"What a piece of work is a man!" is a phrase within a monologue by Prince Hamlet in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Hamlet is reflecting, at first admiringly, and then despairingly, on the human condition.
The monologue, spoken in the play by Prince Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II, Scene 2, follows in its entirety. Rather than appearing in blank verse, the typical mode of composition of Shakespeare's plays, the speech appears in straight prose:
The speech was fully omitted from Nicholas Ling's 1603 First Quarto, which reads simply:
This version has been argued to have been a bad quarto, a tourbook copy, or an initial draft. By the 1604 Second Quarto, the speech is essentially present but punctuated differently:
Then, by the 1623 First Folio, it appeared as:
J. Dover Wilson, in his notes in the New Shakespeare edition, observed that the Folio text "involves two grave difficulties", namely that according to Elizabethan thought angels could apprehend but not act, making "in action how like an angel" nonsensical, and that "express" (which as an adjective means "direct and purposive") makes sense applied to "action", but goes very awkwardly with "form and moving".[1]
These difficulties are remedied if we read it thus:
A source well known to Shakespeare is Psalm 8, especially verse 5: "You have made [humans] a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned them with glory and honor."
Scholars have pointed out this section's similarities to lines written by Montaigne:
However, rather than being a direct influence on Shakespeare, Montaigne may have merely been reacting to the same general atmosphere of the time, making the source of these lines one of context rather than direct influence.[2]