"To be, or not to be": what the punctuation tells an actor

Everybody knows the words. That is the problem with the speech: you are not learning it, you are competing with everyone who has ever said it, most of them at half speed and all of them apparently certain what it means.

Here is something the words alone will not give you. The two earliest substantial printings of Hamlet do not point this speech the same way, and the differences are not decorative. Where the sentence stops is where the actor stops, and the two books stop in different places.

Two books, not one text

There are three early printings. The First Quarto of 1603 is a different speech altogether - it opens “To be, or not to be, I there’s the point” and rearranges most of what follows, and it is not what anyone means by the soliloquy. The two that matter are the Second Quarto of 1604, usually thought to be closest to Shakespeare’s own papers, and the version printed in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after he died.

Set those two side by side and the wording is very nearly the same. The pointing is not.

Before going further, the honest caveat, because the exciting version of this argument is the one that is wrong. Punctuation in a book of this period is partly the compositor’s, not the author’s. The man setting type had house habits, a limited supply of sorts in the case in front of him, and a line to justify. Nobody can hand you Shakespeare’s own commas. What these two books give you is two readings, made by people much closer to the play than we are, and two readings are exactly what an actor can use.

The quotations below keep each book’s punctuation and capitalisation and modernise nothing but the spelling, so you can see the marks without fighting the long s.

Six places where they disagree

Where	Second Quarto, 1604	First Folio, 1623
End of the first line	question,	Question:
End of “And by opposing end them”	end them,	end them:
After “That flesh is heir to”	heir to;	heir to?
After “Devoutly to be wish’d”	wish’d to die to sleep,	wish’d. To die to sleep,
After “With a bare bodkin”	bodkin; who would	Bodkin? Who would
The last line but two	The fair Ophelia,	The fair Ophelia?

Six marks. Each one is a decision about whether he is still thinking or has stopped thinking, and each one is playable.

The first line: a comma, or a colon

To be, or not to be, that is the question, Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

To be, or not to be, that is the Question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer

The Quarto’s comma will not let you stop. The famous six words are not a statement there, they are the front half of a sentence that keeps going for four more lines, and “the question” is whatever “whether” turns out to be. Say it with the comma and you cannot land on “question” at all; you have to carry the line over and let the thought finish itself.

The Folio’s colon does the opposite. It closes the six words into a complete statement and then opens an explanation of it. Say it with the colon and there is a stop after “question”, and what follows arrives as a second move rather than as the rest of the first.

The comma gives you a man thinking; the colon gives you a man who has already decided what he is thinking about. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is the version most people do, which is to pause for four seconds after “question” as if the line were a title, and then start the rest of the speech as a new poem.

Where the sentence stops: “to die, to sleep”

This is the biggest one, and it is worth mapping properly.

The Quarto runs on. “And by opposing, end them, to die to sleep / No more, and by a sleep, to say we end” - commas all the way, so dying, sleeping and ending are one continuous slide of thought. Nothing between them is more than a breath.

The Folio breaks it into steps: a colon after “end them”, then a semicolon after “No more”. Each stage arrives as a separate proposition, and the actor has somewhere to land twice inside four lines.

Then comes the difference that changes the most:

Devoutly to be wish'd to die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub,

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; ay, there's the rub,

The Quarto has no stop at all after “wish’d”. The wish and the dying are the same movement: to be devoutly wished to die, to sleep. The Folio puts a full stop there. The wish completes, and then he starts the thought over from the beginning, and the second time through he gets further and finds the thing that stops him. That full stop is the difference between a speech that flows downhill and a speech that circles back on itself.

If you take nothing else from this, take that one. Try it both ways out loud before you decide.

The question marks the Folio adds

Twice the Quarto reasons where the Folio asks.

“That flesh is heir to; ‘tis a consummation” against “That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation”. “With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear” against “With a bare Bodkin? Who would these Fardels bear”.

A semicolon keeps him inside his own argument, adding a clause to a case he is building. A question mark turns the same words outward. It needs an audience, even if the audience is himself, and it wants an answer, even if no answer comes. A speech pointed with semicolons is a man reasoning; a speech pointed with question marks is a man interrogating somebody.

Notice that this is a decision about who is in the room. Polonius and Claudius are behind the arras. Ophelia is about to be discovered reading. If your Hamlet knows any of that, the Folio’s question marks have somewhere to go.

The last line: is Ophelia a question?

And lose the name of action. Soft you now, The fair Ophelia, Nymph in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd.

And lose the name of Action. Soft you now, The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy Orisons Be all my sins remember'd.

The Quarto’s comma makes it one smooth turn: he stops the speech, sees her, and speaks to her. The Folio’s question mark makes it a double take. Something crosses the stage, he is not sure what it is for a beat, and then he is: it is her, and everything he has just said has an audience.

The Folio also shifts the comma after “Nymph”, which is small and does real work. “Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered” is direct address with the vocative set off, and it makes the last line something said to her face rather than about her.

What this site’s text prints

Worth knowing, since you are about to rehearse against it. The Hamlet text on this site is a standard modern edition, and it points the speech a third way again: a comma after “question”, as the Quarto has; a question mark after “And by opposing end them?”, which neither early book has; a colon at “To die: to sleep;”; and “The fair Ophelia!” with an exclamation mark where the Quarto has a comma and the Folio a question.

That is not an error. It is what a modern edition is: somebody’s reading, printed as though it were the text. Every edition you have ever held made these choices for you, silently, and the only difference here is that you now know they were choices.

Marking your own

You do not have to pick one book and be faithful to it. Editors have been mixing the two for three hundred years. What you do have to do is decide, mark it, and be consistent, because the alternative is that you make a different choice every run and none of them is the one you rehearsed.

A workable pass, in about twenty minutes:

• Read the speech aloud once with every stop treated as a full stop. It will sound absurd. It will also show you where the natural sentences are.
• Read it again with no stops at all, straight through. That shows you the argument.
• Now go through and mark, at each of the six places above, which reading you are playing. Write the mark on your copy in a colour you do not use for anything else.
• Say it three times with your marks. If a mark keeps getting ignored, it is the wrong mark, not a discipline problem.

The speech below opens with Hamlet already selected, so you can hear your pointing against another voice rather than in your own head. It asks for the microphone when you press Rehearse and not before.