The most famous thirty-five lines in the English language almost came down to us as gibberish. In 1603 an unauthorized, badly reconstructed edition of Hamlet was printed, probably pieced together from memory by someone who had been in the cast or the audience. In it, the greatest speech in English drama opens: "To be, or not to be, aye, there's the point." It stumbles on from there like a half-remembered song.
The good version, the one everyone knows, was printed soon after. But that near-miss is a useful reminder that these words were not handed down from on high. They were written for working actors, pirated, garbled, reprinted, and argued over, and they survived more by luck and reprinting than by reverence.
What you're reading
"To be, or not to be, that is the question." It is a soliloquy, a speech Prince Hamlet delivers believing he is alone, roughly in the middle of the play. He is not plotting revenge here and not talking to anyone. He is weighing, out loud, whether it is better to go on living or to end his own life. He compares death to sleep, which sounds like relief, until he catches the trap in his own metaphor: if death is a sleep, then it might come with dreams, and nobody knows what those dreams, in "the undiscovered country" beyond death, might be. That fear, he concludes, is exactly what keeps us all enduring misery rather than escaping it.
What makes it special
It is a mind thinking in real time. The speech is not a conclusion; it is the process. Hamlet reasons, doubts, corrects himself, and talks himself out of his own argument, all in front of us. Shakespeare lets us watch a person think, which is far harder to write, and far rarer, than letting a person simply declare.
It is built on one terrifying metaphor. Death as sleep. It is a comforting image, and Hamlet reaches for the comfort, then recoils from it: "to sleep, perchance to dream." The whole speech turns on the dread that whatever comes after might be worse than what we are escaping. The not-knowing is the horror.
Almost every phrase became the English language. "To be, or not to be." "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." "To shuffle off this mortal coil." "The undiscovered country." "Conscience does make cowards of us all." You have used these without knowing you were quoting a four-hundred-year-old prince.
The story behind it
We do not have Shakespeare's own manuscript of Hamlet, or of anything else. The play survives in three early printed versions that disagree with each other: the garbled 1603 quarto, a much better 1604 quarto, and the 1623 First Folio, published seven years after his death by two of his fellow actors. The texts differ in wording, in lines, even in where this speech sits in the play. The "definitive" Hamlet you read today is a careful modern stitch-up of these sources. There is no single original to go back to, which is part of why scholars have argued over individual words for centuries.
One detail most people miss
Hamlet thinks he is alone. He is not. In the scene as written, the king, Claudius, and his adviser Polonius are hiding nearby, having planted Ophelia as bait to eavesdrop on the prince and judge whether love or madness is behind his strange behavior. So the most private speech in literature, a man quietly debating his own death, is being spied on the entire time. Some productions play Hamlet as oblivious; others have him realize he is watched and perform his despair for the hidden audience. Either way, the privacy we feel listening in is an illusion. We are just one more set of eavesdroppers.
How to read it
Hamlet is in the public domain and free everywhere. The Folger Shakespeare Library offers the full, carefully edited text online at no cost, with notes; Project Gutenberg and Open Source Shakespeare have it too. Read the soliloquy slowly, then read it out loud, because it was written for the mouth and the ear, not the eye. Better still, watch a great actor perform it, and notice how much of the meaning lives in the pauses between the famous words.
