To say that ‘to be or not to be’ is the most frequent literary quotation ever is trite. To investigate how it came to be so famous is interesting because the success story of these Anglo-Saxon monosyllables involves significant aspects of William Shakespeare’s intertextual creativity and the creativity that he stimulated in others. Before turning to the first texts that can definitely be said to present ‘to be or not to be’ as a quotation, the author wants to consider what made this phrase so useful to Shakespeare and how he made it quotable in a way that earlier and contemporary texts could not hope to match. The semantic and structural characteristics of ‘to be or not to be’, combined with Shakespeare’s presentation in Hamlet, enabled the simple string of words to emerge from the general phrase stock of English as a recognizable quotation.