The Readiness is All

This essay is the fourth part of my look at Hamlet and the "To be or Not to be" speech.  Why not start with the first one: To Be OR Not To Be: How Shakespeare Charted the Path to the Modern, then chase after the  next two: Ay, there's the point: The Bad Quarto of Hamlet and The Last Medieval Man: Richard the Third.

Hamlet (and Shakespeare) realized he had a choice: to be or not to be.  At its simplest, the question was to kill his uncle, the king, to avenge his father death or not.  Coming from the Medieval Era, this idea of choice was new to Hamlet (and those of the Elizabethan world).  It paralyzed him. As soon as he realized he had a choice, he knew he would be responsible for the consequences. 

Hamlet wanders through the play not making a decision.  The play happens to him as much as he causes the play to happen.  He cannot decide the best course of action. 

By the end of the Good Quarto’s “To be or not to be” speech, Hamlet comes to the conclusion:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hiew of resolution

Is sickled ore with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard theyr currents turne awry,

And lose the name of action.

I love the back part of this speech.  Just when he seems to make a choice his conscience (thinking) challenges his resolve. He is made sick with thought. And so, he does not choose.[i] 

The players play the play within the play.  It is The Murder of Gonzago, which just happens to portray the exact method by which Claudius killed his brother.  Claudius goes berserk.  This confirms his guilt.  When Hamlet comes across Claudius praying in his closet, there is no reason to wait.  Except, he's praying.  Damn.  Hamlet decides to wait just in case killing him while he's praying would send him to heaven instead of hell. Of course, the audience knows that Claudius is unable to ask for forgiveness. Double Damn.

So, Hamlet kills Polonius instead. He thought that Uncle Claudius was hiding behind the arras, or so he said.  Rather than execution, he gets sent to England. On the way, Hamlet witnesses the army of Fortinbras marching into battle with Poland for a piece of disputed land.  Fortinbras, unlike Hamlet, is a good Medieval prince.  He’s very much into battle and revenge.  He’s been busy settling every slight against Norway.  When his uncle, the king, lets him he will revenge his father, Fortinbras’ death at the hands of Hamlet, Hamlet’s father.  Fortinbras is in many ways Hamlet’s twin or doppelganger or opposite. 

Seeing the two armies massing in battle, Hamlet speaks the soliloquy:

How all occasions inform against me,

And spur my dull revenge. …[ii]

During this speech, Hamlet beats himself up for not acting.  His brain has been getting in his way.  He compares himself with the armies and Fortinbras below him who are going to war and their death over “an eggshell”. He decides “O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.” 

Starting with Hamlet, we became confronted with the consequences of our choices.  Hamlet really got this. He is paralyzed with the consequences of his choice. This is the source of modern angst, depression and schizophrenia.

Much of our Modern life is about either predicting the outcome of our choices or shielding us from making them.  All of the major fields of study originate with the attempt to predict the future. (even History, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” George Santayana)

Before the final duel Hamlet throws up his hands not knowing what to do.

Not a whit, we defy augury, there is special providence, in

the fall of a Sparrow, if it be, tis not to come, if it be not to come,

it will be now, if it be not now, yet it well come, the readines is all,

since no man of ought he leaves, knows what ist to leave betimes, let be. [V.2.219-224]

He gives up and says: OK, let God, Fate or chance sort it out.  To quote another of Shakespeare’s characters:

O time, thou must untangle this, not I,

It is too hard a knot for me t’untie. [iii]

Hamlet does end up killing Claudius and revenging his father’s murder.  Along the way he contributes to the deaths of Laertes (his girl friend’s brother), Gertrude (his mother) and himself.  Oh, and let’s not forget Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (along with some pirates). Also, he left the kingdom in the hands of Fortinbras of Norway.  So much to leaving it up to fate.

As we enter a new era, I can't recommend decisive action over taking a wait and see approach.  Our question seems to be the same as Hamlet's: Is life fated or is our existence random?  Shakespeare in the back end of this play asked the question that continues to be the twenty-first century’s biggest question.

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[i] In the original text the spelling of “sickled” is usually translated into “sicklied” taking the root “sick” could also be read with the root “sickle”, a farm implement for harvesting wheat or grain, also used by Death.   Thereby, one’s resolve is cut down as with a sickle by thought.

[ii] The complete text of the speech from the Second Quarto in the original spelling and punctuation: 

How all occasions doe informe against me,

And spur my dull revenge. What is a man

If his chiefe good and market of his time

Be but to sleepe and feede, a beast, no more:

Sure he that made us with such large discourse

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capabilitie and god-like reason

To fust in us unusd, now whether it be

Bestiall oblivion, or some crauen scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th'event,

A thought which quarterd hath but one part wisedom,

And ever three parts coward, I doe not know

Why yet I live to say this thing's to doe,

Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and meanes

To doo't; examples grosse as earth exhort me,

Witnes this Army of such masse and charge,

Led by a delicate and tender Prince,

Whose spirit with divine ambition puft,

Makes mouthes at the invisible event,

Exposing what is mortall, and unsure,

To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,

Even for an Egge-shell. Rightly to be great,

Is not to stirre without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrell in a straw

When honour's at the stake, how stand I then

That have a father kild, a mother staind,

Excytements of my reason, and my blood,

And let all sleepe, while to my shame I see

The iminent death of twenty thousand men,

That for a fantasie and tricke of fame

Goe to their graves like beds, fight for a plot

Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,

Which is not tombe enough and continent

To hide thevslaine, ô from this time forth,

My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.

[Internet Shakepeare Edition: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Ham/Q2/scene/4.4]

Interestingly, this speech is not in the First Folio.  I have no idea why it was omitted. It could have been that Richard Burbage, the lead actor who originated the role and was principal Sharer in the company, stopped playing the role. The speech was then omitted to shorten the script. Or if Burbage was still playing the role late in his life, he needed a break.  From 1599 on, all of the big roles like Lear, Macbeth or Othello take off a sizable chunk of the fourth act.  Most people feel as if Burbage, who was growing older and rounder, did the Elizabethan equivalent of putting it in his contract: "I will have the fourth act of every tragedy off."  In London during the first part of the last century, many lead actors playing Shakespeare title roles were known to step out to the pub during the fourth act with the actor who got killed in the third act.  The lead actor would return refreshed for the final fifth act sprint to the finish. Or properly soused.

[iii] Viola, the Ring speech from TWELTH NIGHT, II.1.40-41.

Richard III: The Last Medieval Man

This essay is part of my look at Hamlet and the "To be or Not to be" speech.  Why not start with the first one: To Be OR Not To Be: How Shakespeare Charted the Path to the Modern.

Before HAMLET, Shakespeare’s first big hit was Richard the Third: Richard, Earl of Gloucester, the Hunchback, the Crook-backed toad, Tricky Dick. Richard marched through the Henry VI plays killing everyone in his way to get the crown for his father, York, and then his older brother, Edward the fat and horny. At the end of Henry VI part III, Richard assassinated King Henry, the Sixth, the pious, the boy who should have been a Saint rather than a King. King Henry tells Richard what a horrible devil he is, how he infects the world and how the world would have been better if he had never been born. Richard gets fed up with listening to this and murders him in the Tower saying: “Die, prophet, in thy speech. For this, amongst the rest, was I ordain’d.”

In the opening soliloquy of the play, The Life and Death of King Richard the Third, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York“, Richard has a dilemma. Edward is now King Edward IV. Peace has returned. What’s a villain like Richard to do during this summer of peace? Dance with the ladies? Right, the hunchback will become a courtier. Well, if he is to be true to his nature and honor God, being a good Medieval Man, he must continue to become the best villain ever.

In the Medieval era, there was a belief that a man had his place in the wheel. He had his place, function and duties. They were pre-ordained by God. A man stayed in his track. If he thought he had a choice or stepped out of his path, he would be damned. He might have a little glory and power for a while, but fate would finally catch up with him. He would be sentenced to eternal damnation. Richard realizes that he has no other option than to be what God made him to be. “For this, amongst the rest, was I ordain’d.”

Hmm, let’s see what would be the height of Villainy? To become King. How audacious would that be for the younger brother, the hunchback toad to become a king? He kills a brother, marries the wife of the previous prince whom he killed, he kills his nephews. He is a great villain, a pious villain.

A great example of this is Act III, Scene 7. Edward has died. Richard and Buckingham put out a rumor that Edward's sons were bastards and illegitimate. The Lord Mayor and the Citizens come to plead for Richard to assume the throne. They demand to see Richard. The mob is told that Richard is at prayer. After many summons while Buckingham riles up the crowd, Richard appears with prayer book in his hand and a Bishop on either side. In some ways this is a farce and a sacrilege that the audience is in on. In another way it is absolutely correct. Richard is doing what God ordained him to do: be a Super Villain. After much begging, Richard finally capitulates. He becomes King Richard the Third of that name. This is a triumph. He is gaming the system while he is abiding by the system. It’s quite brilliant.

Attaining the crown is one thing. Keeping it is the next challenge. He continues to kill everyone in his way, including his friends. Buckingham who helped him to the throne is executed. A villain has to keep up his skills. In time (three plus hours in the theater), an army amasses against Richard at Bosworth Field.

Prior to the penultimate battle, Richard has a dream where all of the people he killed or had killed return to curse him: “despair and die”, you shithead. In that moment, he asks if he is a murderer? He realizes that he might have had a choice. Maybe he didn’t have to be a murderer. But, he’s a Medieval Man. He can’t change his stripes. 

The next day, “A Horse, A Horse, my kingdom for a Horse”, is the end of Richard.

Hamlet, of the "to be or not to be" fame realized that to his downfall he had a choice, but that's another play.

Ay, there's the point: The Bad Quarto of Hamlet

This essay is the second part of my look at Hamlet and the "To be or Not to be" speech.  Why not start with the first one: To Be OR Not To Be: How Shakespeare Charted the Path to the Modern? Or you can read this one by itself.

To be, or not to be,

Ay there's the point,

What were you expecting? “that’s the question?”  It comes later.  This is the first line of an early version of Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy. It’s from a rendering of Hamlet scholars call the “bad quarto”. Did you know there was an early version of Hamlet, a “bad quarto”?

“Ay, there’s the point!” It’s a eureka moment.  Hamlet has made an amazing discovery.

This version is called the “bad quarto” because it lacks the amazing language and complexity of the later version, called the “good quarto” which is universally accepted as being the BEST PLAY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. The “bad quarto” not so much. It’s a simple revenge tragedy. Hamlet would have been forgotten if all we had was the “bad quarto”.

Shakespeare worked on Hamlet for years, probably between 1591 and 1601. It was an old story. He ripped it off from a play that is lost to us, scholars call it the Ur- Hamlet. It was performed by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s. Shakespeare borrowed constantly from other writers.  He wouldn’t win any Original Screenplay Awards today, he was more of an Adapted Screenplay guy.[i] 

Shakespeare’s company had played either the bad quarto or some version of Hamlet while on tour prior to premiering the new version in the newly built Globe Theater in 1601.

Just as Shakespeare was completing his new version of Hamlet, the one we know, his early version of the play was stolen and published. Shakespeare was midway through revising the script when it was stolen.  He had reworked sections of the first two acts, but not the rest of the play. People have blamed the actor who played Marcellus for stealing the manuscript. His lines and scenes are most like the good version. Another theory of the theft of Hamlet is that scribblers (who could write really quickly) or person with a hyperthymestic memory (who could memorize the play in one hearing) were employed to go to the playhouse to steal the play.  They theorize the bad quarto is an Elizabethan version of a bootleg tape.  However, we got it the stolen version has become known as the “bad quarto”. Having no copyright laws sucked for the playwright and the players.[ii]

By the way, a quarto is a printing of a single play script, a small book, cut to the size of a quarter page, thus a quarto. The First Folio was published after Shakespeare’s death. It contained 36 of his plays, more of a Complete Works of Shakespeare. A quarto is to a single play script as the Folio is to a Complete Works. Got it?

To be, or not to be, Ay there's the point,

To Die, to sleep, is that all? Ay all:

This “to be or not to be” speech is spoken in the second act. In the first act, Hamlet encounters the Ghost of his father who tells him that he was murdered by his uncle. Hamlet, being a good son, promises to revenge his father. To give him time to plot his revenge, Hamlet will “put on his antic disposition” which means act crazy. The next time we see him he speaks this speech. As he enters, the stage directions let us know that he sees Uncle Claudius and Corambis (an early name for Polonius, the King’s counselor and his girlfriend’s father) hiding behind the arras (a curtain). He also sees Ophelia, his girlfriend, sitting to the side, set as a trap so his uncle can overhear their conversation. This “to be or not to be” is a crazy speech clearly about suicide with a few somewhat veiled homicidal threats for Claudius who Hamlet knows is hiding behind the arras. It is a coarse speech:

To be, or not to be, Ay there's the point,

To Die, to sleep, is that all? Ay all:

No, to sleep, to dream, Ay marry there it goes,

For in that dream of death, when we awake,

And borne before an everlasting Judge,

From whence no passenger ever retur'nd,

The undiscovered country, at whose sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.

And on…[iii]

After this speech, Ophelia clearly betrays her boyfriend when she lies about where her father is when they both know he is behind the arras. Hamlet abuses her and acts crazy for a bit until he comes up with a test to confirm his Uncle’s guilt. Hamlet will have the Players play a play like the murder of his father, he calls it the The Mousetrap. When Claudius sees the murder enacted, he flips out. Hamlet is now sure of his guilt. The course is set. In the closet scene, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude swears to support him in killing Claudius. Though there are still dramatic complications and Hamlet still ends up dead, he revenges his father. He gets the job done. A good revenge tragedy!

After the “bad quarto” was stolen and published, Shakespeare’s company published the Second Quarto, the good one, within the year as the:

Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was,

according to the true and perfect Coppie.

This is the Hamlet we know. This is the great play. It contains all of the great language, the intrigues, the complications and Hamlet’s infernal indecision. There is a huge difference between these two plays.

Shakespeare changed the play. He added complexity. The play got longer. The text got sharper. The poetry, more poetic. Hamlet’s path is less clear. He waters down Ophelia and makes her weaker by changing the very sound of her words. She lost her hard consonants, her "t"s, "b"s and "d"s for soft consonants "m"s, "n"s and "l"s. Gertrude doesn’t commit to help him even after Hamlet tells her of Claudius’ guilt as she does in the Bad Quarto. Every place where he could, he made the play more ambivalent.  He made Hamlet less decisive and more concerned, well, about everything.  He doesn’t know what to do.  He can’t make up his mind.

The biggest change is that the “to be or not to be” speech is moved from the second act to the third act after he has made the plan with the players to play The Mousetrap. He has a great soliloquy: “Oh What a Rogue and Peasant Slave am I?” (Which is a much better line than the Bad Quarto’s: “Why what a dunghill Idiot slave am I?”) He makes this plan with the players, he stops acting crazy, then he does the speech. For a revenge tragedy, it makes no sense. Also, the stage directions do not inform us that he sees Claudius and Polonius hide behind the arras or that he sees Ophelia waiting for him. He speaks the speech directly to the audience.

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Whether tis nobler in the minde to suffer

The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune,

Or to take Armes against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them, 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 to die to sleep,

In this speech, Hamlet has a decision, a choice. The Ghost of his father or some fiend claiming to be his father (Elizabethans believed demons appeared as dead people to trap the living; this type of thing was rumored to happen) tells him that his uncle murdered him to get his throne and his queen. Hold On! Let’s pause a moment. An apparition of his father comes back from the dead and has a long conversation with him??? It’s easy to take this for granted, but it is not an everyday occurrence. This was out there stuff.

Hamlet and his dad were very different. Hamlet Senior was a warrior and a King, more of a “Not to be” kind of guy. Hamlet Junior tends to be a thinker and feeler, more of a “to be” kind of guy. A son’s responsibility is to avenge his father and to protect the virtue of his mother. But, murder especially regi- and uncle-cide are bad things to do, against God’s law. Who do you believe? What should a Prince do? One would need to be sure, right? Maybe it would be better to take a wait and see attitude. Wait for it to sort itself out?

Hamlet had been at school in Wittenberg, you know the place where Martin Luther hung his Ninety-Five Thesis on the door of the church and started the religious reformation. He learned there that men had choice. To be or not to be. This or That. When Shakespeare revived the play he gave Hamlet a choice. Not a clear choice, a very complicated and messy choice. Such, is life.

With choice came consequences. Hamlet really got this. He is paralyzed with the consequences of his choice. It is the source of modern angst, depression and schizophrenia. Hamlet says so much at the end of the “to be or not to be” speech.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hiew of resolution

Is sickled ore with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard theyr currents turne awry,

And lose the name of action.

For Hamlet, as with Modern Man, knowing you have a choice messed him up. Choice comes with unknown consequences, causality. Whether the “to be or not to be” was to suffer what life gave you or to or commit suicide, murder or become numb, you were stuck with the consequences of your choice. Hamlet was paralyzed by choice. He decided that suicide was not the answer. Homicide on the other hand was very much the answer.

By the end he had murdered or caused the murder of his girlfriend, her father, her brother, his two best friends, his mother and his uncle, the King. Oh, and his own death. Had he just made a choice, the play might have ended better.  Or at least would have had a smaller body count.  But, that’s the problem with being the Master of your Fate.  YOU become responsible for the consequences of your choices even when you fail to actually make one.

Before the final duel Hamlet throws up his hands not knowing what to do.

Not a whit, we defy augury, there is special providence, in

the fall of a Sparrow, if it be, tis not to come, if it be not to come,

it will be now, if it be not now, yet it well come, the readines is all,

since no man of ought he leaves, knows what ist to leave betimes, let be. [V.2.219-224]

Perhaps that is where modern choice leaves us.  All we can do is throw our hands up and accept what comes because we cannot predict the outcome of our choices.  Is this what Shakespeare learned?  All you can really do is be ready?

The Bad and Good Quartos show us two different approaches on how to live.  They were invented over a decade of vast and significant change.  Shakespeare’s later version of the play gave us the model for choice and the responsibility of the consequences.  This play plotted the path to the Modern Era.  The new question or challenge is how do we handle the choices going forward?

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[i] Shakespeare regularly borrowed and adapted scripts by others.  Only Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest seem to be original stories, and with both of these he gained inspiration from other writings.  For more on this read my entry into the authorship debate: Shakespeare’s Mentor (to be posted soon).

[ii] Yes, Shakespeare regularly rewrote and revised his plays like any good writer. When his fellow actors wrote in the forward to the First Folio, the complete works of Shakespeare:

His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easiness,

that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.

I’m sure “the lady doth protest too much”. They were trying to sell a few books. They wanted everyone to know that they had the right versions of the plays. Not “bad” versions. I’m also sure it was an inside joke coming from actors who suffered through twenty years of constant rewrites. Shakespeare was a serial reviser.

[iii] Full text of Quarto 1 “To be, or not to be” speech:

To be, or not to be, I there's the point,

To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:

No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,

For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,

And borne before an everlasting Judge,

From whence no passenger ever retur'nd,

The undiscovered country, at whose sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.

But for this, the joyfull hope of this,

Whol'd beare the scornes and flattery of the world,

Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?

The widow being oppressed, the orphan wrong'd,

The taste of hunger, or a tirants raigne,

And thousand more calamities besides,

To grunt and sweate under this weary life,

When that he may his full Quietus make,

With a bare bodkin, who would this indure,

But for a hope of something after death?

Which pusles the braine, and doth confound the sence,

Which makes us rather beare those evilles we have,

Than flie to others that we know not of.

I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of us all,

Lady in thy orizons, be all my sinnes remembred.

[Adapted from Internet Shakespeare Edition: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Ham/Q1/default/]

To Be OR Not To Be: How Shakespeare Charted the Path to the Modern

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Thus begins the big speech from the play Hamlet. This speech and play are universally accepted as being the best, most profound, most significant (add your superlative here) play in the English Language, or of the Millennium, or the History of Man (add your frame of reference here). 

The big question has been: Why is to be or not to be, the question?  Like most people, I’ve always focused on the “to be” and “not to be” parts.  Lately, I’ve come to understand the most important word in the sentence is the “or”. The speech offers two opposite and mutually exclusive options.  It’s not sort of this and sort of that.  It is this or that. It is a choice.  Hamlet has a choice.  It is for him to make.

The version of the play we know is not the first rendering. The story originated in Germany in the 14^th Century.  It was retold many times and performed as a play.  Each writer changed it. Shakespeare based his version on a lost play scholars call the Ur-Hamlet. It was performed in London in the late 1580s. Shakespeare started writing his Hamlet in the early 1590s. It seemingly was performed many times over the decade. One of his early drafts of the play was stolen and printed in 1601.  Scholars call it the “Bad Quarto.”  The thief was capitalizing on the success of the Shakespeare’s newly revised work that was burning up the stage of the newly built Globe Theatre.  Shakespeare’s company quickly printed a “true and perfect copy” of the play the next year, called the “Good Quarto.” [Follow this link to: Ay, there's the point: the Bad Quarto of Hamlet]

The Bad Quarto, like the early renderings of the play, was a straight forward revenge drama.  The Ghost of the King, Hamlet's father, tells Hamlet that his uncle has murdered him and taken his throne and wife.  He commands his son to revenge him.  Hamlet plots his revenge, acts crazy as a diversion, and eventually gets the job done.  There are dramatic twists and plots (otherwise the play would be about fifteen minutes long), but in the end Hamlet exacts his revenge as any good Medieval son should do.

The Good Quarto of Hamlet is a different play.  Sure, it’s still a revenge drama, but it is about something else.  Earlier Hamlets did not question whether they should revenge their dead fathers, the question was how.  This new improved Hamlet (or as I like to think, the Hamlet Reboot, since the treatment he got from Shakespeare is not unlike the current reboots of superhero franchises we see today: Hamlet, the Dark Prince.) questions everything especially whether he should kill the king. 

Whether to revenge or not creates the huge difference between the Bad and Good Quartos. Shakespeare changed the play. This was more than a few additions and notes from a producer. While the plot remained essentially the same, the play changed. He added complexity. The play got longer. The text got sharper, but also more complex. Hamlet’s path is less clear. He watered down Ophelia and made her weaker. Gertrude’s is more of an accomplice to Claudius. Every place where he could Shakespeare made the play more ambivalent.  Yes, he made a better play.  But "why" is the question? 

The biggest change is that the “to be or not to be” speech is moved from the second act to the third act after he has made the plan with the players to perform the a play like the murder of his father to catch his uncle.  (It's all very Perry Mason, if you remember that sort of thing.) In the Bad Quarto: Hamlet says he's going to act crazy; he does the speech acting crazy, the Players show up, he makes a plan to catch Claudius and he stops acting crazy.  In the Good Quarto: he does the speech after he has made the plan with the Players.  This speech is not an acting crazy speech. It's different. This speech is an argument for himself and the audience.

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, 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 to die to sleep, [i]

This is no revenge drama speech. Hamlet's questioning whether he should kill Claudius. He realizes he has a choice. He will also bear the responsibility for his choice. He has two opposite paths. His “to be or not to be” is:

TO BE (to Live)

OR NOT TO BE (to Die)

TO BE (Suffer through one’s life dealing with whatever the world throws at you)

OR NOT TO BE (End your life or the life of someone else, to murder, to kill)

TO BE (Be in civilization and absorb the pain of being in community)

OR NOT TO BE (Be a violent barbarian forcing your will on others)

TO BE (Live and be present, feeling everything that it is to be human)

OR NOT TO BE (To shut off one’s feelings/emotions and be numb in the world)

Or it could be all of the above, plus anything you can imagine “be” to be, all at the same moment.[ii]

The “to be” and the “not to be” are very important, however, the “question” is in the “or”.  There is a choice. Hamlet must make a choice.  This is the difference between the two versions of HAMLET. In the “bad”, Hamlet doesn’t question whether he should revenge his father’s death. It’s his duty. In the “good”, he realizes he has a choice. This is huge. Hamlet has a choice. He has control of this decision. He, not God, has control of his fate. Either choice is valid. He can go either way.

Four hundred years later it’s hard for us to appreciate how remarkable choice is for Hamlet. We post-modern folk, or post-post modern folk or postie-tostie modern folk make decisions and choices every day. But for someone coming out of the Medieval Era, for Hamlet to have a choice and realize it, it is world changing.

Over the ten years of writing this play, Shakespeare came to this understanding because choice was the story of his life.  He understood how new, complex and amazing choice actually is. He had made a choice about becoming a poet and player that changed his life. In the time between starting to write HAMLET and it being a huge hit in the newly opened Globe Theatre some ten years later, Shakespeare’s life changed.

• He had left his small town, his wife and kids.
•  He had turned his back on his father’s trade as a Glove Maker and had become an actor and a poet. (One step above prostitute)
•  He had matured in age from 27 to 37.
•  He had gone from being a minor playwright, an “upstart crow”, to the chief playwright and an actor in the top theater company in London.
• His only son has died at home while Shakespeare was away in London.
• He had made a fortune.
• He had become an Elizabethan Rock Star.

Shakespeare made a choice and his life changed.

Choice was profoundly new for Shakespeare and his age. The Medieval era did not contain options and choices for people. The Medieval Man (I use the term generically though it would have never occurred to the Medieval Man to do so. I’m also speaking in broad generalities. I know this and can argue with myself on any of these points, so please hang with me); the Medieval Man understood his place. He knew where he was in the world. He knew what his job was. If he stayed in his place and followed his predetermined fate, he would go straight to heaven when he died. Life was preordained. Fate was set. Everything was clear. If your father was a stone mason, you would be a stone mason like your grandfather was a stone mason. If you were a serf, you would spend your life working in the dirt, eating the dirt, you would return to the dirt. A Serf was a Serf. A Duke was a Duke. Even the royalty had their place in the wheel, the “great chain of being.” 

You had a responsibility to stay in your path. Life was ordered. There was surety, but no control. A higher power outside the system had control and responsibility for each and every life. There was a minimal concept of individuality and personal identity. Everyone was a cog in the wheel. You were identified by your place in the system. It even became your last name. (The Medieval version of “We are the Borg”) Within this pre-ordained world of fixed hierarchies every person, high or low, would look around and be able to say with absolute certainty: “I have my place in the system.” Life was fated; time was fixed; space was insurmountable. A thing was what it was. This led to that! This was this!

If a person questioned or failed to follow God’s will, he would end up damned for eternity in Hell. You might get there anyway if you were fated by God to go to Hell, but mostly it was reserved for those who didn’t stay in their place, those people who thought they had choices. You could make a choice to be a villain, rogue or actor, but the consequences were completely clear. [Richard III made the most of this. God made him a villain and he committed to it in a big way.  Read: The Last Medieval Man: Richard the Third]

The transition from the Medieval to the Renaissance began as early as 1200. The Crusades, the discovery of Classical writing and rise of the merchant/middle class helped. In England, when King Henry VIII decided to toss out the Catholic Church so he could marry Anne Boleyn, everything went into disarray. Which church do you follow, the Pope’s or your King’s? It created doubt and choice. It didn’t help that the monarchs switched religions back and forth for the next twenty-five years. When Elizabeth I took the throne, she also did something that impacted the creation of the English Golden Age more than anything: Literacy. Due to the installation of public schools, the literacy rate in England went from 20% of the men to 80% in thirty years.[iii] (Only wealthy women were taught to read, even a female monarch couldn’t change things that much.) These elements and many others affected this idea that a man could make a choice about his life. It was a rising tide. [Look for my coming article on Left and Right Brain Architecture: The Teeter Totter of the Brain.]

When Richard Burbage, playing Hamlet, spoke “To be or not to be” on the platform of the Globe Theater in 1601, he embodied the major question of the age. Shakespeare charted the path for the creation of the modern era. For it all begins with having a choice and the challenge of consequences.

Following Hamlet, Elizabethan Man embraced his control over his life. Everything changed. He was on his way to becoming Modern. He now had to choose his path. He had to deal with the consequences. His choice made him unique, an individual. This was the birth of individual identity. “I am a person. I chose this over that. I made this choice. I caused this to happen. I created my life. My future is created by my present." Time became linear. Space could now be crossed in time with effort. Distance became fixed.

(Of course, in a few decades after Shakespeare a group of people thought this was all bullocks, beheaded the King and started to follow God’s will.  It was the type of backlash that always happens when people think they have control over their lives.)

If there was no Shakespeare, then we might not have had a Newton. Classical Mechanics is the physicist expression of Shakespeare’s work. Without Shakespeare, we probably would not have had the Enlightenment. Or, the United States. We don’t get to the Modern. I know I’m overreaching, we probably would get to now without Shakespeare, but it was his clear embodiment of causality and individual choice that gave us the path to the Modern.

With choice came consequences. Hamlet really got this. He became paralyzed with the consequences of his choice. It is the source of modern angst, depression and schizophrenia. Hamlet says so much at the end of the “to be or not to be” speech.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hew of resolution

Is sickled ore 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 end of the play, Hamlet’s confrontation of causality and his cowardice cause him to throw up his hands and accept that he has no real control of the circumstances.  He needs to remain true to what is right.  Toss the dice and see the way they come up.  He does this, get’s his revenge, kills a few more people and dies, “the rest is silence”. [for more on this read: The Readiness is All]

It has been a four hundred year journey from that day in the Globe Theater to our time that some call post-modern. We are leaving the Modern because about a hundred years ago the painters and the physicists started to suggest that the world works in a different way than we thought. Rather than fixed, everything behaves in a relative way to everything else. It depends on observation which causes entanglement, because as soon as we are involved in the observation it changes the observed. The same thing can be two opposite things at the same time. An electron can be a wave or a particle depending on how we look at it. Time, light and space can bend upon itself. Time is spontaneous and simultaneous. Space bends and can be transgressed instantaneously. “I am both separate and equal. I am both an individual and fully part of the community, I am universal. [I'll have to say about this in the coming month.]

Our experience of our world is changing. The challenge for the writers, dramatists, screenwriters today is to embody the question of our age in the same way Shakespeare embodied his age. For us to get to the Next, the quantum era, we need the human example. Since theatre, films and television are the most human of the art forms, it is dependent on us to lead to the new era.

Knowing that the question is no longer one of choosing opposites, the new question is living in the duality of opposites being true at the same moment. This and that, rather than this or that. The new question might be:

To be and not to be, that is our challenge.

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[i] Full text of Quarto 2 “To be, or not to be” speech, in original text:

To be, or not to be, that is the question,

Whether tis nobler in the minde to suffer

The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune,

Or to take Armes against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them, to die to sleepe

No more, and by a sleepe, to say we end

The hart-ake, and the thousand naturall shocks

That flesh is heire to; tis a consumation

Devoutly to be wisht to die to sleepe,

To sleepe, perchance to dreame, I there's the rub,

For in that sleepe of death what dreames may come

When we have shuffled off this mortall coyle

Must give us pause, there's the respect

That makes calamitie of so long life:

For who would beare the whips and scornes of time,

Th'oppressors wrong, the proude mans contumely,

The pangs of despiz'd love, the lawes delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurnes

That patient merrit of th'unworthy takes,

When he himselfe might his quietas make

With a bare bodkin; who would fardels beare,

To grunt and sweat under a wearie life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country, from whose borne

No traviler returnes, puzzels the will,

And makes us rather beare those ills we have,

Then flie to others that we know not of.

Thus conscience dooes make cowards,

And thus the native hiew of resolution

Is sickled ore with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard theyr currents turne awry,

And loose the name of action. Soft you now,

The faire Ophelia, Nimph in thy orizons

Be all my sinnes remembred.

[Adapted from Internet Shakespeare Edition: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/Ham/Q2/default/]

[ii] This list of “to be’s” are inspired by the work of Tina Packer, Founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company and one of my mentors. While she has spoken often of this speech often, this bit was taken from Women of Will, Tina's lecture/theatrical on the feminine in Shakespeare.

[iii] The actual percentage of increase in literacy is highly debatable. A low number would be an increase of 5% to over 30%. I picked a higher number. The basic idea is that far more men could read and write in 1600 than could in 1560. And this made a huge difference in the culture.