Reading Hamlet: One Line, as Many Meanings as Voices

1. Why Read It

My first meeting with Hamlet was not a good one: an excerpt in a school textbook. It was the opening of Act 3, Scene 1, given the heading “To be, or not to be.” I took it for a philosophical poem, memorised it, quoted a line in an essay, and counted the play read.

The second time was in a reading room, with Zhu Shenghao’s Chinese translation, and I read all five acts in one sitting. What made me put the book down was not the plot but something I should have noticed earlier: the most famous speech in the play is not delivered in private — two men are hidden behind the arras. The “melancholy prince” I thought I knew had been standing under other people’s ears all along.

What changed my reading was saying it out loud. One empty afternoon I spread Act 3, Scene 1 on the desk and read the same line three times: first the textbook Hamlet, melancholy and hesitant; then imagining the listeners behind the curtain, playing it to an unseen audience; then as a man at the end of his rope, talking himself toward a decision. Only after the third pass did “the question” stop feeling like a question and start feeling like an action.

2. The Skeleton First

Reading a play is not reading a novel: a novel’s narration tells you what a character is thinking, while a play tells you almost nothing, only the lines and a few stage directions. So I carry three maps:

One caution: nearly everyone in this play is acting — Hamlet feigns madness, Claudius feigns affection, Polonius feigns experience. So watch one thing as you read: is this line meant for the person standing next to him, or for himself? Miss that, and a character flattens into a “personality” rather than a live response to a situation.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On “thinking”: the soliloquy has eavesdroppers

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

— Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

My own working translation: To live, or not to live — that is the question.

I once took this for the most inward line in the play; it is in fact its most public one. In this scene Claudius and Polonius are hidden behind the arras, and Ophelia has been pushed out as bait; when Hamlet walks in, he is not alone.

My note: once you see that, the speech can be delivered in two completely different ways. Play it straight, and it is a man turning something over in the small hours. Play it as performance, and it is a man who knows he is being listened to, making his words bottomless. Shakespeare never tells us which to choose; the gap is the scene.

On “man”: he praises humanity to informers

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!

— Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

My own working translation: What a piece of work a man is! How noble in reason, how boundless in ability, how finished and admirable in form and movement, how like an angel in action, how like a god in understanding!

These lines are usually lifted out as the Renaissance hymn to mankind; but his audience here is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, sent by the king to sound him out.

My note: whether a sentence is true often depends on whom it is spoken in front of. The same praise, said to a friend, is lyric; said to an informer, it is a change of subject. Not long after, Hamlet undercuts it himself — at the very moment he is disillusioned with humanity, he first raises it to the ceiling and then drops it. You cannot see that turn in a quotation.

On “brevity”: an aphorism from the least brief man in the play

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, / I will be brief.

— Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2 (Polonius)

My own working translation: Since brevity is the soul of wit, and wordiness its limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.

警告“Brevity is the soul of wit” is spoken by Polonius, and Polonius is the wordiest man in the play. He announces that he will be brief while already several clauses deep and still nowhere near the point.

My note: this is one of Shakespeare’s comic devices — letting a character use the handsomest sentence to expose his own flaw, while he himself cannot hear it. The trap with such lines is to copy them out as aphorisms; the moment they leave that mouth, the joke turns back into a maxim.

On “readiness”: four acts of “thinking” collapse into a single word

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

— Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2

My own working translation: If it is now, it will not be late; if it is not now, it will be now; if it is not now, it will still come. Readiness is all.

着重点The play spends four acts asking whether to act. Here, suddenly, it stops asking. “Readiness” gathers up all the earlier circling and self-auditing into a single word.

My note: this is often read as fatalism, but it looks more like a change of stance. He had been waiting for a conclusive reason before moving; here he takes the threshold away: not act once you have thought it through, but hold yourself ready and let what will happen happen. Only in the fifth act does the play let a decision stand without an argument attached.

4. What I Actually Use

1. Ask first who else is in the room. Before a long speech, add one silent question: who is present — behind the arras, on stage, just out the door? Almost nothing in Shakespeare is spoken to the air; restore the listeners and the tone usually surfaces on its own.
2. Read a soliloquy three times, one voice each. Once melancholy, once exhausted, once performed for someone else. Decide only afterwards which one you believe. It is more useful than hunting through the notes for whether Hamlet really loves Ophelia.
3. Read one scene in two editions. Take Act 3, Scene 1, or Act 5, Scene 2, and read it once in the second quarto and once in the Folio, circling the differences. You find that even the “settled text” does not exist — and that a good share of the worry comes from the edition itself.

5. Closing

What Hamlet taught me had nothing to do with “the meaning of life” and everything to do with how to read a single line. It pulled me out of the search for a central message: nothing in the play can be lifted out and kept, because every line answers the one before it and keeps an eye on whoever is nearby. By the end, the line I remember is not “To be, or not to be” but the space between it and the lines around it.

Next: the Meditations — a Roman emperor’s notebook written to himself. Oddly, it shares this play’s question: when a person is alone, whom is he actually addressing? I want to see how philosophy writes to itself.