At the core of the great Shakespearean cannon sits docked its flagship play and titular character, Hamlet.

First performed in 1602, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark played on the themes of death and depression in ways audiences had never seen before. They watched the now-famed Danish prince, with his ‘inky cloak’—reeling from the death of his father and his mother’s swift remarriage to his uncle—ruminate on the ‘rotten’ state of Denmark, on his ‘cursed’ fate ‘to set it right’—and, most crucially, on his fundamental lack of suitability to enact the role of revenger he is bound to play.

The success of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again a (1592) had established the revenge play, or revenge tragedy as a popular genre in English theatre. Given the instructions of the ghost of Old Hamlet to his son, to ‘revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ by his brother Claudius, audiences expected Hamlet —who claims to feign madness in putting on ‘an antic disposition’—to actually do the deed. Problematically, Hamlet is a scholar, not a fighter; instead of rushing to take up the sword, he is plagued with overthinking and seen to ‘unpack [his] heart with words’ onstage, in self-loathing procrastination and resistance against the revenging prescript which goes against his nature.

In Act 3 Scene 1—at what is meant to be the climax of the play—Hamlet, in peak pondering, delivers perhaps the most famous lines in English Literature, as he contemplates how suicide might end his turmoil:

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.

The phrase ‘To be, or not to be’ combines the devices of epanalepsis (same words, start and end) and antithesis (opposites, contrasting) to pose the quintessential, existential ‘question’—to exist, or not to exist. From its suggestion as suicidal ideation, the phrase—hinging and tipping over the turning point of the drama—can also be imagined as Hamlet questioning his ability ‘to be’ the revenger he needs to be. From there, it can be extrapolated as a universal kind of meditation—Everyman’s contemplation of their future and destiny.