To Be or Not to Be ?i?upāla: Which Version of the Key Speech in Māgha's Great Poem Did He Really Write?

摘要

Imagine that the famous soliloquy in act 3 of Shakespeare's Hamlet existed in two completely different versions, in only one of which Hamlet is in doubt about the value of existence and action; in the hypothetical alternate version Hamlet would express his full confidence about the right mode of being and behaving. Had such a radical divergence existed in the text of Shakespeare's most famous play, this fact would certainly not have gone unnoticed. Careful scholarly attention and probably many monographs would have been devoted to the study of this textual problem: to examining the variants and their provenances, to determining, if possible, which of the two soliloquies is original or more authentic, and to explaining how the other version came to be included in the text. Scholars would not have limited their attention to text-critical studies of this one passage but would certainly have explored its connection to the larger work of which it forms a part. The question of which version best fits the style and structure of the play, its development, and the character of its protagonist would certainly have been considered and might well have been a key issue, if not the key issue, in Hamlet studies.~1