How to memorize a Shakespeare monologue (starting with To be, or not to be)

The fastest way to memorize a Shakespeare monologue is to stop treating it as words and start treating it as an argument: work out what the speaker is trying to decide, learn the speech one thought at a time, out loud and on your feet, and let the verse tell you when you have got a word wrong. That is how to memorize Hamlet's To be, or not to be, and it is how to memorize any of the others. Shakespeare is harder to read than modern dialogue, but once you understand it, it is easier to learn, because it was written for actors who had days, not weeks, to get it into their heads.

This guide walks through the method on the most famous speech in the language, the one in Act 3, Scene 1 of Hamlet. It works whether you have an audition on Friday, a recitation for English class, or have simply always meant to know it by heart.

Understand it before you learn a word of it

You cannot hold on to a sentence you do not understand. Memorizing sounds you have not decoded is like learning a phone number in a language you do not speak: it goes in, and it falls out the moment you are nervous.

So before you try to learn anything, read the speech through and say, in your own words, what each sentence means. Every speech on the scene page has a plain-English version beside it and short notes on the hard words. (Those translations and notes are AI-generated, and they are a rehearsal aid, not scholarship; check anything you plan to stake a grade on.) Look up every word you are not sure of. Contumely is insolence. Fardels are burdens. A bodkin is a small dagger. A rub, in ay, there's the rub, is an obstacle in the game of bowls that knocks the ball off course.

Then ask the actor's question: what does Hamlet want, at this moment, and what changes in him between the first line and the last? If you can answer that, you have the spine you will hang the words on.

How to memorize Hamlet: learn the thoughts, then the lines

To be, or not to be looks like a single block of thirty-odd lines. It is actually a short chain of thoughts, each of which leads to the next, and if you learn the chain, the lines come with it:

1. The question. To be, or not to be: that is the question: is it nobler to put up with what fortune throws at you, or to fight it and end it?
2. Death is only sleep. To die: to sleep; / No more. That would be a relief, a consummation / Devoutly to be wish'd.
3. But sleep means dreams. To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub. Nobody knows what dreams come after death, and that is what keeps us alive.
4. The list of what we put up with instead. The whips and scorns of time, and everything after it.
5. Why we put up with it. The dread of something after death, / The undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns.
6. The conclusion. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all: thinking too much kills the will to act.
7. Interruption. He sees Ophelia, and the speech stops.

Write those seven beats on a card in your own words. Learn the card first. Now, when you dry in the middle of a line, you do not have to find the next word; you only have to remember where the argument goes next, and the words for it are usually waiting.

Then learn the speech one beat at a time. Say the first beat until you can say it without looking, add the second, run the two together, add the third. Always run from the top. The joins between thoughts are where people go blank, and running from the top is how you practise the joins.

Let the verse catch your mistakes

Most of Shakespeare's big speeches are in iambic pentameter: ten syllables to a line, in a rough da-DUM da-DUM rhythm. You do not need to scan it properly to use it. You only need to notice that when you get a line wrong, it usually stops sounding right.

Say Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer. Now say "whether it is nobler in your mind to suffer" and listen to it limp. The meter is a checksum. Modern dialogue, which has no rhythm to lean on, lets you paraphrase without noticing; verse does not.

Two habits make the most of this:

• Learn the line endings. Shakespeare's lines often end on the important word, and the next line picks up from it. Knowing that suffer ends line two and fortune ends line three gives you fixed posts to steer between.
• Keep the punctuation. The Globe edition this site uses has its own colons and semicolons, and they are breath marks as much as grammar. To die: to sleep; / No more is three small steps, and if you learn it as three steps, it stays as three steps.

The list in the middle, and how not to scramble it

Every long speech has a stretch where the speaker piles things up, and that stretch is where actors swap the order. In To be, or not to be it is this passage:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes

There is no logical order to recover here, so give it one. One way that works is a little story, with a face for each item: time with a whip, a bully, a sneering grandee, a lover who has left, a lawyer who never calls back, an official behind a desk, and finally a good, patient person being kicked by someone who doesn't deserve to be kicking. Picture them in a line, one after another, and walk past them as you speak.

Another is the first-letter method. Write the first letter of every word on a card, punctuation and all:

F w w b t w a s o t, / T o w, t p m c,

Then speak from the letters alone. It is clumsy for a day and remarkably effective by the third, because it forces you to recall rather than recognise, and recall is what you will need when there is no page.

Say it out loud, every time

Reading a speech silently and saying it are different skills, and only one of them is the one you are being asked to perform. Learn it out loud from the first session, at the volume you will use, standing up. Move as you speak: cross the room on one beat, stop on the next. Memory ties itself to the body, and a speech learned walking the length of a kitchen comes back more easily than one learned in a chair.

Hamlet himself has opinions on this. When he coaches the players in the next scene, his first instruction is about the voice: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.

Two more things that help more than they should:

• Learn the end too. People rehearse the opening so often that the last third is always the weakest. Every few sessions, start from the last beat and work backwards.
• Sleep on it. A short session today, another tomorrow and another the day after beats one long session the night before. The night in between does a lot of the work.

Learn the cue, not just the monologue

A monologue in a play is never really alone. Someone speaks before it, someone usually speaks after, and in an audition or a performance the first thing that goes is the start, because you are waiting for a moment rather than counting down to one.

To be, or not to be begins after Polonius hides himself and the King: I hear him coming: let's withdraw, my lord. It ends when Hamlet sees Ophelia, Soft you now! / The fair Ophelia!, and she answers him with Good my lord, / How does your honour for this many a day? Rehearse it with those lines around it, even if you are performing it alone. It changes how the speech starts (Hamlet walks into a room he thinks is empty) and it gives you somewhere to land.

Rehearsing it with Yorick

Most of the steps above you can do with a pencil and a kitchen. The one that is hard alone is the last: hearing the other parts, coming in on the cue, and finding out whether you can really say the speech without the page in front of you. That is what we built Yorick to do.

Here is how to memorize Hamlet's soliloquy with it:

• Cast yourself as Hamlet. On Cast Your Characters, mark Hamlet as Me and leave everyone else as Yorick. Polonius, the King and Ophelia are read by default in human voices, from volunteer LibriVox recordings that someone has listened to speech by speech, so the cue you are coming in on sounds like a person.
• Loop the stretch you are learning. Set a loop from Polonius's I hear him coming to Ophelia's reply, and it repeats until you stop it. You get the cue, your speech, and the answer, as many times as you can stand.
• Let it listen. When it is your turn, Yorick listens through the microphone and fills in the words as it hears them. It does not need you word-perfect to move on, which is what you want in the first week, when the point is to keep going rather than stop at every slip.
• Then check what it heard. At the end, Review plays back each of your lines with a mark for how clearly it came through and a comparison against the text. A cross on the same line three days running is your weak spot, and now you know which one it is. Re-record just that line until it is right.
• Look up a line without leaving the scene. Tap any line to open its translation, notes and context, or ask the AI a question about it ("Why does Hamlet say he instead of I here?"). The AI's answers are AI-generated and labelled as such; treat them like a well-read friend, not a professor.
• Slow it down. The gear sets how fast Yorick reads, so you can slow the other parts while you are still finding your place.

Yorick shows the text while you perform, so once you are close to off book, look away from the screen and only glance back when you are stuck. On iPhone you can also put the phone in your pocket and run the scene from the lock screen, though speech recognition pauses while the phone is locked, so you press next after your own lines.

It works on iPhone, Android, and in Chrome or Edge on a computer, and you can start rehearsing before you pay for anything.

The same method, on any monologue

None of this is special to Hamlet. Take Macbeth's To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow: the thoughts are the news that his wife is dead, time crawling on, the brief candle, and life as a bad actor in a story that means nothing. Its trap is the repetition, and the fix is the same as for Hamlet's list: know why each image follows the last, and the order holds.

If you are choosing a speech rather than learning one you have been given, the reader's collections of Shakespeare monologues for men, for women and short monologues for auditions link straight to each speech in its scene, with the lines either side of it. And if you are new enough to the plays that you are not sure where to start, our guide to which Shakespeare play to start with has one scene to open in each.

Whichever speech it is: understand it, break it into thoughts, learn it out loud, and rehearse it with the lines around it. Then say it to someone.