“To be or not to be” asks whether it is better to go on living and endure life’s pain, or to die and end it, and Hamlet’s answer is that people keep living not because life is good, but because they fear what might come after death.
To Be or Not to Be: The Full Soliloquy
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;
To sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there’s 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;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
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? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er 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.
Text based on the Second Quarto of Hamlet (1604), Act 3, scene 1, with modernized spelling and punctuation.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about “To be or not to be” for quick reference.
What “To Be or Not to Be” Means
The whole speech in plain English, before the line-by-line detail.
Hamlet begins with the largest question there is: to be, or not to be, to exist or not to exist. Is it nobler, he asks, to put up with all the blows that bad luck throws at us, or to fight back against our troubles and, by fighting, end them? Ending them seems to mean ending life itself.
At first, death looks attractive. To die is only to sleep, and by that sleep to end the heartache and the thousand pains that every human body inherits. That would be an ending to wish for devoutly.
But then Hamlet catches himself. Sleep brings dreams, and no one knows what dreams might come in the sleep of death, once we have thrown off the tangle of mortal life. That is the snag, “the rub,” and it is the reason people put up with such long, unhappy lives.
He then lists life’s injustices: the insults of time, the cruelty of the powerful, the arrogance of the proud, the pain of rejected love, slow courts, rude officials, and the contempt that good people suffer from worthless ones. Who would bear all this, when a simple dagger could end it? No one would, except that the dread of something after death, that unexplored country from which no traveler comes back, confuses our will and makes us keep the troubles we know rather than rush toward ones we do not.
His conclusion goes beyond death. Thinking too hard, he says, makes cowards of everyone. The healthy color of determination grows pale and sickly under the shadow of thought, and great plans turn aside and never become action. It is a diagnosis of his own failure to take revenge, as much as a reflection on suicide.
To Be or Not to Be, Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Where the Speech Comes in Hamlet
The context changes how the speech sounds.
By Act 3, Hamlet has learned from his father’s ghost that his uncle Claudius murdered his father, and he has sworn revenge. He has not acted. At the end of Act 2, he has just attacked himself for his delay, calling himself “a rogue and peasant slave,” and he has planned a test: a play that will show whether Claudius is guilty. It is to be performed the next evening.
“To be or not to be” comes the next day, in a trap. Claudius and Polonius have arranged for Hamlet to meet Ophelia “as ’twere by accident,” and they hide nearby to watch. Hamlet enters, speaks the soliloquy, and then sees Ophelia: “Soft you now, / The fair Ophelia.” The meeting that follows is one of the cruelest scenes in the play, ending with “Get thee to a nunnery.”
So the most famous speech on the meaning of life is spoken by a man who is being watched, just before he turns savagely on the woman he loves. For more on the play, see our full guide to Hamlet and our guide to the famous lines of Hamlet.
Themes
The three big ideas the speech turns on.
Life, Death, and Suffering
The speech weighs life against death and finds life full of pain: “the whips and scorns of time,” injustice, and heartbreak. Death, by comparison, looks like rest. Shakespeare’s audience would have known that the church forbade suicide, and in Act 1 Hamlet has already wished that God “had not fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” the law against suicide. Here he approaches the same thought from a colder, more philosophical distance.
Fear of the Unknown
What stops Hamlet is not faith or duty but uncertainty. Death might be peaceful sleep, or it might bring terrible dreams, and no one has come back to say which. “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns” is one of the most famous descriptions of death ever written, because it captures exactly what makes it frightening: it cannot be known.
Thought Against Action
The speech ends by turning a question about suicide into a diagnosis of Hamlet’s whole problem. “Conscience,” meaning reflection and awareness as much as morality, “does make cowards of us all.” Thinking drains resolution until great plans “lose the name of action.” It is the clearest statement in the play of why Hamlet delays his revenge. Our guide to the themes of Hamlet follows this idea through the play.
Form and Language
How the speech is built, and why it sounds the way it does.
Blank Verse with Extra Beats
The speech is in iambic pentameter, but many of its lines carry an extra, unstressed syllable at the end: “question,” “suffer,” “fortune,” “troubles.” These are called feminine endings, and they give the speech a falling, hesitant sound, as if each line trails off in doubt. The opening line itself has eleven syllables.
A Mixed Metaphor
“To take arms against a sea of troubles” mixes two images: fighting with weapons, and a sea that no weapon can defeat. Critics have long noted the oddness, but it works: taking up arms against the sea is hopeless, which is exactly how Hamlet feels about fighting his troubles.
The List of Grievances
Lines 15 to 19 pile up injustices one after another, from “the oppressor’s wrong” to “the law’s delay.” None of them is Hamlet’s own problem. He is a prince, not a victim of slow courts or rude officials. The list turns his private despair into a picture of everyone’s suffering.
Sleep and Dreams
The speech’s central image compares death to sleep. The comparison is comforting until Hamlet extends it: if death is sleep, then it might have dreams, and the dreams might be nightmares. The whole argument turns on a single word, “perchance.” Our guide to Shakespeare’s soliloquies looks at how speeches like this let us hear a character think.
A Closer Reading: The Soliloquy Without an “I”
The most personal-sounding speech in Shakespeare never uses the words “I,” “me,” or “my,” and that absence tells us something about where Hamlet is when he speaks it.
Hamlet’s other great soliloquies are full of himself. “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” he cries at the end of Act 2. But “To be or not to be” speaks only of “we,” “us,” and “who”: “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,” “makes us rather bear those ills we have,” “cowards of us all.” It never mentions his father, his mother, Claudius, the Ghost, or revenge. The man with the most specific task in literature talks as if he were a philosopher considering the human condition in general.
That generality is part of the speech’s power, and why people everywhere have quoted it for four centuries: it could be about anyone. But in context it is also a retreat. Hamlet has an urgent, concrete job, and here he turns it into an abstract question about existence. The speech ends by diagnosing exactly this: “the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” The soliloquy is not only a description of that paralysis. It is an example of it, a man thinking so broadly that he no longer has to think about what he must do.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about “To be or not to be,” answered briefly.
Is Hamlet Thinking About Suicide?
Mostly, yes: he weighs ending his life with “a bare bodkin,” a small dagger. But he speaks in general terms, about “we” and “us,” and the speech also bears on his delay in taking revenge. Many readers hear both at once.
What Does “Ay, There’s the Rub” Mean?
“Yes, that is the obstacle.” A “rub” was something that stopped or diverted a ball in the game of bowls. The obstacle is that death might bring dreams, and no one knows what they would be.
What Does “Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil” Mean?
Having died. “Coil” meant turmoil or fuss, so “this mortal coil” is the troubled business of living; to “shuffle it off” is to cast it aside.
What Is “The Undiscovered Country”?
Death, or whatever comes after it: a country no one has explored, “from whose bourn,” or boundary, “No traveler returns.”
Does Anyone Overhear the Speech?
Claudius and Polonius are hiding nearby, waiting to spy on Hamlet’s meeting with Ophelia, so they may hear it. The play does not say whether they do, and productions stage it both ways.
Related Reading
Three pages that take “To be or not to be” further.