“To Be or Not To Be” Analysis

Hi, all!

As a companion piece to our lectures on Hamlet, emotion, and madness, I’d like to give you a quick breakdown of why Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance of “To be, or not to be” is one of the best ones given my perspective on this play — apart from John Mulaney’s, of course.

First, start by watching Cumberbatch’s performance. 

 Once you’ve watched it, here are a couple of things to note, or to go back and look for:

1. The staging of this play is... a choice. Yes, he has a noose around his neck. Yes, he’s in a colorful military uniform. No, none of this is accurate to the text. Nothing is perfect, you can ignore this for now.

2. The tears — you can catch the light reflecting off his cheeks and by his nose around 0:38. Very few people play this scene as anguished. Kenneth Branagh, for example, plays this scene with a very different affect initially. 

But this is a speech about suicide, no matter how rational, and I know you all know that this is something that deeply pains people. I think that the inclusion of heavily-dramatized emotion for Cumberbatch speaks to how deep Hamlet’s conflict truly is on a personal level. It also underscores our point in this class that emotion does not impede the capability for rational thinking, but actually enhances it. Portrayals like Branagh’s that don't show the human emotion of anguish but instead a more edgy suicidal ideation I think do a disservice to Hamlet’s struggle and the main message of the play, which is about balancing emotion with action.

3. “Ay, there's the rub” around 1:04-1:05. This is what makes this speech stand out for me. Oftentimes, the “To be, or not to be” speech is Recited, with a capital R — since it is such an iconic soliloquy, a lot of actors tend to go onstage and Perform it without really embodying what each word means in the moment for that character. It feels rehearsed, a piece of showmanship, rather than organic to the thought process. An example of this would be Branagh’s performance, linked above, but Branagh is actually drawing on a much longer legacy of Hamlet portrayals; before him, the late great Laurence Olivier (whose performance I do like, but for different reasons) did "To be, or not to be" here. 

(I mean, come on. The DRAMA. Stunning.)

As great as it is, the difference between Branagh’s Olivier-esque performance and Cumberbatch’s is that Cumberbatch says the lines like he’s actually feeling them as they happen: his performance is organic. He starts off deeply sad and conflicted, and then with the line, “Ay, there's the rub,” you see Cumberbatch straighten up, change his whole facial expression, spread his hands as if to say, “Eureka!” As he’s speaking, Hamlet figures out the crux of the problem that he’s struggling with, and you can literally see the moment in Cumberbatch’s acting when he “gets it.” It’s a very believable performance of a sequential argument that builds on itself to the point of possible resolution, which is in my opinion a much truer interpretation of the text.

Andrew Scott (Cumberbatch’s Sherlock cast mate) has this same understanding of the soliloquy, but he plays the moment very differently.

He takes Branagh’s menacing energy and combines it with Cumberbatch’s style of argumentation. I think that Scott is very effective at conveying Hamlet weighing possible options in the beginning of the soliloquy: the way he looks off into the distance and waves his hands for example, and most notably his inflection on “OR” around 0:27. However, he doesn’t quite embody the same frenetic energy in his “Ay, there’s the rub” moment, and as a result his version seems a bit too “rehearsed” as well.

If you want to see interpretations of a “mad” Hamlet, Scott and David Tenant are your guys. Tenant’s “To be, or not to be” gets dark, and fast — you can see it in his face as his speech approaches its end. These are Hamlets that get overtaken by their internal conflict and it tears them apart psychologically. Cumberbatch’s Hamlet is a much more sympathetic portrayal of a guy who’s confused and deeply troubled by his own situation, doing his best to work through it with only the information he has and his reasoning skills. His feelings are bound up in that process, and I think that despite the numerous drawbacks of this production as a whole, his performance does really make it stand out as one of the best acted.

Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet is an interesting one to add to this list, because his “To be or not to be” happens only partially in Hamlet’s head: much of it is a voiceover. I don’t particularly like this portrayal of Hamlet, but this version follows in the Olivier tradition as well and was obviously not possible in Shakespeare’s day because all performances were onstage. Film gives us certain advantages over live performance, one of which are effects that show us the “interior” of a character’s mind.

People of color have also played Hamlet, which changes the way that this topic gets represented:

• Adrian Lester’s “To be, or not to be” is here. His blank, detached stare is something else.

•  Paapa Essiedu’s is here. I particularly like Essiedu’s “end them?” around 0:45 — really heartbreaking.

•  and Ruth Negga’s performance isn’t available online but it is really cool, as a woman playing Hamlet. A woman of color at that.

In the end, the lesson in this analysis is that the play we get actually depends on how the actor interprets the text! This is why we study textual ambiguity: the way that we interpret Shakespeare’s “original text” and the intentions behind it — which, as we learned, doesn’t truly exist — influences how actors embody these characters, and the lessons we learn from them.

And Shakespeare Live! from the Royal Shakespeare Company enacts this same struggle for us onstage in an amazingly meta performance featuring many of the actors listed here: Paapa Essiedu, Tim Minchin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Harriet Walter, David Tenant, Rory Kinnear, Sir Ian McKellan, Dame Judi Dench, and even Prince Charles himself come together to debate, live onstage, the best way to perform this iconic speech based by emphasizing certain words.

What do you think of other Hamlet performances compared to the ones in this list? Is there someone I missed? Are there other performances that made you think differently about a character? Go ahead and drop your thoughts in the comments if you have them!