CATPAW

The Literature of “To Be”

So you’ve got the message, right? Try not to use too many “to be” verbs, especially in clusters. Well, check out the beginning this speech from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

To be or not to be—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. (3.1.64-68)

Here, in one of the most famous passages in English literature, Hamlet begins a speech contemplating what it means to commit suicide. “To be” verbs have their moment on the red carpet here, not only in “To be or not to be” but also in “that is the question” and “Whether ‘tis nobler.” The first action verb, after those four “to be” verbs, is “to suffer”--a kind of active passivity. The last two lines, which shift to taking action, appropriately switch to active verbs: take, opposing, end.

But those first four verbs are all forms of “to be.” What’s up with that?

The contrast between the initial group of “to be” verbs and the second group of active verbs implies one answer. Hamlet creates the intellectual drama of his speech by reversing the usual associations of life with movement and death with stillness. The rest of the speech considers the implications of suicidal action, with many more turns of thought, but the crucial idea setting those thoughts in motion involves this opposition between a life of (merely) being and a death of manly action (taking arms, opposing troubles, ending them). The verbs create the intellectual action of the speech.

In the context of the play, we can see another, subtler reason why Shakespeare chooses those “to be” verbs. When Hamlet says those lines, two men (the King and Polonius) are spying on him. The play does not specify whether Hamlet notices their presence. If a production does choose to have Hamlet notice his spies, his awareness of their presence explains why this speech sounds different from Hamlet’s other soliloquies, in which he is truly alone on stage. For instance, his first soliloquy--another speech about God’s prohibition of suicide--begins, “O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” (1.2.133-34). The dynamic, active verbs (melt, thaw, resolve) lead to an intense and detailed examination of Hamlet’s own predicament following the murder of his father.

By contrast, “To be or not to be” is abstract and academic. When Hamlet says “that is the question,” he portrays his speech as a debate exercise, considering both many perspectives on the morality of suicide, with no details about his plans to avenge his father and little of the self-directed intensity of his other speeches. Perhaps the “to be” verbs help Hamlet create this detached, academic approach to the same question he already addressed earlier; this time, Hamlet speaks strategically, using a different approach to trick the spies into thinking that they understand his situation. This way of reading the scene depends on the choices made by directors and actors, but you can see how reading the verbs of a speech might lead them to certain decisions about playing a character.

In other words, Shakespeare’s approach to this speech--or Hamlet’s--takes advantage of the bland side of “to be” verbs, using them to create a contrast with the more dynamic verbs that follow. Other texts infuse energy into “to be” verbs in a different way, by putting so much pressure on them that they turn against themselves. Sometimes “it is” makes you sit up, pay attention, and way, “Wait--is it?”

One of the key moments in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for example, involves the young Catherine Linton trying to explain to her caretaker, Nelly Dean, why she wants to marry her rich neighbor rather than Heathcliff, her childhood playmate. Catherine tries to explain her motivations in a speech that culminates with this short, powerful sentence: “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!”

The sentence works so well because it captures the two sides of Catherine’s argument. On the one hand, she asserts the overwhelming force of her connection to Heathcliff. What relationship could be more powerful than pure identification: I don’t just love him, I am him! On the other hand, Catherine’s statement is overstated, even to the point of becoming simply false and perhaps a little creepy. (You’re not going to find a line of “I am you!” cards for Valentine’s Day in your local Hallmark store.) Catherine is not Heathcliff, and she uses her statement to avoid Nelly’s questions about love, marriage, and the choices Catherine needs to make. The identity-linking function of the “to be” verb brings out both the depth and the limits of Catherine’s commitment to Heathcliff in a simple four-word sentence.

Another famous literary moment puts a similar weight on verbs of being: in “Sacred Emily,” Gertrude Stein wrote “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” You can read this as an insistence on the stability of the word rose. In this reading, the repetition of “rose” does not allow you to deviate from the solid, consistent thingness of the word, the natural object it refers to, or both. However, you can also see the line as conveying something like the opposite of a solid sense of “rose.” The first use of the word, for example, has no “a”: is “rose” the same as “a rose”? Or does the first instance refer to an idea of “rose,” and the second an instance of that idea? The first instance is also capitalized, perhaps simply because it begins a sentence, but the capital letter also opens the possibility that “Rose” functions as a personal name, a proper noun. And, to put it simply, if Rose is a person, then Rose is not a rose. And we’ve made it only to the second rose! What does it do to add two more: repetition can reinforce a point, but it can also undermine meaning by overinsistence. At minimum, the fourth “rose” (or third, if you put the initial “Rose” in a different category) creates a different effect simply by being the fourth one, with the meanings and echoes of the others informing the reader’s experience. To this day, more than a century later, critics and writers still argue about their opposing perceptions of Stein’s sentence.

Whereas Stein’s sentence uses “to be” as a hinge for swinging the noun “rose,” Toni Morrison uses “to be” to make verbs into the main agents of this sentence: “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Morrison’s sentence provides an especially clear example of masterfully working against common writing advice. The sentence has two parts, each built on a striking verb: “to free” and then “to claim.” Normally, writers try to avoid taking those verbs and transforming them into subjects of “to be” verbs; in most cases, the repetition of “was” does not energize a sentence in Beloved.

In this case, however, Morrison’s sentence uses the verbs as active, striking subjects. The sentence compels the reader to focus on the difference between freeing and claiming. Putting those words at the beginning of each clause ensures that we see the contrast clearly, and the contrast gains even more sharpness because the rest of the words are so ordinary: was, thing, was, another. Rewriting the sentence to use active verbs makes it longer and harder to follow, as in “You could free yourself, but that action differed from claiming that freed self.” “To be” verbs work best when you want to define things, to say how they are. Morrison’s sentence illustrates the power of a well-placed definition.