To be or not to be — the other version
Most English speakers are at least passingly familiar with Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. But not everyone has seen or heard the version of the monologue from the First Quarto edition of Hamlet. It’s quite different!
HAMLET
To be, or not to be, ay, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all.
No, to sleep, to dream, ay, marry, there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursèd damned.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who’d bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor,
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged,
The taste of hunger, or a tyrant’s reign,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweat under this weary life,
When that he may his full quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which puzzles the brain, and doth confound the sense,
Which makes us rather bear those evils we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Ay, that. Oh, this conscience makes cowards of us all.
