Essay: Discuss the placement and dramatic function of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy in Hamlet

In his response to the adjusted position of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy in The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet, David Tennant asserted that uprooting the soliloquy from ‘Act III Scene 1 to its location in the First Quarto just seemed to make more sense’. The soliloquy, in rehearsal practice, was initially staged in the Folio position, yet at the ‘beginning of the fourth week’ director Gregory Doran manoeuvred ‘To be’ from Act III and instead approximated the First Quarto (Q1) placing, which brings forward Hamlet’s verse by some six-hundred-and-seven lines. I, like Doran, will experiment with the dramaturgical placing of ‘To be’ in both environs, and initially propose that the Q1 placement does indeed provide a more ‘logical’ arrangement, but also what Ann Thompson observes as a ‘fast […] and less ruminative’ theatrical pace. The rapidity that Q1’s structure brings correspondingly alters the dramatic function of ‘To be’; becoming what Doran pencilled in his script as a progressive ‘springboard’ device in the architectural arrangement of Polonius’ eavesdropping plan (see Appendix, fig.1). Yet in engaging with Thompson and Tennant’s notion of ‘logicality’, I will simultaneously question, by turning to the Folio, whether one should be trying to find the ‘logical’ and merely think of the soliloquy as a quickening mechanism, when this ignores the illogical digression that is central to the Folio’s oscillatory action, and to the unravelling of Hamlet’s mind.
Before this essay expands on how moving ‘To be or not to be’ engenders a greater structural swiftness and logicality in the earlier Q1 placement, it is important to outline the deletion and interpolation of material in the First Quarto. Polonius, in the Folio, plots to discover ‘the very cause of Hamlets Lunacie’, by using Ophelia as pivot: ‘Ile loose my Daughter to him’ (II.ii.49-162). This is followed with the ‘fishmonger’ episode, Hamlet’s encounter with Rosincrance and Guildensterne, and the Prince’s first staging with the players to ‘catch the Conscience of the King’ (II.ii.174-605). It is only after the breakage of a twenty-four-hour stage day that Hamlet soliloquises, and thereafter casts Ophelia off to a nunnery. However, in Q1, the King and Corambis’ (Polonius) ‘eavesdropping plan’ is followed in quick succession by the shortened ‘To be or not to be’ verse and Hamlet’s confrontation with Ophelia. Unlike the Folio, there are no interposed events between the scenes, nor the Act II-III division (ll.821-923).
The omission of six-hundred-and-seven lines in Q1 therefore transposes the ‘To be’ verse from its recognised position in the Folio, and accordingly brings a cogency to the staged series of events. The soliloquy functions as a dramatic vehicle and thus facilitates the theatrical fluidity and linearity of Polonius’ eavesdropping operation. This is clearly enabled by the deletion of such a sizeable portion of text; roughly seventeen percent of the play occurs between Polonius’ strategizing from Act II, Scene ii to Act III, Scene i in the Folio. As such, a structural ‘fusion’ of two stage days occurs, leading to what Giorgio Melchiori identifies as one ‘single, continuous acting sequence’. The condensed time and placement of ‘To be’ in Q1 enables Polonius’ test not only to operate linearly in succession, but also immediately, for Hamlet’s entrance ‘poring vppon a book’ acts as a signifier for Ophelia to ‘walke aloofe’ and ‘heare the effect of all his hart’ (ll.824-826). ‘To be’, in this essence, fulfils Doran’s idea of the soliloquy functioning as a metaphorical ‘springboard’ in between the plot and the catalysed outcome. Instead of stalling the action for a whole stage day to see ‘this frensie, which now possesseth him’, ‘To be’, just twenty-one lines later, directly provides the ‘melancholy’ and ‘distraction’ that Polonius is searching for (ll.808-812). In the Folio, the structural pattern is deeply protracted by Hamlet’s meeting with the players and his discourse with Rosincrance and Guildensterne. Consequently, the energetic pace generated from Polonius’ instigation of the test to its ‘climax’ when Ophelia confronts the Prince is shattered, and rather we are left with the tarnished ‘residue’ of this action when it arrives later in Act III, Scene 1 (l.859). ‘To be’, when brought forward, empowers this climax as the verse works in a threefold sequential structure: plans are ‘formed’, observes Lukas Erne, and with the aid of the soliloquy as mediator, they are then ‘carried out’. The early Quarto’s emendation of ‘To be’ thus straightens out the rather oscillatory, circular arrangement of the Folio and instead dramatically tightens the structure of Polonius’ test, which leads L.L. Schücking to render it ‘incomparably more logical’ and swiftly effective.
Yet this fixation with the Q1 placement of ‘To be’ as being more ‘logical’, as though bringing a sudden comprehensiveness to the play, is both ignorant and reductive. While the Q1 location structurally ‘makes more sense’ – reducing the function of the soliloquy to that of a meagre ‘springboard’ in the acceleration of Polonius’ stratagem loses the very essence of the discursive illogicality that one identifies with Hamlet. I therefore argue that the dramatic function of ‘To be’, in the Folio, is precisely to denote and mirror the illogical. It dramatically suspends Polonius’ scheme, and in turn teases out the perturbed, fragmented nature of grievance. Simon Godwin’s cast, in the RSC’s most recent production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, stringently followed the Folio text and placement. From Polonius’ entrance and report to Claudius and Gertrude, ‘I will breefe. Your Noble Sonne is mad’, to Cordelia’s final line in the nunnery scene, ‘T’haue seene what I haue seene: see what I see’, the action collectively amounted to just shy of three quarters of an hour (II.ii.86-III.i.161). Gregory Doran’s Hamlet, which transported the soliloquy forward to Act II Scene ii, reduced the same plot frame to a mere twelve minutes and twenty seconds. While Doran’s production proves that the Q1 positioning offers an agility, it overlooks the irrational despondency that is so central to Hamlet as a play, and more specifically to the very workings of Polonius’ plot. Instead the Folio location of ‘To be’ allows both the audience, and the metatheatrical spectators that are Claudius and his counsellor, to witness a greater vacillation of Hamlet’s emotional state as he diverges from the championed, ‘I know my courfe’ at the end of Act II, to the suicidal, ‘To dye, to sleepe’, at the beginning of Act III (II.ii.598-III.i.59). Whilst this may not ‘logically’ and linearly ‘make sense’, this is precisely ‘the point’. The late placing of ‘To be’ gets to the crux of what it is to mourn. Hamlet dips in and out of certainty to agitated versification, and while Erne argues that the soliloquy’s musing on suicide, when located in Act III, infers that Hamlet ‘seems to have forgotten about his project’, I argue that this is exactly the idea: the function of ‘To be’ mirrors the uncontrollable, frantic nature of grief. Unlike in Q1, where the climax is Ophelia’s entrance, in the Folio it is the soliloquy itself. Hamlet’s iambic verse, in Act III, Scene 1, thus digresses away from Polonius’ plan, and yet is ironically pivotal in illuminating the importance of regressing into six-hundred-and-seven lines of speech, for the ‘Melancholly’ that the King and Queen are so desperately trying to extrapolate is only presented more clearly with ‘To be’ in this ‘out of ioynt’ location (I.v.189-III.i.165).
‘To be’, in the Folio placement, is structurally central in delaying the action and in turn outwardly projecting what is in Hamlet’s ‘minde to suffer’ (III.1.56). Yet I want to delve a little deeper and ‘vnfold’ another layer of digression (I.i.2). In disembodying the idea of ‘placement’, I will look at the positioning and lineation of the lines in Q1’s construction of ‘To be’ alongside the Folio’s lengthier version. While many directors, including Doran, use the Folio text when exercising the Q1 arrangement (see fig.1&2), looking at the difference in speech here will prove that it is not only the Folio’s location of ‘To be’ that best mirrors the illogical, but also the repetition and parenthetical structures of the 1623 text that work in synthesis to reflect Hamlet’s meandering thoughts. Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ verse, in the 1603 Quarto, is twenty-three pentameter lines, in comparison to the Folio where it is increased to thirty-five. Among prominent deletions in the Q1 text, the Folio divagates and inwardly pauses on distinct images leading to its protraction. Hamlet rhetorically repeats, ‘To dye, to fleepe, / No more; and by a fleepe, to fay we end […] ‘To dye: to fleepe – / To fleepe: perchance to Dreame’ in the Folio, whereas in the Quarto this thought is said immediately after ‘I there’s the point’, and it does not return (III.i.55-89). Much like the excursive positioning of ‘To be’ in the Folio, the repetition of this suicidal contemplation, and its recurring placement within the soliloquy, conveys the illogical linguistically. The very lines seem to diverge and stray from each theme, and this too can be seen in Thompson’s emendation of the line:
‘(The vndifcoured Country, from whofe Brone / No Traueller returnes)’ (III.i.77-79).
These parentheses are not apparent in the early Quarto, and yet again they accentuate the clashing of thought as Hamlet wanders away from the image of ‘weary’ ‘dread… after death’ to consider the unreturning traveller (III.i.76-77). The parentheses themselves signify a digression, collapsing and fragmenting Hamlet’s thoughts away from images in the soliloquy, and thus further from the action around it. The rapidity created by the placement in Q1, and the reduction of thirteen lines within the pentameter structure, means that the quarto framework simply rushes past the illogicality. Yet in the Folio, the repetition and the position of the parenthetic injections within the verse remain in constant dialogue with its function as a regressor of action, thus augmenting the illogical.
As an afterthought, one may question whether ‘To be’, in all its despondency and ambiguity ever really fits in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet at all. Indeed, ‘To be’, as a detachable and moveable entity as this study has proven, could be placed in any formation and it would never be in direct discourse with the preceding or succeeding lines. The proposition offered in this work, however, has aimed to demonstrate that trying to piece and make Hamlet logically sequential by rearranging the verse’s placement, as the Q1 transposition does, abridges and diminishes the despondency of grief that is at the crux of the soliloquy’s function in the Folio. A dramatic pace is not, therefore, the answer to the ‘question’, but rather digression, which allows ‘To be’ a ‘great pith and moment’ in a way that Q1 passes by (III.1.85).