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"To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). The speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most widely known and quoted lines in modern English literature, and has been referenced in many works of theatre, literature and music.
The monologue, spoken in the play by Prince Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II, Scene 2, follows in its entirety. Rather than appearing in blank verse, the typical mode of composition of Shakespeare's plays, the speech appears in straight prose:
Comparison of the 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto, the Good Quarto and the First Folio. Q1 was discovered in 1823. Only two copies are extant. According to Jenkins, "The unauthorized nature of this quarto is matched by the corruption of its text."
Speak the speech" is a famous speech from Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601). [1] In it, Hamlet offers directions and advice to a group of actors whom he has enlisted to play for the court of Denmark. The speech itself has played two important roles independent of the play.
Even in the famous 3.1 soliloquy, Hamlet gives voice to the conflict. When he asks if it is "nobler in the mind to suffer", [80] Cantor believes that Shakespeare is alluding to the Christian sense of suffering. When he presents the alternative, "to take arms against a sea of troubles", [81] Cantor takes this as an ancient formulation of goodness.
Comparison of the 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto (Q1), the Good Quarto (Q2) and the First Folio. The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall ...
The Gravediggers (or Clowns) are examples of Shakespearean fools (also known as clowns or jesters), a recurring type of character in Shakespeare's plays. Like most Shakespearean fools, the Gravediggers are peasants or commoners that use their great wit and intellect to get the better of their superiors, other people of higher social status, and each other.
After its discovery in 1823, its initial editors typically took the view that Q1 was an early draft of the play, perhaps even a revision of the Ur-Hamlet, but John Payne Collier argued in 1843 that it was simply a bad version: a "pirated" text, one of the "stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors", which were denounced in the preface to ...