Andrew Klavan and Andrew Clavin examine Hamlet’s "To be or not to be" soliloquy as a mirror of the Reformation’s existential chaos, where purgatory and divine truth crumble. Hamlet’s hesitation—fearing an unknown afterlife or eternal damnation—reveals Shakespeare’s skepticism toward both Protestant and Catholic dogma. His paralysis over revenge and meaning reflects modern doubt, not just personal torment but a crisis of morality tied to shifting social norms like gender. The speech’s tragic resonance suggests human lives, like art, may have purposeful authorship, urging us to embrace struggle over surrender. [Automatically generated summary]
Not only is it the question, it may also be the most famous line in all of English literature.
It's the start of one of the most famous speeches at the heart of English literature's most famous play, William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
What is it about that line, that speech, that play, that puts them at the center of Western culture?
That is the question.
Well, that's also a question.
And here's another question.
Do we still care?
Does this work still have anything to tell us about our lives?
All right, that's two more questions.
There are a lot of questions.
We're going to stop counting.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is Clavin's Culture.
If I had to choose the first truly modern man to appear in Western literature, it'd probably be Hamlet.
The minute he starts talking, we recognize he's one of us.
The mighty heroes of Homer, the characters of ancient Greek and Roman poetry and plays, these are all men and women at home in a world of accepted realities and familiar gods.
The characters in the medieval arts are fully connected to the ideas of their times.
They're either pious believers in Catholic Christianity, or they're fools and villains created to mock the corruption of the church, but without undermining the church's central ideas.
But Hamlet is more like us.
He doesn't know quite what to believe, what's real about the world, what's real about himself.
He's divided from himself, and so he has to discuss himself with himself.
There are more soliloquies in Hamlet and more deep and important soliloquies than in any play written before.
By my reading, which is of course the correct reading or I wouldn't bring it up, Hamlet is Shakespeare's play about the Reformation, about the shattering of the Catholic Church's monopoly on the spiritual life of the West.
Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, returns home after studying in Wittenberg, where the Reformation began.
The action of the play probably takes place long before that, but Shakespeare never cared about anachronisms, about things mentioned out of their proper times.
In fact, the play is full of references to the Reformation's collapse of spiritual certainties.
For instance, the play begins with the appearance of a ghost, Hamlet's dead father, and he's clearly in purgatory.
I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away.
But see, these newfangled Protestants didn't believe in ghosts in purgatory, so Hamlet can't tell whether this is a ghost or a demon in disguise.
The ghost tells Hamlet he was murdered by his brother Claudius, who has taken both his throne and his wife, who happens to be Hamlet's mother.
He wants Hamlet to take revenge and kill Claudius.
But how can Hamlet go off and kill someone if he isn't sure what this ghost really is?
In fact, Hamlet is not sure about anything.
He looks around him and sees that actors can play a part, though they have no personal stake in the action of the play.
Soldiers can fight and die, though they have no personal stake in the outcome of the battle.
But Hamlet, who's being called on the most personal mission of revenge, can't take action at all because he can't decide the truth of the matter or the truth of anything.
Hamlet's Dilemma00:09:14
The very nature of the earth seems to change with his melancholy mood.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises.
And indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.
Without some certainty about God, about the spiritual world and its invisible realities like morality and the soul, how can you know what's right or wrong, what's true or false?
Your soul might be nothing more than a series of physical impulses that just feels like a soul.
Reality as you see it might be an illusion that might change with your mood.
Maybe even your gender is just a social construct.
How can you know if there's even a reason to go on living despite the pain and tragedy of life?
Aha, that's the question.
Whether or not to go on living.
Let's take a look at how Hamlet tries to think this question through.
To be or not to be?
That is the question.
Whether it is 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.
Okay, so what are our choices here?
On the one hand, we can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
That's pretty clear.
The sling is a slingshot that hits you in the head with a rock and an arrow is an arrow that sticks into you.
Those represent all the bad things that happen to you in life.
So you can suffer the slings and arrows and that's one choice.
Or you can take arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing end them.
What does that mean?
Well, Hamlet was a Dane, so it's possible he was thinking of the famous Danish king, Cnut, who tried to demonstrate that even a king can't command the sea to turn its tides.
But whether he was or not, the point is this.
If you draw your sword and charge into the sea, you're going to drown.
So Hamlet is referring to suicide.
He's saying you can suffer the slings and arrows of life or you can choose to kill yourself.
And then he goes on to say, wow, wouldn't suicide be just great?
To die?
To sleep?
No more.
Am I asleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is dead?
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished to die.
Again, that's pretty clear.
To die is like going to sleep.
And to sleep forever would be to end the shocks and the heartache that flesh is heir to.
That is, when you become a creature of flesh, you inherit the physical suffering and spiritual heartache that is the curse of original sin passed down from parent to child through all the generations after Adam and Eve.
Hamlet thinks it would be peaceful, restful to be done with all that.
To die, to sleep, but wait.
To sleep, a chance to dream.
Aye, is 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.
So this is the heart of it.
If death is sleep, will there be dreams?
In other words, will we have an afterlife when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, which is to say when we have disentangled ourselves from this fleshy, suffering life that has coiled itself around us?
There's the respect, Hamlet says, that makes calamity of so long life.
The fear of the afterlife, in other words, is what keeps us from killing ourselves and ending this so long life by saying, so long, life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time?
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumbly, the pangs of despised love, The law's delays, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin.
So that's basically a list of all the crap we have to put up with.
Getting old, being oppressed by tyrants, being treated with contempt, contumely, by people higher up the social ladder than we are.
Getting rejected by someone we love, getting screwed by lawyers, getting screwed by politicians, or just being overlooked when you're so much cooler than the idiots who become rich and famous.
Man, life just sucks, doesn't it?
I would make my quietis with a bare bodkin if I knew what a coietus or a bodkin was.
Actually, a quietis, that's a legal term, meaning to be quick, to have your account settled.
And a bodkin is a kind of dagger.
So Hamlet is saying, why put up with all this crap when I could just settle my account by stabbing myself to death?
Who would fardles bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life?
But that the dread of something after death.
The undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of.
Right?
Who would bear all these fartles?
And what the hell is a fartle anyway?
And no, it's not a painful case of flatulence.
A fartle is a burden.
Who would bear the burdens of life if it weren't for a fear of the afterlife?
Where the church teaches that you get sent to hell for stuff like stabbing yourself with a bare bodkin to get some quietis from your fartles.
And you'll notice something really strange here.
Hamlet says that death is that undiscovered country from whose born, from whose border, no traveler returns.
That's a very weird thing to say because his father's ghost did return from death and told him all about his afterlife in purgatory.
But because of this damn Reformation thing, Hamlet can no longer fully trust even the evidence of his own eyes and ears.
And what he doesn't know about the afterlife puzzles the will.
It freezes his ability to make up his mind whether to suffer the crap of life or go into an afterlife where you might find yourself on fire for like eternity.
Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all.
And thus, the native hue of resolution is sickly low with the pale cast of thought.
And enterprises of great pitch and moment will disregard their currents, turn awry and lose the name of action.
So, you can't make up your mind, and the natural red-blooded color of your resolution devolves into sickly, pale thought and contemplation.
And Hamlet, who can't make up his mind whether to kill his father's killer, now can't even decide whether to kill himself.
So after this whole long speech, he's right back where he started, asking himself whether to be or not to be.
The most famous speech in English literature is just a big circle that goes absolutely nowhere.
And it actually has to be that way, because in fact, to be or not to be is not the question, it's a question that's part of a bigger question.
Do we believe in a spiritual reality?
Do we believe in a God who rules over an invisible level of truth that we only half perceive as if in a foggy mirror, through a glass darkly, you might say.
That invisible spirit world is what confirms that there is a moral order.
There's good that's good and bad that's bad, even if everyone around us says it isn't so.
That spiritual reality confirms that we can experience some higher truth that does not change with our moods or our situation or our times.
It confirms that you are a self, a soul, that can't be changed by simply believing that you're a different sex or Napoleon Bonaparte or a center fielder for the New York Yankees like myself.
Because if life does have this spiritual level, then living into that spirituality, moving closer toward that moral order, becoming not whatever we want to be, but who we were made to be, then that becomes the purpose of life and the reason for living, even when you've got a painful case of fartles and would like to bear your bodkin.
Life's Tragic Purpose00:00:36
The play Hamlet is a tragedy.
It ends in death.
And life in this world is a tragedy that also ends in death.
But Hamlet is a tragedy with an author.
It's a tragedy with deep, deep meaning, and it's well worth the difficult experience of trying to understand it better.
And that suggests the possibility that your life is a story with an author too.
Your life is a story with a deep meaning too.
And that that story is well worth living in order to find out more about what that meaning is.