Great Poems: Shakespeare’s ”To Be or Not to Be” (from the archive)

An episode from 8/12/22: Everybody knows the most famous soliloquy in all of drama, or at least the first line of it: ⁠"To be or not to be, that is the question,"⁠ from act three of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Tonight, I delve into the speech and try to figure out why it works so well not just as poetry and drama, but why it has leapt beyond literature entirely to become a cultural touchstone.

Throughout the episode I include the performance of this speech from modern actors: the first is by ⁠Paapa Essiedu⁠, and the second by ⁠Andrew Scott⁠. The very last, to give a sense of what the original pronunciation of the speech would have sounded like, is performed by ⁠Ben Crystal⁠. A larger compilation of nine different versions ⁠can be found here⁠.

The books read from in this episode are Ben and David Crystal’s ⁠Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion⁠, Marjorie Garber’s ⁠Shakespeare After All⁠, and Peter Ackroyd’s ⁠Shakespeare: The Biography⁠.

You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at  humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.