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Comparison of the "To be, or not to be" speech 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. "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 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:
In Act III, Hamlet seems to drop the pretense of friendship, coldly dismissing the two in Scene 2. Line 319 is perhaps his only use of the royal "we" in the play, although he may also be addressing the other person present on the stage, Horatio, with whom Hamlet first saw the ghost they are discussing. To his mother, he comments in Scene 4 that ...
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 ...
Hamlet Q1 (1603), the first published text of Hamlet, is often described as a "bad quarto".. A bad quarto, in Shakespearean scholarship, is a quarto-sized printed edition of one of Shakespeare's plays that is considered to be unauthorised, and is theorised to have been pirated from a theatrical performance without permission by someone in the audience writing it down as it was spoken or ...
Hamlet's statement that his dark clothes are the outer sign of his inner grief demonstrates strong rhetorical skill (artist: Eugène Delacroix 1834). Much of Hamlet ' s language is courtly: elaborate, witty discourse, as recommended by Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 etiquette guide, The Courtier. This work specifically advises royal retainers to ...
William Shakespeare's play Hamlet has contributed many phrases to common English, from the famous "To be, or not to be" to a few less known, but still in everyday English. Some also occur elsewhere (e.g. in the Bible) or are proverbial. All quotations are second quarto except as noted:
Accordingly, the meaning might be: 'when we have unwound and worked off this coil of mortality.' In this way, the length of our life is metaphorically the length of thread that is coiled on a spool, a metaphor related to the ancient Greek mythological figures of the Fates. As humans live, the thread is unwound from the coil by the shuttle of ...