To Be, or Merely to Exist? Riz Ahmed Reopens Hamlet’s Question for Our Time — Is America Better Yet?

More than four centuries ago, William Shakespeare put six words into the mouth of a grieving prince:

“To be, or not to be.”

They may be the most familiar words Shakespeare ever wrote.

Familiar enough that we can stop hearing them.

Actor and writer Riz Ahmed heard something different.

In an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, Ahmed spoke with host Tonya Mosley about his modern film adaptation of Hamlet. Mosley noted that generations of students have commonly encountered the famous soliloquy as Hamlet contemplating whether life itself is worth continuing.

Ahmed rejects that reading.

“I don't think it's about suicide at all.”

His interpretation leads somewhere more unsettling.

Ahmed hears Hamlet asking what a human being should do when confronted by a world that is plainly unjust.

You can endure it.

You can survive it.

You can be.

Or you can resist it, knowing resistance may cost you dearly.

The difference between being and living

One small word carries enormous weight in Ahmed's reading.

Be.

Not flourish.

Not live freely.

Not live with dignity.

Just be.

Ahmed points to Hamlet's catalogue of life's injuries: oppression, unfairness, injustice and insult.

One choice is to continue existing while absorbing them.

The other is to oppose them.

And opposition carries risk.

Ahmed describes the question as whether people are willing to “pay the price of true resistance.”

That interpretation changes the soliloquy.

It changes it from a private question about one man's existence into a public question about conscience.

And that makes an old play remarkably uncomfortable in 2026.

What do we tolerate so we can keep our lives comfortable?

Most injustice does not arrive at our own front door.

It happens to somebody else.

Someone else loses a job unfairly.

Someone else's child is afraid.

Someone else is detained.

Someone else is denied a right.

Someone else is targeted because of race, religion, nationality, politics, poverty, gender or identity.

Someone else discovers that a system they trusted does not work the way they thought it did.

We see it.

Then we have a decision to make.

That decision usually isn't as dramatic as Hamlet's.

For most of us, resistance doesn't mean risking death. It might mean risking an argument. A friendship. A promotion. An invitation. Some money. Our reputation. A comfortable silence.

It can mean saying no when everyone around us has decided that saying nothing is easier.

That is where Ahmed's interpretation becomes larger than Shakespeare.

The question becomes:

How much injustice are we willing to live beside because opposing it might cost us something?

The world we thought we lived in

Ahmed offered another observation during the interview that may be even more relevant.

He described Hamlet as someone “grieving the illusion that the world was ever a fair place.”

Ahmed said that feeling resonates now because people may have known intellectually that the world was unfair, yet still find themselves shocked when its unfairness becomes unmistakable.

There is something painfully recognizable in that.

Societies survive partly because people believe their institutions will ultimately work.

Courts will apply the law.

Elections will matter.

Police will obey rules.

Governments will respect limits.

Journalists will uncover wrongdoing.

Citizens will care when wrongdoing is uncovered.

Those institutions have never worked perfectly. American history makes that impossible to claim.

But democracy depends on something more modest:

The belief that failures can be challenged and corrected.

Lose that belief and something important changes.

The question is no longer whether the system failed.

It becomes whether anybody will bother trying to repair it.

Resistance is not violence

There is an important distinction to make here.

Ahmed's discussion concerns Hamlet's language of taking up arms against oppression. That is his literary interpretation of Shakespeare.

It should not be mistaken for an argument that political violence is the answer to injustice today.

In a democracy, resistance has many other forms.

Voting is resistance.

Speaking when silence would be easier is resistance.

Peaceful protest is resistance.

Going to court is resistance.

Representing someone who has little power is resistance.

Documenting what happened is resistance.

Requesting public records is resistance.

Refusing an unlawful order can be resistance.

Publishing evidence that powerful people would rather keep hidden can be resistance.

Sometimes resistance is simply insisting:

Show me the evidence.

The dangerous moment is when we stop asking

A government does not need every citizen to approve of everything it does.

It needs something much easier.

It needs enough people to become exhausted.

To decide that the story is too complicated.

That politics is too ugly.

That nothing will change.

That somebody else will handle it.

That it isn't their problem.

That they have work tomorrow.

That they have children to feed.

That they are tired.

All perfectly human reasons.

And perhaps that is why Hamlet's question survives.

The greatest threat to injustice may not always be outrage.

And the greatest protection for injustice may not always be enthusiastic support.

Sometimes it is resignation.

People can recognize that something is wrong and nevertheless learn to live beside it.

They continue to be.

There is another side to the question

Resistance carries its own danger.

Certainty can become fanaticism.

A person convinced that a cause is righteous can stop listening, stop questioning evidence and eventually justify terrible things in the name of fighting terrible things.

So Ahmed's reading should leave us with another question too:

How do we resist injustice without becoming unjust ourselves?

Perhaps the answer begins with methods rather than ideology.

Evidence.

Law.

Due process.

Nonviolence.

Accountability.

The willingness to discover that the person we distrust was right.

And the willingness to discover that we were wrong.

Those constraints can be frustrating.

They are also what distinguish democratic resistance from vengeance.

Hamlet never gives us an easy answer

That may be why Shakespeare still matters.

He doesn't hand Hamlet a slogan.

He gives him doubt.

Hamlet questions himself relentlessly.

He hesitates.

He searches.

He gets things wrong.

He sees corruption around him and also recognizes uncertainty within himself.

Four centuries later, Ahmed has taken perhaps the most famous question in English literature and made one word inside it difficult to ignore.

Be.

Is existence enough?

If we can see injustice and comfortably accommodate ourselves to it, are we living according to our values or merely surviving alongside their violation?

And if opposing injustice demands something from us, how much are we actually prepared to give?

There will never be one answer for everyone.

There shouldn't be.

But perhaps there is value in asking the question before circumstances answer it for us.

What would you risk for something you genuinely believe is right?

Your comfort?

Your reputation?

Your livelihood?

Your freedom?

And where would you draw the line?

Maybe Hamlet has lasted more than 400 years because “To be, or not to be” was never only Hamlet's question.

It is ours.

I write for you.

— Roberto