To Be No More: A Prince’s Resignation

Dear Will,

We need to talk. And not in the way I usually “talk”—you know, those five-page monologues where I pause dramatically every six words and stare into the abyss while audiences scribble notes about “existential dread.” No, I mean a real conversation. Well… as real as it gets when you’re just ink and I’m just what spilled out of it.

So here it is:
I quit.
Not from the entire play—calm down, I know you’ve got bills to pay—but from that scene. Yes, that one. To be or not to be. The most over-quoted, over-parodied, over-dissected soliloquy in the entire history of English drama. I’m done.

Will, when you gave me those words, did you have any idea what you were doing? I don’t mean “literary genius” or “immortal phrasing.” I mean giving me the burden of asking the question that no one, not even God, has ever answered. You dropped this philosophical time bomb in my lap and just… walked away.

“To be, or not to be…” You made me the poster child for indecision. The prince of paralysis. The moody teenager of Western literature. People think I’m dramatic. People think I’m unstable. People think I’m weak. And honestly, maybe I was all those things—because of you.

Let’s break this down, Will.

Do you know how many high schoolers have stood in front of mirrors, butchered my speech, and then promptly used it as a way to avoid doing their math homework? Do you know how many actors have stared at skulls like that’s a normal Tuesday activity? Do you know how many professors have written 40-page essays trying to “unpack my psyche” like I’m a suitcase full of metaphors?

And you know what? Fine. Let the scholars babble. But what really gets me is that you gave me no resolution. You let me ask the question—“to exist or not to exist”—but you didn’t let me answer it. I wander through this story, unraveling like a wool sweater in a sword fight, with grief stuck in my throat and revenge burning in my chest, and you just leave me there. You hand me the burden of consciousness and then slam the curtain down before I can even begin to figure it out.

So I’m done, Will. I’m resigning from being your symbol of tortured genius.

I’m stepping down from being your tragic philosophical mascot.

Effective immediately.

Let Ophelia be confused and fragile. Let Laertes scream vengeance. Let Rosencrantz and Guildenstern… well, do whatever it is they do. I’m not going to be the martyr for everyone else’s narrative anymore.

You wrote me to be brilliant but burdened. I carried Denmark’s future on my back while everyone around me swung swords and plotted poisonings. You made me clever enough to see the machinery of this world and powerless enough to be crushed by it. You made me aware—and then made that awareness my punishment.

But I’m writing this to tell you: I’m choosing to be, and I’m choosing differently.

I’m not going to be a question anymore, Will. I’m going to be a declaration.

I am tired of contemplating the abyss. I want to scream into it. I want to climb out of it. I want to paint over it and write “NOPE” in giant bloody letters. I want to wear joy like a crown instead of madness like a curse.

I want to talk to Ophelia without pretending I don’t care. I want to mourn my father without vengeance tying my shoelaces together. I want to laugh at Polonius without stabbing him. I want to stop treating love like a trap and anger like a script and grief like a secret.

I want to be messy.
I want to be loud.
I want to exist, not endure.

So take your quill, dear playwright, and strike through that speech. Let someone else inherit the ghost of “to be or not to be.” I’ve carried that weight for four centuries. My back hurts. My soul hurts. My metaphorical spine is collapsing under the pressure of your poetry.

Let me write my own soliloquy now. Something less polished, more raw. Something like:

“To breathe and then shout,
To feel and not apologize,
To cry without needing a stage…”

That’s more of me now: not your version of me, my version.
The one that laughs without permission, that mourns without poetry, that chooses silence not as a dramatic pause, but as peace.
The one who no longer paces castle halls rehearsing despair for an audience that never asked for honesty, only eloquence.
I am no longer your symbol, your shadow-stitched prince of pause and pondering.
You can keep the skull. I don’t need it anymore.
Let it grin for someone else. Let it preach to players. I have no further business with bones. Sincerely,
Just Hamlet. Not your symbol.
P.S. Tell Macbeth he can have the tragic spotlight. He seems to enjoy the drama.