To be or not to be (idea)

The first line of Hamlet’s famous monologue about death and its consequences. It is followed by these four lines:

“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. ……………. “

The lines describe the classical choice we have to make when we get into trouble: do we accept our fate because we see the suffering as a just punishment for our sins (mere fatality has no deep roots in western civlization), or, do we put up a fight and try to eliminate the problems and perhaps even those who threaten us. It makes you think of the biblical story about Job’s submission to God’s will. Perhaps it makes you think of how some historians have blamed the Jews for this same passive attitude of submission to their fate which in their view made the holocaust possible, or at least more easily feasible. In their opinion the Jews should have taken “arms against a sea of troubles”.

Certainly in Shakepeare’s day more than in ours this was a real dilemma. The medieval attitude of humble acceptance of suffering seen as God’s will was still considered to be a morally elevated (noble) way of dealing with problems in one’s life.

The fact that this dilemma gets so much emphasis at this point in the play is a bit unexpected. Hamlet has already promised his father “to take arms”, that is, to revenge his father’s murder, hasn’t he? Is he having second thoughts on philosophical or moral grounds, then? The answer is clearly negative, his dawdling mainly results from his hesitation about who or what the ghost really is and whether it tells the truth about his uncle.

The four lines state a moral, a philosophical problem. The funny thing, however, is that Hamlet, distracted by intense emotions of sadness (his father’s death), fear (the confrontation with his father’s ghost) and hatred (his mother’s behaviour and his uncle’s crime), should bring up this philosophical discussion at all. Also, the wording is out of character: commentators have pointed out the stiffness of the language in these lines and the (very much unlike Shakespeare), mixed metaphor (arms against a sea of …. ). The lines just don’t seem to fit in On top of this there is the problem of logical continuity and coherence in the first six lines. I have not been able to find a clear and straightforward explanation, experts give a few more or less acceptable interpretations.

All in all, a confusing business. Maybe, just maybe, a look at a contemporary version of the play, the so-called “First Quarto” of Hamlet can be of some help. Even though this is recognizably the same play, it is radically different. It’s much shorter and some of the names are different. So why look at it? Well, the part with the monologue in it is much like our accepted version. Here are some of the lines from this part of the play in the First Quarto:K

King: See where he comes poring upon a book.
Enter Hamlet

Corambis: And here, Ofelia, read you on this book And walk aloof; the king shall be unseen.
Exeunt the King and Corambis

Hamlet: To be, or not to be; ay there’s the point. To die, to sleep: is that all? Ay all.

Yes, the four lines we have just discussed are missing! And yes, Hamlet appears with a book on the stage here. In the commonly used version his mother mentions his being occupied with a book in the second act.

Well, he is a student, isn’t he. Students use books. But surely this isn’t a time for him to be doing his homework? An explanation could be that he is trying to find advice on how to proceed in the tricky situation he finds himself in in a theological or philosophical work. After all, it is not an unnatural act for a student to try and find answers to problems in books.

Once you accept the possibility that Hamlet is reading a book , a book in which he hopes to find good advice, when he appears on the stage just before his conversation with Ophelia, a new explanation of the first few lines of the monologue offers itself. The problems of coherence and style would vanish if the four lines did not express Hamlet’s thoughts, but were read aloud by him from the book (a philosophical work)he is holding.

Suddenly the passage becomes clear: in his search for an answer to his problems in philosophical literature Hamlet has come across the dilemma of the basic attitudes of acceptance versus resistance in life. Hamlet, however, rejects this dilemma outright. To be or not to be, to live or to die, that is what he sees as the real choice. He rejects the moral/philosophical authority of his book which gives him the choice of passive acceptance or active resistance. That just will not do in Hamlet’s view. The real choice for him, at that point in the play, is the one between life and death, not between two different attitudes in life.

Looking at the text in this way, the first line does not explicitly mention suicide but the idea of suicide is implicitly there, of course. The remaining part of the monologue deals with the consequences of the choice for death.