To Be, or Not to Be, Misunderstood

The most famous line in literature doesn’t mean what ‘Hamnet’ thinks it means.

By Robert N. WatsonMarch 13, 2026

• Film

• Literary Criticism

THE MOST FAMOUS LINE in all of Shakespeare—maybe the most famous line in any play ever—doesn’t mean what the Golden Globes Best Motion Picture winner and Oscars Best Picture nominee Hamnet (2025) makes it mean. No doubt Paul Mescal, playing Shakespeare, wanted to say “To be, or not to be”—what actor wouldn’t want his turn? And it’s not surprising that Hamnet’s director, Chloé Zhao, wanted to include it for general audiences that might not recognize any of the movie’s other Shakespearean lines. But it’s nowhere in Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel on which the movie is based. And here it’s a mistake.

The scene from the film seems designed to assure us that Mescal’s Shakespeare actually feels as guilty as his wife wants him to feel for being away when (spoiler alert!) his son Hamnet dies of plague. The playwright stands in blue-black darkness on a jetty overlooking the River Thames, on the brink of a suicidal leap. Whether such a jump would actually suffice seems doubtful, given an earlier scene in which Mescal swims an impressive freestyle crawl. His main peril in this plunge would be illness from the fecal filth in the Renaissance-era Thames.

The more serious problem is that the scene assumes—as most people do, including most Shakespeare scholars—that the “To be, or not to be” monologue shows Hamlet deciding whether to kill himself. But if we understand what two key words in the speech meant in Shakespeare’s time, instead of what they are now commonly assumed to mean, that line actually signifies something quite different—and so does the rest of the soliloquy.

Earlier in the play, Hamlet wishes God had not forbidden “self-slaughter,” and shortly thereafter his friends worry that his father’s ghost will trick Hamlet into jumping off a cliff into the sea. After that ghost reports that he was killed by the usurping King Claudius, however, Hamlet’s focus shifts to revenge, and he wonders whether that’s worth attempting (note: most quotations in this review are based on the Second Quarto edition, with some lines drawn from the First Folio):

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.

Hamlet asks whether a Stoic detachment from the injustices of this corrupt world—a detachment that was considered a noble state of mind by many ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, and therefore by Renaissance thinkers too—is better than trying to defeat evil when you’re likely to fail and will probably die trying. My students (and Hamlet is a university student, not a full-time prince) wrestle with this question all the time: should I give my life to the important but seemingly impossible task of saving our world from everything that’s wrong with it, or should I instead focus on trying to carve out a decent little life for myself and my family, and try not to be angry and miserable in the time I have here?

Understanding this soliloquy requires understanding that in the Elizabethan period, to “suffer” something usually meant to permit it even if you didn’t like it. In the Bible translation Shakespeare’s audiences would have known best, and similarly in the still-prevalent King James translation created a few years after Hamlet, Jesus tells his disciples to “suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14; Luke 18:16 is almost identical).

Far too many Christians have thought that this command meant they should make children suffer harsh punishment to qualify them for salvation. But the original audiences of Hamlet would have understood that the word “suffer” meant “allow.” Similarly, in Hamlet’s graveyard scene, Hamlet asks Horatio why the corpse of a lawyer would “suffer this mad knave [the gravedigger] now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel” without taking him to court for assault and battery. “Suffer” here also means “let him get away with it,” as it does many other times in Shakespeare’s works (including in Romeo and Juliet and several times in King Lear).

In Hamlet’s soliloquy, he is considering whether the wise choice is to stop caring about bad things you probably can’t change, as the widely beloved Serenity Prayer recommends. The alternative to such acceptance, Hamlet says, is “to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them.” That doesn’t sound like suicide, which would be more like surrendering.

The other crucially misunderstood word in the soliloquy is “quietus.” Hamlet says: “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, […] When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?” People generally assume that when Hamlet considers making “his quietus […] with a bare bodkin,” he is envisioning stabbing himself with a dagger, because they think “quietus” refers to the silence of the grave—“resting in peace,” as the familiar funeral language puts it, and as Hamlet’s dying line “The rest is silence” might seem to confirm. But “quietus” didn’t necessarily indicate quiet; it was a legal term for a debt paid off (“quietus est,” which translates to “he is quit,” would then be written on the loan document). It meant getting even (as when we lament “unrequited love,” love that’s not repaid in kind). Shakespeare’s only other use of the word is in the last line of Sonnet 126, where “quietus” signals a settling of accounts.

The final scene of this play offers two examples. When Hamlet tells Horatio that it would be “perfect conscience” to “quit him with this arm,” he is saying that it would be completely justified to pay King Claudius back in kind for murdering the previous king. Then, as the fatal fencing match begins, Claudius announces that if Hamlet loses the first two hits but manages to “quit in answer of the third exchange,” they will celebrate his success—meaning if he pays back with a hit of his own, not that he would quit the match if he loses the first few points (which would hardly be an achievement to celebrate).

The bodkin Hamlet imagines wielding in the “To be, or not to be” monologue is therefore much likelier aimed at Claudius than at himself. But dying while killing a person, especially a king, risks the horrific purgatory his father’s ghost described, or even eternal damnation. Hamlet therefore concludes the soliloquy by lamenting that “enterprises of great pitch [or, in the First Folio, “pith”] and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry / And lose the name of action.” Overthrowing an evil usurping king fits the category of “enterprises of great pitch and moment”—i.e., high, essential, momentously important projects—much better than the suicide of a powerless melancholy prince would.

“To be, or not to be” is therefore asking, “Should I try to survive, even if that requires me to ignore all the wrongdoing in the world, or should I try to right those wrongs, especially by assassinating this usurper, even though that will almost certainly cost me my life and maybe my afterlife?” It’s the natural extension of what Hamlet lamented right after the ghost assigns him the task of avenging his murder: “O cursèd spite / That ever I was born to set it right!” Hamlet’s great soliloquy is therefore not an echo of his earlier suicidal one; it’s an anticipation of his later “How all occasions do inform against me” speech, in which he accuses himself of cowardice for not risking his life to avenge his father. In other words, Hamlet is contemplating justified martyrdom, not suicide.

When teaching adolescents at UCLA, I worry that my romantic reading of the end of Romeo and Juliet could encourage suicide pacts between young lovers. For similar reasons, I wish Zhao’s wonderfully life-affirming and art-affirming film didn’t reinforce the assumption that the revered and powerful “To be, or not to be” speech—by a character dangerously easy to identify with—proposes suicide as a reasonable solution to the frustrations, helpless indignations, and general emotional pain of being human. Sometimes it is essential not to be too fearful—whatever the odds and costs—to fight for what you think the world ought to be.