To be, or not to be, misunderstood
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert Watson writes that the famous line doesn’t mean what ‘Hamnet’ thinks it means
Courtesy of Focus Features
English professor Robert Watson writes that “if we understand what two key words in the speech meant in Shakespeare’s time, instead of what they are now commonly assumed to mean, that line actually signifies something quite different” from what it conveys in the Oscar-nominated film.
| March 13, 2026
Robert N. Watson is a UCLA Distinguished Professor of English whose teaching focuses on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. His book for general audiences, “Shakespeare’s Tragedies: What Makes Them Great,” is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
The most famous line in all of Shakespeare — maybe the most famous line in any play ever — doesn’t mean what the Golden Globes Best Motion Picture winner and Oscars Best Picture nominee “Hamnet” (2025) makes it mean.
No doubt Paul Mescal, playing Shakespeare, wanted to say “To be, or not to be” — what actor wouldn’t want his turn? And it’s not surprising that “Hamnet”’s director, Chloé Zhao, wanted to include it for general audiences that might not recognize any of the movie’s other Shakespearean lines. But it’s nowhere in Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel on which the movie is based. And here it’s a mistake.
The scene from the film seems designed to assure us that Mescal’s Shakespeare actually feels as guilty as his wife wants him to feel for being away when (spoiler alert!) his son Hamnet dies of plague. The playwright stands in blue-black darkness on a jetty overlooking the River Thames, on the brink of a suicidal leap. Whether such a jump would actually suffice seems doubtful, given an earlier scene in which Mescal swims an impressive freestyle crawl. His main peril in this plunge would be illness from the fecal filth in the Renaissance-era Thames.
The more serious problem is that the scene assumes — as most people do, including most Shakespeare scholars — that the “To be, or not to be” monologue shows Hamlet deciding whether to kill himself. But if we understand what two key words in the speech meant in Shakespeare’s time, instead of what they are now commonly assumed to mean, that line actually signifies something quite different — and so does the rest of the soliloquy.
This is an excerpt from the Los Angeles Review of Books website. Read the full story.