually says is not "life and death" but rather "existence and non-existence," which may not mean quite the same thing.

Given the oratorical tone of the first five lines of the speech, and the rhetorical offering of two other fake alternatives, I think that the second choice is the one that makes more sense. As I see it, Hamlet in this speech is not debating whether to kill himself or or not, but saying to the audience, "You know, at times like this, one really has to wonder what the point of it all is? Why is it that we struggle so much to be alive, when being alive is so difficult? You know, if we really had any guts, we'd just do it: just kill ourselves. But of course we don't. We just sit here, and can't make up our minds to do anything at all."

The speech began on a tone of great certainty. "THAT is the question."  This is someone who is promising to tell us the truth, to give us a definitive answer. But as the speech progresses, along with the movement toward a subtler and quieter rhythm there is a gradual loss of assurance.

     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.

If we thought before that the choice offered between life and death was a false choice, this part of the speech must indeed give us pause. Hamlet seems to be now saying that the only reason that life seems the better alternative is because death is so frightening in its uncertainty.

But although it take an effort to continue to deliver these six lines as oratory, they in fact lend themselves quite well to comic delivery.

It is worth noting the words in which Hamlet expresses himself in this speech.

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; a sea of troubles.

And now we get to:

the whips and scorns of time,

Because Shakespeare's language is so archaic, it is difficult to be sensitive to all the nuances. But certainly we can notice that all this is highly metaphorical, and also highly exaggerated. It is not merely that life presents us with difficulties, but it attacks us with slings and arrows in a way that is outrageous. Life (or time, as Shakespeare says, using one of his favorite words) assails us with whips and scorns.

This sort of rhetorical exaggeration is very characteristic of oratory, but it is also characteristic of comedy.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes?
Who would fardels bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary life?

He does go on and on! And that's not the end of it. One is tempted to say to Hamlet, "Hey, get a grip man. Sure, things are tough right now, but you don't need to go into complete hysterics."

Tempo is crucial here. A long list like this must be spoken quickly if it is not to be very tedious. Each item simply makes the same point as before with a slightly different example. And yet the speech must not be spoken so fast that words get swallowed up, because each significant word (each noun and verb) needs to have its moment, very brief, in the spotlight, because each new word takes the speech in a new and slightly unexpected direction. This unpredictability on the sentence level is characteristic of much of Shakespeare's writing and is also characteristic of much contemporary screenwriting as well as other good literature.

In fact, I think that the whole charm of the "To be or Not to be" speech lies in the way the different ideas and metaphors tumble out one after the other. It needs to be delivered with a wink to the audience, as it were, because Hamlet is simply telling them things that they already know but saying them in a clever way. If it is spoken slowly or in a meditative tone, then the audience will notice that there's almost no actual substance to the speech.

The whole speech is a good example of the way that Shakespeare can be a very impressionistic writer. Instead of actually telling us what he's getting at, he floods us with metaphors and generalities which we have to decipher.

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns,   puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied over 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.

In the first two lines here, Hamlet can still be heard preaching at us. But then it starts to sound more like he's musing, especially when he gets to the phrase "puzzles the will" where the oratorical delivery is no longer feasible at all. These two decidedly non-resonant words, "puzzles" and "will," almost demand to be muttered, in a way that will defeat the skills of any orator, and in fact are a major challenge to any actor. And the metaphors become less blunt and vigorous, the syntax becomes more complicated, and in general it becomes more difficult to follow the thread of the discourse.

The line

Thus conscience doth makes cowards of us all

But the lines that follow seem to explain what he was getting at (and perhaps simply restate it in language that would be more accessible to his audience). Namely, Hamlet seems to be saying that if one wants to act, it's best not to think too much about what one is about to do. Otherwise one starts to have too many doubts.

If we interpret the last five lines of the speech in this way, it certainly does seem to confirm the popular contemporary interpretation of the play as a whole.

This is certainly a speech that ends with a whimper rather than a bang. The general tone here at the end is one of futility (just as, in its way, Hamlet is a play of futility). One can say that here, at the end of the speech, Hamlet is presenting us with an undesirable alternative, the thing which we must avoid. But a good orator would never end this way. He would finish by reminding us of the positive alternative, the one he wants us to choose.

In any case, what this carefully contrived speech, with its strange choices of words, is not is a stream of consciousness. The rhythmic pattern of this alone makes it clear that we are not overhearing Hamlet's thoughts. If you pay attention to the language rather than he content here, you do not hear a man considering suicide. Hamlet is speaking to his audience, addressing them as "we."

For this reason, because of what I see as Hamlet's comic and ironic attitude toward what he is saying in this speech, it is absolutely essential that Hamlet's words, even if delivered as a voice-over in a film, be spoken to the audience.

I see "To be or not to be" as the sort of comedy which very calmly and at great length leads us through a thoroughly logical consideration of something which is obviously insane. (Not that people in Elizabethan times didn't commit suicide. But, despite the fact that Hamlet does refer in passing to suicide a couple of times previously in the play, there is nothing at all either in Hamlet's situation or his personality which indicates that that Hamlet would seriously consider suicide.)

With language like this, there are only two choices for the actor: either be bombastic (à la Olivier and almost all modern actors) or be sardonic. When performed by almost all contemporary actors, this most famous of Shakespearean soliloquies becomes a piece of bad oratory; a bad writer trying to impress the audience by using unusual and difficult words where much simpler ones would actually be clearer and more effective. We listen to it, because we've all been told that it's a great speech, but as usually delivered it is boring and, in truth, at points it's a little difficult even to make sense of it. (The odd thing about this speech is the fact that, despite the general agreement that it is some of Shakespeare's finest writing, critics have never been able to come to a general agreement about what it says. It is not even universally accepted that the opening phrase "To be or not to be" refers to suicide.)