Hamlet Thinks Aloud

Around the year 1600, on the stage of the Globe Theatre in London, a young prince walks out alone. His father has died; his mother has remarried the dead man's brother. A ghost has told him the new king is a murderer, and asked for revenge. Hamlet has been instructed by every force in the play to act — and instead, for thirty-three lines, he thinks. He thinks aloud. The form is called soliloquy — a character speaking, alone on stage, to nobody but themselves and the audience. The result is probably the most quoted passage in the English language. Every line has been borrowed, parodied, set to music, painted, filmed. What follows is the whole speech in its original verse.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:<br>Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer<br>The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,<br>Or to take arms against a sea of troubles<br>And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,<br>No more; and by a sleep to say we end<br>The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks<br>That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation<br>Devoutly to be wish'd.

To die, to sleep;<br>To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:<br>For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,<br>When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,<br>Must give us pause. There's the respect<br>That makes calamity of so long life.<br>For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,<br>Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,<br>The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,<br>The insolence of office, and the spurns<br>That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,<br>When he himself might his quietus make<br>With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,<br>To grunt and sweat under a weary life,<br>But that the dread of something after death,<br>The undiscover'd country from whose bourn<br>No traveller returns, puzzles the will,<br>And makes us rather bear those ills we have<br>Than fly to others that we know not of?<br>Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,<br>And thus the native hue of resolution<br>Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,<br>And enterprise of great pitch and moment<br>With this regard their currents turn awry,<br>And lose the name of action.

Notice that the famous opening is not an answer. "To be, or not to be" is the question; the rest is Hamlet thinking about why he cannot yet say. Death would be sleep — desirable — except sleep might contain dreams, and no one has returned to report on them. That uncertainty, he concludes, is why we bear the life we have rather than risk what we do not know. The speech ends on a verb about losing: "lose the name of action." Thought, he says, is what action dies of.