Edition: HamletHamlet, Q2 Modern
1.1
Enter Barnardo and Francisco, two sentinels.1.1.Sp11Barnardo
Enter Horatio and Marcellus.
Exit Francisco.
Well, good night.
If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.
1.1.Sp24Marcellus
Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him,
Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us.
Therefore I have entreated him along,
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That if again this apparition come
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.
1.1.Sp26Barnardo
Sit down awhile,
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story,
What we have two nights seen.
1.1.Sp28Barnardo
Enter Ghost.
Last night of all,
When yond same star that’s westward from the pole
Had made his course t’illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one—
1.1.Sp36Horatio
Exit Ghost.
What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee speak!
1.1.Sp41Barnardo
How now, Horatio, you tremble and look pale.
Is not this something more than fantasy?
What think you on’t?
1.1.Sp42Horatio
Before my God, I might not this believe
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of mine own eyes.
1.1.Sp44Horatio
As thou art to thyself.
Such was the very armor he had on
When he the ambitious Norway combated.
So frowned he once, when in an angry parle
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
’Tis strange.
1.1.Sp45Marcellus
Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour,
With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch.
1.1.Sp46Horatio
In what particular thought to work I know not,
But in the gross and scope of mine opinion
This bodes some strange eruption to our state.
1.1.Sp47Marcellus
Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch
So nightly toils the subject of the land,
And with such daily cost of brazen cannon
And foreign mart for implements of war,
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week:
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-laborer with the day?
Who is’t that can inform me?
1.1.Sp48Horatio
That can I.
At least the whisper goes so: our last King,
Whose image even but now appeared to us,
Was as you know by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride,
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet—
For so this side of our known world esteemed him—
Did slay this Fortinbras, who by a sealed compact
Well ratified by law and heraldry
Did forfeit, with his life, all these his lands
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror;
Against the which a moiety competent
Was gagèd by our King, which had return
To the inheritance of Fortinbras
Had he been vanquisher, as, by the same comart
And carriage of the article design
His fell to Hamlet. Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimprovèd mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes
For food and diet to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in’t, which is no other,
As it doth well appear unto our state,
But to recover of us by strong hand
And terms compulsatory those foresaid lands
So by his father lost. And this, I take it,
Is the main motive of our preparations,
The source of this our watch, and the chief head
Of this post-haste and rummage in the land.
1.1.Sp49Barnardo
I think it be no other but e’en so.
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armèd through our watch so like the King
That was and is the question of these wars.
1.1.Sp50Horatio
Exit Ghost.
A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets,
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
And even the like precurse of feared events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.
(Enter Ghost.)
But soft, behold, lo, where it comes again!
I’ll cross it though it blast me.—Stay, illusion!
It spreads his arms.If thou hast any sound or use of voice,
Speak to me!
If there be any good thing to be done
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me!
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,
Which happily foreknowing may avoid,
Oh, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, your spirits oft walk in death,
Speak of it. Stay and speak!
(The cock crows.)
Stop it, Marcellus!
1.1.Sp55Marcellus
’Tis gone.
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence,
For it is as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
1.1.Sp57Horatio
And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day, and, at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
Th’extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine; and of the truth herein
This present object made probation.
1.1.Sp58Marcellus
It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long,
And then they say no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is that time.
1.1.Sp59Horatio
So have I heard and do in part believe it.
But look, the morn in russet mantle clad
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
Break we our watch up, and by my advice
Let us impart what we have seen tonight
Unto young Hamlet, for, upon my life,
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.
Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it
As needful in our loves, fitting our duty?
1.1.Sp60Marcellus
Exeunt.
Let’s do ’t, I pray, and I this morning know
Where we shall find him most convenient.
1.2
Flourish. Enter Claudius, King of Denmark, Gertrude the Queen, Council—as Polonius and his son Laertes, Hamlet, with others including Voltemand and Cornelius.1.2.Sp1King
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we as ’twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife. Nor have we herein barred
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our thanks.
Now follows that you know young Fortinbras,
Holding a weak supposal of our worth,
Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,
Co-leaguèd with this dream of his advantage,
He hath not failed to pester us with message
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father, with all bands of law,
To our most valiant brother. So much for him.
Now for ourself, and for this time of meeting,
Thus much the business is: we have here writ
To Norway, uncle of young Fortinbras,
Who, impotent and bed-rid, scarcely hears
Of this his nephew’s purpose, to suppress
His further gait herein, in that the levies,
The lists, and full proportions are all made
Out of his subject; and we here dispatch
You, good Cornelius, and you, Voltemand,
For bearers of this greeting to old Norway,
Giving to you no further personal power
To business with the King more than the scope
Of these delated articles allow.
Farewell, and let your haste commend your duty.
1.2.Sp3King
We doubt it nothing. Heartily farewell.
Exeunt Voltemand and Cornelius.
And now, Laertes, what’s the news with you?
You told us of some suit. What is’t, Laertes?
You cannot speak of reason to the Dane
And lose your voice. What wouldst thou beg, Laertes,
That shall not be my offer, not thy asking?
The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.
What wouldst thou have, Laertes?
1.2.Sp4Laertes
My dread lord,
Your leave and favor to return to France,
From whence though willingly I came to Denmark
To show my duty in your coronation,
Yet now I must confess, that duty done,
My thoughts and wishes bend again toward France
And bow them to your gracious leave and pardon.
1.2.Sp6Polonius
H’ath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave
By laborsome petition, and at last
Upon his will I sealed my hard consent.
I do beseech you, give him leave to go.
1.2.Sp7King
Take thy fair hour, Laertes. Time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will.
But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son—
1.2.Sp11Queen
Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not forever with thy vailèd lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know’st ’tis common: all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
1.2.Sp14Hamlet
"Seems," madam? Nay, it is, I know not "seems."
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play.
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
1.2.Sp15King
’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father.
But you must know your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow; but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. ’Tis unmanly grief.
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, or mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschooled;
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie, ’tis a fault to .heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried
From the first corse till he that died today
"This must be so." We pray you throw to earth
This unprevailing woe, and think of us
As of a father; for let the world take note
You are the most immediate to our throne,
And with no less nobility of love
Than that which dearest father bears his son
Do I impart toward you. For your intent
In going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire,
And we beseech you bend you to remain
Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.
1.2.Sp16Queen
Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.
I pray thee stay with us, go not to Wittenberg.
1.2.Sp18King
Flourish. Exeunt all but Hamlet.
Why, ’tis a loving and a fair reply.
Be as ourself in Denmark.—Madam, come.
This gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet
Sits smiling to my heart, in grace whereof
No jocund health that Denmark drinks today
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,
And the King’s rouse the heaven shall bruit again,
Respeaking earthly thunder. Come, away!
1.2.Sp19Hamlet
Enter Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo.
Oh, that this too too sallied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! Oh, God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come thus!
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two!
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth,
Must I remember? Why, she should hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on. And yet within a month—
Let me not think on’t; frailty, thy name is woman!
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears, why, she—
Oh, God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!—married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her gallèd eyes,
She married. Oh, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good,
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
1.2.Sp23Hamlet
Sir, my good friend, I’ll change that name with you.
And what make you from Wittenberg,
Horatio?—
Marcellus.
1.2.Sp25Hamlet
I am very glad to see you.
To Barnardo.
Good even, sir.
To Horatio
But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?
1.2.Sp27Hamlet
I would not hear your enemy say so,
Nor shall you do my ear that violence
To make it truster of your own report
Against yourself. I know you are no truant.
But what is your affair in Elsinore?
We’ll teach you for to drink ere you depart.
1.2.Sp31Hamlet
Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio!
My father—methinks I see my father.
1.2.Sp40Horatio
Season your admiration for a while
With an attent ear till I may deliver,
Upon the witness of these gentlemen,
This marvel to you.
1.2.Sp42Horatio
Two nights together had these gentlemen,
Marcellus and Barnardo, on their watch
In the dead waste and middle of the night
Been thus encountered: a figure like your father
Armed at point, exactly, cap-à-pie,
Appears before them, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them. Thrice he walked
By their oppressed and fear-surprisèd eyes
Within his truncheon’s length, whilst they, distilled
Almost to jelly with the act of fear,
Stand dumb and speak not to him. This to me
In dreadful secrecy impart they did,
And I with them the third night kept the watch,
Where, as they had delivered, both in time,
Form of the thing, each word made true and good,
The apparition comes. I knew your father.
These hands are not more like.
1.2.Sp46Horatio
My lord, I did,
But answer made it none. Yet once methought
It lifted up it head and did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak;
But even then the morning cock crew loud,
And at the sound it shrunk in haste away
And vanished from our sight.
1.2.Sp48Horatio
As I do live, my honored lord, ’tis true,
And we did think it writ down in our duty
To let you know of it.
1.2.Sp73Hamlet
Exeunt all but Hamlet.
If it assume my noble father’s person,
I’ll speak to it, though hell itself should gape
And bid me hold my peace. I pray you all,
If you have hitherto concealed this sight
Let it be tenable in your silence still,
And whatsomever else shall hap tonight,
Give it an understanding but no tongue;
I will requite your loves. So, fare you well.
Upon the platform ’twixt eleven and twelve
I’ll visit you.
1.2.Sp75Hamlet
Exit.
Your loves, as mine to you. Farewell.
My father’s spirit—in arms! All is not well.
I doubt some foul play. Would the night were come!
Till then, sit still, my soul. Fond deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.
1.3
Enter Laertes, and Ophelia his sister.1.3.Sp1Laertes
My necessaries are inbarked. Farewell.
And sister, as the winds give benefit
And convey is assistant, do not sleep
But let me hear from you.
1.3.Sp3Laertes
For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute,
No more.
1.3.Sp5Laertes
Think it no more.
For nature crescent does not grow alone
In thews and bulks, but as this temple waxes
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal. Perhaps he loves you now,
And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch
The virtue of his will; but you must fear,
His greatness weighed, his will is not his own.
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself, for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state,
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof he is the head. Then if he says he loves you,
It fits your wisdom so far to believe it
As he in his particular act and place
May give his saying deed, which is no further
Than the main voice of Denmark goes withal.
Then weigh what loss your honor may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmastered importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough
If she unmask her beauty to the moon.
Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes.
The canker galls the infants of the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary, then; best safety lies in fear.
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
1.3.Sp6Ophelia
Enter Polonius.
I shall the effect of this good lesson keep
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven
Whiles, a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
1.3.Sp7Laertes
Oh, fear me not.
I stay too long. But here my father comes.
A double blessing is a double grace;
Occasion smiles upon a second leave.
1.3.Sp8Polonius
Exit Laertes.
Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee,
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged courage. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,
Bear’t that th’opposèd may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy—rich, not gaudy,
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous, chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender, boy,
For love oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulleth edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!
1.3.Sp16Polonius
Marry, well bethought.
’Tis told me he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you, and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous.
If it be so—as so ’tis put on me,
And that in way of caution—I must tell you
You do not understand yourself so clearly
As it behooves my daughter and your honor.
What is between you? Give me up the truth.
1.3.Sp18Polonius
Affection? Pooh, you speak like a green girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.
Do you believe his "tenders," as you call them?
1.3.Sp20Polonius
Marry, I will teach you. Think yourself a baby
That you have ta’en these tenders for true pay
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly,
Or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase
Wronging it thus—you’ll tender me a fool.
1.3.Sp23Ophelia
And hath given countenance to his speech,
My lord, with almost all the holy vows of heaven.
1.3.Sp24Polonius
Exeunt.
Ay, springes to catch woodcocks. I do know
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows. These blazes, daughter,
Giving more light than heat, extinct in both
Even in their promise as it is a-making ,
You must not take for fire. From this time
Be something scanter of your maiden presence.
Set your entreatments at a higher rate
Than a command to parle. For Lord Hamlet,
Believe so much in him that he is young,
And with a larger tether may he walk
Than may be given you. In few, Ophelia,
Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits
Breathing like sanctified and pious bonds
The better to beguile. This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Look to’t, I charge you. Come your ways.
1.4
Enter Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus.1.4.Sp6Horatio
Indeed? I heard it not. It then draws near the season
Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk.
(A flourish of trumpets, and two pieces goes off.)
What does this mean, my lord?
1.4.Sp7Hamlet
The King doth wake tonight and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swagg’ring upspring reels;
And as he drains his drafts of Rhenish down
The kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.
1.4.Sp9Hamlet
Enter Ghost.
Ay, marry, is’t,
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honored in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations.
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition, and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So, oft it chances in particular men,
That, for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty
(Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners, that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect
(Being Nature’s livery, or Fortune’s star),
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of eale
Doth all the noble substance often dout
To his own scandal.
1.4.Sp11Hamlet
The Ghost beckons Hamlet.
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane. Oh, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsèd in death,
Have burst their cerements? Why the sepulcher
Wherein we saw thee quietly interred
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again? What may this mean
That thou, dead corse, again in compleat steel
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?
1.4.Sp13Marcellus
Look with what courteous action
It waves you to a more removèd ground.
But do not go with it.
1.4.Sp17Hamlet
Why, what should be the fear?
I do not set my life at a pin’s fee,
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?
The Ghost beckons Hamlet.
It waves me forth again. I’ll follow it.
1.4.Sp18Horatio
The Ghost beckons Hamlet.
They attempt to restrain him.
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.
1.4.Sp23Hamlet
Exeunt Ghost and Hamlet.
Exeunt.
My fate cries out
And makes each petty artery in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve.
The Ghost beckons Hamlet.
Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen!
By heav’n, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me.
I say, away!—Go on, I’ll follow thee.
1.5
Enter Ghost and Hamlet.1.5.Sp10Ghost
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, oh, list:
If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
1.5.Sp15Hamlet
Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love
May sweep to my revenge.
1.5.Sp16Ghost
I find thee apt,
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear:
’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forgèd process of my death
Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
Now wears his crown.
1.5.Sp18Ghost
Exit.
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts—
Oh, wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
So to seduce!—won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming virtuous queen.
Oh, Hamlet, what falling off was there!
From me, whose love was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
I made to her in marriage, and to decline
Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor
To those of mine. But virtue, as it never will be moved,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So but though to a radiant angel linked,
Will sort itself in a celestial bed
And prey on garbage.
But soft, methinks I scent the morning air.
Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour, thy uncle stole
With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The lep’rous distillment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,
And with a sudden vigor it doth possess
And curd like eager droppings into milk
The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine,
And a most instant tetter barked about
Most lazarlike with vile and loathsome crust
All my smooth body.
Thus was I sleeping by a brother’s hand
Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched,
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousled, disappointed, unaneled,
No reck’ning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
Oh, horrible, oh, horrible, most horrible!
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damnèd incest.
But howsomever thou pursues this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once.
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near
And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.
1.5.Sp19Hamlet
Enter Horatio and Marcellus
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? Oh, fie! Hold, hold, my heart,
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me swiftly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven.
Oh, most pernicious woman!
Oh, villain, villain, smiling damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word.
It is "Adieu, adieu, remember me."
I have sworn’t.
1.5.Sp37Hamlet
Why, right, you are in the right.
And so, without more circumstance at all
I hold it fit that we shake hands and part:
You as your business and desire shall point you
(For every man hath business and desire,
Such as it is), and for my own poor part
I will go pray.
1.5.Sp41Hamlet
He holds out his sword.
Ghost cries under the stage.
Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio,
And much offense too. Touching this vision here,
It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.
For your desire to know what is between us,
O’ermaster it as you may. And now, good friends,
As you are friends, scholars, and soldiers,
Give me one poor request.
1.5.Sp52Hamlet
They swear.
Ha, ha, boy, say’st thou so? Art thou there, truepenny?—
Come on, you hear this fellow in the cellarage.
Consent to swear.
1.5.Sp56Hamlet
They swear.
Hic et ubique? Then we’ll shift our ground.
He moves them to another spot.
Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword.
Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard.
1.5.Sp58Hamlet
They move once more.
Well said, old mole. Canst work i’th’ earth so fast?
A worthy pioneer!—Once more remove, good friends.
1.5.Sp60Hamlet
They swear.
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come,
Here as before: never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd some’er I bear myself
(As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on),
That you at such times seeing me never shall,
With arms encumbered thus, or this headshake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase
As, "Well, well, we know," or "We could an if we would,"
Or "If we list to speak," or "There be, an if they might,"
Or such ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me. This do swear,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you.
1.5.Sp62Hamlet
Exeunt.
Rest, rest, perturbèd spirit.—So, gentlemen,
With all my love I do commend me to you,
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do t’express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together,
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. Oh, cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
They wait for him to leave first.
Nay, come, let’s go together.
2.1
Enter old Polonius, with his man Reynaldo or two. He gives money and papers.2.1.Sp3Polonius
You shall do marv’lous wisely, good Reynaldo,
Before you visit him, to make inquire
Of his behavior.
2.1.Sp5Polonius
Marry, well said, very well said. Look you, sir,
Inquire me first what Danskers are in Paris,
And how, and who, what means, and where they keep,
What company, at what expense; and finding
By this encompassment and drift of question
That they do know my son, come you more nearer
Than your particular demands will touch it;
Take you, as ’twere, some distant knowledge of him,
As thus: "I know his father, and his friends,
And in part him." Do you mark this, Reynaldo?
2.1.Sp7Polonius
"And in part him. But," you may say, "not well,
But if’t be he I mean, he’s very wild,
Addicted so and so," and there put on him
What forgeries you please—marry, none so rank
As may dishonor him, take heed of that,
But, sir, such wanton, wild, and usual slips
As are companions noted and most known
To youth and liberty.
2.1.Sp11Polonius
Faith, as you may season it in the charge.
You must not put another scandal on him
That he is open to incontinency;
That’s not my meaning. But breathe his faults so quaintly
That they may seem the taints of liberty,
The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind,
A savageness in unreclaimèd blood,
Of general assault.
2.1.Sp15Polonius
Marry sir, here’s my drift,
And I believe it is a fetch of wit.
You laying these slight sallies on my son
As ’twere a thing a little soiled with working,
Mark you, your party in converse, him you would sound,
Having ever seen in the prenominate crimes
The youth you breathe of guilty, be assured
He closes with you in this consequence:
"Good sir" (or so), or "friend," or "gentleman,"
According to the phrase, or the addition
Of man and country.
2.1.Sp17Polonius
And then, sir, does ’a this, ’a does—what was I about to say?
By the mass, I was about to say something.
Where did I leave?
2.1.Sp19Polonius
Exit Reynaldo.
Enter Ophelia.
At "closes in the consequence." Ay, marry,
He closes thus: "I know the gentleman,
I saw him yesterday"—or th’other day,
Or then, or then—"with such or such, and as you say,
There was ’a gaming there, or took in’s rouse,
There falling out at tennis," or perchance
"I saw him enter such a house of sale,"
Videlicet, a brothel, or so forth. See you now,
Your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth,
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out;
So by my former lecture and advice
Shall you my son. You have me, have you not?
2.1.Sp30Ophelia
My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosèd out of hell
To speak of horrors, he comes before me.
2.1.Sp34Ophelia
He took me by the wrist, and held me hard.
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And with his other hand thus o’er his brow
He falls to such perusal of my face
As ’a would draw it. Long stayed he so.
At last, a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being. That done, he lets me go,
And with his head over his shoulder turned
He seemed to find his way without his eyes,
For out o’ doors he went without their helps,
And to the last bended their light on me.
2.1.Sp35Polonius
Come, go with me. I will go seek the King.
This is the very ecstasy of love,
Whose violent property fordoes itself
And leads the will to desperate undertakings
As oft as any passions under heaven
That does afflict our natures. I am sorry.
What, have you given him any hard words of late?
2.1.Sp36Ophelia
No, my good lord, but as you did command
I did repel his letters, and denied
His access to me.
2.1.Sp37Polonius
Exeunt.
That hath made him mad.
I am sorry that with better heed and judgment
I had not coted him. I feared he did but trifle
And meant to wrack thee; but beshrew my jealousy!
By heaven, it is as proper to our age
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions
As it is common for the younger sort
To lack discretion. Come, go we to the King.
This must be known, which, being kept close, might move
More grief to hide than hate to utter love.
Come.
2.2
Flourish. Enter King and Queen, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and other Courtiers.2.2.Sp1King
Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Moreover that we much did long to see you,
The need we have to use you did provoke
Our hasty sending. Something have you heard
Of Hamlet’s transformation—so call it,
Sith nor th’exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was. What it should be,
More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him
So much from th’understanding of himself,
I cannot dream of. I entreat you both
That, being of so young days brought up with him,
And sith so neighbored to his youth and havior,
That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court
Some little time, so by your companies
To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather
So much as from occasion you may glean,
Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus
That, opened, lies within our remedy.
2.2.Sp2Queen
Good gentlemen, he hath much talked of you,
And sure I am two men there is not living
To whom he more adheres. If it will please you
To show us so much gentry and good will
As to expend your time with us awhile
For the supply and profit of our hope,
Your visitation shall receive such thanks
As fits a king’s remembrance.
2.2.Sp3Rosencrantz
Both your majesties
Might, by the sovereign power you have of us,
Put your dread pleasures more into command
Than to entreaty.
2.2.Sp4Guildenstern
But we both obey,
And here give up ourselves in the full bent
To lay our service freely at your feet
To be commanded.
2.2.Sp6Queen
Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and other Courtiers.
Enter Polonius.
Thanks, Guildenstern, and gentle Rosencrantz.
And I beseech you instantly to visit
My too-much-changèd son.—Go, some of you,
And bring these gentlemen where Hamlet is.
2.2.Sp11Polonius
Have I, my lord? I assure my good liege,
I hold my duty as I hold my soul,
Both to my God and to my gracious king;
And I do think—or else this brain of mine
Hunts not the trail of policy so sure
As it hath used to do—that I have found
The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy.
2.2.Sp13Polonius
Give first admittance to th’ambassadors.
My news shall be the fruit to that great feast.
2.2.Sp14King
Enter Ambassadors Voltemand and Cornelius, ushered in by Polonius.
Thyself do grace to them, and bring them in.
Polonius goes to bring in the ambassadors.
He tells me, my dear Gertrude, he hath found
The head and source of all your son’s distemper.
2.2.Sp16King
Well, we shall sift him.—Welcome, my good friends.
Say, Voltemand, what from our brother Norway?
2.2.Sp17Voltemand
Most fair return of greetings and desires.
Upon our first, he sent out to suppress
His nephew’s levies, which to him appeared
To be a preparation ’gainst the Polack,
But, better looked into, he truly found
It was against your highness; whereat grieved
That so his sickness, age, and impotence
Was falsely borne in hand, sends out arrests
On Fortinbras, which he in brief obeys,
Receives rebuke from Norway, and, in fine,
Makes vow before his uncle never more
To give th’assay of arms against your majesty.
Whereon old Norway, overcome with joy,
Gives him threescore thousand crowns in annual fee
And his commission to employ those soldiers
So levied (as before) against the Polack,
With an entreaty herein further shown
Giving a letter to the King
That it might please you to give quiet pass
Through your dominions for this enterprise
On such regards of safety and allowance
As therein are set down.
2.2.Sp18King
Exeunt Ambassadors.
It likes us well,
And at our more considered time we’ll read,
Answer, and think upon this business.
Meantime, we thank you for your well-took labor.
Go to your rest. At night we’ll feast together.
Most welcome home!
2.2.Sp19Polonius
This business is well ended.
My liege and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore, brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it, for to define true madness,
What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.
2.2.Sp21Polonius
Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he’s mad, ’tis true. ’Tis true ’tis pity,
And pity ’tis ’tis true—a foolish figure,
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him, then. And now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause.
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.
Perpend.
I have a daughter—have while she is mine—
Who in her duty and obedience, mark,
Hath given me this. Now gather and surmise.
He reads from the letter.
“To the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most
beautified Ophelia.” That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase;
“beautified” is a vile phrase. But you shall hear. Thus: “In
her excellent white bosom, these, etc.”
2.2.Sp23Polonius
Good madam, stay awhile, I will be faithful.
(
He reads the letter.)
“Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.”
“O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. I have not art to reckon
my groans. But that I love thee best, oh, most best, believe it. Adieu.
Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him. Hamlet.”
This in obedience hath my daughter shown me,
And more about hath his solicitings,
As they fell out, by time, by means, and place,
All given to mine ear.
2.2.Sp27Polonius
I would fain prove so. But what might you think,
When I had seen this hot love on the wing—
As I perceived it (I must tell you that)
Before my daughter told me—what might you,
Or my dear majesty your queen here, think
If I had played the desk or table-book,
Or given my heart a working, mute and dumb,
Or looked upon this love with idle sight,
What might you think? No, I went round to work,
And my young mistress thus I did bespeak:
"Lord Hamlet is a prince out of thy star.
This must not be." And then I prescripts gave her
That she should lock herself from her resort,
Admit no messengers, receive no tokens.
Which done, she took the fruits of my advice,
And he, repellèd, a short tale to make,
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
Thence to lightness, and by this declension
Into the madness wherein now he raves,
And all we mourn for.
2.2.Sp30Polonius
Hath there been such a time—I would fain know that—
That I have positively said ’Tis so"
When it proved otherwise?
2.2.Sp32Polonius
Take this from this, if this be otherwise.
If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the center.
2.2.Sp36Polonius
Enter Hamlet.
At such a time, I’ll loose my daughter to him.
Be you and I behind an arras then;
Mark the encounter. If he love her not,
And be not from his reason fall’n thereon,
Let me be no assistant for a state
But keep a farm and carters.
2.2.Sp39Polonius
Away, I do beseech you both away.
(Exit King and Queen.)
I’ll board him presently. Oh, give me leave.—
How does my good Lord Hamlet?
2.2.Sp46Hamlet
Ay, sir, to be honest, as this world goes,
is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
2.2.Sp48Hamlet
For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—Have you
a daughter?
2.2.Sp50Hamlet
Let her not walk i’th’sun. Conception is a blessing,
but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to’t.
2.2.Sp51Polonius
Aside
How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter. Yet he
knew me not at first. ’A said I was a fishmonger. ’A is far gone,
and truly, in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very
near this. I’ll speak to him again.—What do you read, my
lord?
2.2.Sp56Hamlet
Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says here that old
men have gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes
purging thick amber and plumtree gum, and that they have a
plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams—all which, sir,
though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down; for yourself, sir, shall grow old
as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward.
2.2.Sp57Polonius
Aside
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.—Will you
walk out of the air, my lord?
2.2.Sp59Polonius
Aside
Indeed, that’s out of the air. How pregnant sometimes
his replies are! A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason
and sanctity could not so prosperously be delivered of. I will leave
him and my daughter.—My lord, I will take my leave of you.
2.2.Sp60Hamlet
Enter Guildenstern and Rosencrantz.
Exit Polonius.
You cannot take from me anything that I will not more
willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, except my
life.
2.2.Sp67Hamlet
My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern?
Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do you both?
2.2.Sp69Guildenstern
Happy in that we are not ever happy. On Fortune’s lap
we are not the very button.
2.2.Sp76Hamlet
Then is doomsday near. But your news is not true.
But, in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsinore?
2.2.Sp78Hamlet
Beggar that I am, I am ever poor in thanks, but I thank
you; and sure, dear friends, my thanks are too dear a halfpenny.
Were you not sent for? Is it your own inclining? Is it a free
visitation? Come, come, deal justly with me. Come, come, nay, speak.
2.2.Sp80Hamlet
Anything but to th’ purpose. You were sent for, and there is
a kind of confession in your looks, which your modesties have not
craft enough to color. I know the good King and Queen have
sent for you.
2.2.Sp82Hamlet
That you must teach me. But let me conjure you, by the
rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of our youth, by the
obligation of our ever-preserved love, and by what more dear a
better proposer can charge you withal, be even and direct with
me whether you were sent for or no.
2.2.Sp86Hamlet
I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your
discovery, and your secrecy to the King and Queen molt no
feather. I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,
forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with
my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a
sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy the air, look
you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul
and pestilent congregation of vapors. What piece of work is a
man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and
moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an
angel in apprehension, how like a god; the beauty of the world; the
paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of
dust? Man delights not me, nor women neither, though by your
smiling you seem to say so.
2.2.Sp89Rosencrantz
To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten
entertainment the players shall receive from you. We coted them
on the way, and hither are they coming to offer you service.
2.2.Sp90Hamlet
He that plays the King shall be welcome; his majesty shall
have tribute on me. The Adventurous Knight shall use his foil and
target, the Lover shall not sigh gratis, the Humorous Man shall end
his part in peace, and the Lady shall say her mind freely, or the
blank verse shall halt for’t. What players are they?
2.2.Sp92Hamlet
How chances it they travel? Their residence both in
reputation and profit was better both ways.
2.2.Sp94Hamlet
Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in
the city? Are they so followed?
2.2.Sp96Hamlet
A flourish.
It is not very strange, for my uncle is King of Denmark, and
those that would make mouths at him while my father lived give
twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture
in little. ’Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if
philosophy could find it out.
2.2.Sp98Hamlet
Gentlemen, you are welcome to Elsinore. Your hands, come,
then. Th’appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony. Let
me comply with you in this garb, lest my extent to the players,
which, I tell you, must show fairly outwards, should more
appear like entertainment than yours. You are welcome. But my
uncle-father and aunt-mother are deceived.
2.2.Sp100Hamlet
Enter Polonius.
I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is
southerly, I know a hawk from a hand saw.
2.2.Sp102Hamlet
Hark you, Guildenstern, and you too, at each ear a hearer:
that great baby you see there is not yet out of his swaddling clouts.
2.2.Sp103Rosencrantz
Happily he is the second time come to them, for they say an
old man is twice a child.
2.2.Sp104Hamlet
I will prophesy he comes to tell me of the players. Mark it.—
You say right, sir, o’Monday morning, ’twas then indeed.
2.2.Sp111Polonius
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy,
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene
individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy nor
Plautus too light for the law of writ and the liberty: these are the
only men.
One fair daughter and no more, The which he lovèd passing well.
2.2.Sp120Hamlet
Enter the Players.
Why,
“
As by lot,
God wot,”
and then you know,
“
It came to
pass,
As most like it was.”
The first row of the pious chanson will
show you more, for look where my abridgment comes.
2.2.Sp121Hamlet
You are welcome, masters, welcome all.—I am glad to see thee
well. Welcome, good friends.—Oh, old friend, why, thy face is
valanced since I saw thee last. Com’st thou to beard me in Denmark?—
What, my young lady and mistress! By Lady, your ladyship is
nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a
chopine. Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold,
be not cracked within the ring.—Masters, you are all welcome.
We’ll e’en to’t, like French falconers: fly at anything we see.
We’ll have a speech straight. Come, give us a taste of your quality.
Come, a passionate speech.
2.2.Sp123Hamlet
I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted,
or if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleased not
the million, ’twas caviary to the general. But it was, as I received
it, and others whose judgments in such matters cried in the top
of mine, an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down
with as much modesty as cunning. I remember one said there
were no sallets in the lines, to make the matter savory, nor no matter in the phrase
that might indict the author of affection, but called it an honest method, as wholesome
as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine. One speech in’t I chiefly loved:
’twas Aeneas’ talk to Dido, and thereabout of it especially when he
speaks of Priam’s slaughter. If it live in your memory, begin at
this line—let me see, let me see—
The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’Hyrcanian beast—
’Tis not so, it begins with Pyrrhus.
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couchèd in th’ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared
With heraldry more dismal head to foot;
Now is he total gules, horridly tricked
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Baked and empasted with the parching streets
That lend a tyrannous and a damnèd light
To their lord’s murder. Roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o’ersizèd with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks.
So proceed you.
2.2.Sp125Player
Anon he finds him,
Striking too short at Greeks. His anticke sword,
Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls,
Repugnant to command. Unequal matched,
Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide,
But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword
Th’unnervèd father falls. Then senseless Ilium,
Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top
Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash
Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear; for lo! his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverent Priam, seemed i’th’ air to stick.
So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood,
Like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.
But as we often see against some storm
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder
Doth rend the region, so, after Pyrrhus’ pause,
A rousèd vengeance sets him new a-work,
And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall
On Mars’s armor forged for proof eterne
With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword
Now falls on Priam.
Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods
In general synod take away her power,
Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven
As low as to the fiends!
2.2.Sp127Hamlet
It shall to the barber’s with your beard.—Prithee, say on. He’s
for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps. Say on. Come to Hecuba.
2.2.Sp131Player
Run barefoot up and down, threat’ning the flames
With bisson rheum, a clout upon that head
Where late the diadem stood, and, for a robe,
About her lank and all-o’erteemèd loins
A blanket in the alarm of fear caught up—
Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steeped
’Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced;
But if the gods themselves did see her then,
When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport
In mincing with his sword her husband limbs,
The instant burst of clamor that she made,
Unless things mortal move them not at all,
Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven
And passion in the gods.
2.2.Sp133Hamlet
’Tis well. I’ll have thee speak out the rest of this soon.
To Polonius
Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you
hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief
chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a
bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
2.2.Sp135Hamlet
God’s bodkin, man, much better. Use every man after his
desert and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honor
and dignity; the less they deserve, the more merit is in your
bounty. Take them in.
2.2.Sp137Hamlet
Follow him, friends. We’ll hear a play tomorrow.
Aside to the First Player
Dost thou
hear me, old friend, can you play "The Murder of Gonzago"?
2.2.Sp139Hamlet
We’ll ha’t tomorrow night. You could for need study
a speech of some dozen lines or sixteen lines, which I would set
down and insert in’t, could you not?
2.2.Sp141Hamlet
Exeunt Polonius and Players.
Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Very well. Follow that lord, and look you mock him not.
—My good friends, I’ll leave you till night. You are welcome to
Elsinore.
2.2.Sp143Hamlet
Exit.
Ay, so, God buy to you.—Now I am alone.
Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all the visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit, and all for nothing,
For Hecuba.
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and that for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i’th’ throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this,
Ha? ’Swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should ha’ fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear murderèd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab, a stallion. Fie upon’t, foh!
About, my brains! Hum, I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick. If ’a do blench
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be a de’il, and the de’il hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds
More relative than this. The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.
3.1
Enter King, Queen, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Lords.3.1.Sp1King
And can you by no drift of conference
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?
3.1.Sp2Rosencrantz
He does confess he feels himself distracted,
But from what cause, ’a will by no means speak.
3.1.Sp3Guildenstern
Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,
But with a crafty madness keeps aloof
When we would bring him on to some confession
Of his true state.
3.1.Sp9Rosencrantz
Madam, it so fell out that certain players
We o’erraught on the way. Of these we told him,
And there did seem in him a kind of joy
To hear of it. They are here about the court,
And, as I think, they have already order
This night to play before him.
3.1.Sp10Polonius
’Tis most true,
And he beseeched me to entreat your majesties
To hear and see the matter.
3.1.Sp11King
Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Lords.
With all my heart,and it doth much content me
To hear him so inclined.
Good gentlemen, give him a further edge,
And drive his purpose into these delights.
3.1.Sp13King
Sweet Gertrard, leave us two,
For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither,
That he, as ’twere by accident, may here
Affront Ophelia. Her father and myself,
We’ll so bestow ourselves that, seeing unseen,
We may of their encounter frankly judge,
And gather by him, as he is behaved,
If’t be th’affliction of his love or no
That thus he suffers for.
3.1.Sp14Queen
Exit Queen.
I shall obey you.
And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlet’s wildness. So shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his wonted way again,
To both your honors.
3.1.Sp16Polonius
Ophelia, walk you here.—Gracious, so please you,
We will bestow ourselves.
To Ophelia, as he gives her a book
Read on this book,
That show of such an exercise may color
Your lowliness. We are oft too blame in this,
’Tis too much proved, that with devotion’s visage
And pious action we do sugar o’er
The devil himself.
3.1.Sp17King
Enter Hamlet.
The King and Polonius conceal themselves.
Aside
Oh, ’tis too true!
How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plast’ring art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
Oh, heavy burden!
3.1.Sp19Hamlet
To be, or not to be, that is the question,
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’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 th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus conscience does make cowards,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.
3.1.Sp22Ophelia
My lord, I have remembrances of yours
That I have longèd long to redeliver.
I pray you now receive them.
3.1.Sp24Ophelia
She offers Hamlet the remembrances.
My honored lord, you know right well you did,
And with them words of so sweet breath composed
As made these things more rich. Their perfume lost,
Take these again, for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind,
There, my lord.
3.1.Sp31Hamlet
Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform
honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can
translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the
time gives it proof. I did love you once.
3.1.Sp33Hamlet
You should not have believed me, for virtue cannot so
evocutate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not.
3.1.Sp35Hamlet
Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of
sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of
such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am
very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck
than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,
or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves; believe none of us.
Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father?
3.1.Sp37Hamlet
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house.
Farewell.
3.1.Sp39Hamlet
If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy
dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape
calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry,
marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you
make of them. To a nunnery go, and quickly too. Farewell.
3.1.Sp41Hamlet
Exit.
I have heard of your paintings well enough. God hath
given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig and
amble, and you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures, and make your
wantonness ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad.
I say we will have no mo marriage. Those that are married already, all
but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go.
3.1.Sp42Ophelia
Enter King and Polonius stepping forward from concealment.
Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’expectation and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
Th’observed of all observers, quite, quite down,
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his musicked vows,
Now see what noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled out of time, and harsh,
That unmatched form and stature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. Oh, woe is me
T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
3.1.Sp43King
Love? His affections do not that way tend,
Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little,
Was not like madness. There’s something in his soul
O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger; which for to prevent,
I have in quick determination
Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England,
For the demand of our neglected tribute.
Haply the seas, and countries different,
With variable objects, shall expel
This something-settled matter in his heart,
Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus
From fashion of himself. What think you on’t?
3.1.Sp44Polonius
Exeunt.
It shall do well. But yet do I believe
the origin and commencement of his grief
Sprung from neglected love.—How now, Ophelia?
You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said,
We heard it all.—My lord, do as you please,
But if you hold it fit, after the play
Let his queen-mother all alone entreat him
To show his grief. Let her be round with him,
And I’ll be placed (so please you) in the ear
Of all their conference. If she find him not,
To England send him, or confine him where
Your wisdom best shall think.
3.2
Enter Hamlet, and three of the Players.3.2.Sp1Hamlet
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you,
trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do,
I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very
torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and
beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear
a robustious periwig-pated fellowtear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split
the ears of the
groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for
o’erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.
3.2.Sp3Hamlet
Be not too tame, neither, but let your own discretion be
your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with
this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of
nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing,
whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere
the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it makes the
unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of
which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theater of
others. Oh, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others
praised, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither
having th’accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor
man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of
nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they
imitated humanity so abhominably.
3.2.Sp5Hamlet
Enter Polonius, Guildenstern, and Rosencrantz.
Exeunt they two.
Enter Horatio.
Oh, reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns
speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that
will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators
to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of
the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most
pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.
Exeunt Players.
To Polonius
How
now, my lord, will the King hear this piece of work?
3.2.Sp13Hamlet
Nay, do not think I flatter,
For what advancement may I hope from thee
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flattered?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish her election,
Sh’hath sealed thee for herself, for thou hast been
As one in suff’ring all that suffers nothing,
A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.—Something too much of this.—
There is a play tonight before the King.
One scene of it comes near the circumstance
Which I have told thee of my father’s death.
I prithee, when thou see’st that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damnèd ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note,
For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,
And after we will both our judgments join
In censure of his seeming.
3.2.Sp14Horatio
Enter trumpets and kettledrums, King, Queen, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and others.
Well, my lord,
If ’a steal aught the whilst this play is playing
And scape detected, I will pay the theft.
3.2.Sp17Hamlet
Excellent, i’faith, of the chameleon’s dish; I eat the air,
promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so.
3.2.Sp38Hamlet
Oh, God, your only jig-maker. What should a man do but
be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my
father died within’s two hours.
3.2.Sp40Hamlet
The trumpets sounds. Dumb-show follows.
Enter Players as a King and a Queen, the Queen embracing him, and he her. He
takes her up, and declines his head upon her neck. He lies him down
upon a bank of flowers. She, seeing him asleep, leaves him. Anon come in
another man, takes off his crown, kisses it, pours poison in the sleeper’s ears,
and leaves him. The Queen returns, finds the King dead, makes passionate
action. The poisoner, with some three or four, come in again, seem to
condole with her. The dead body is carried away. The poisoner woos the Queen
with gifts. She seems harsh awhile, but in the end accepts love. Exeunt players.
Enter a Player as Prologue.
So long? Nay, then, let the dev’l wear black, for I’ll have a
suit of sables. Oh, heavens! Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet?
Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a
year. But, by’r Lady, ’a must build churches then, or else shall ’a suffer
not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is, "For oh, for
oh, the hobby-horse is forgot."
3.2.Sp46Hamlet
Ay, or any show that you will show him. Be not you ashamed
to show, he’ll not shame to tell you what it means.
3.2.Sp48Prologue
Exit.
Enter two Players as King and Queen.
For us and for our tragedy,
Here stooping to your clemency,
We beg your hearing patiently.
3.2.Sp52King
Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone round
Neptune’s salt wash and Tellus orbed the ground,
And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen
About the world have times twelve thirties been
Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands
Unite commutual in most sacred bands.
3.2.Sp53Queen
So many journeys may the sun and moon
Make us again count o’er ere love be done!
But woe is me, you are so sick of late,
So far from cheer and from our former state,
That I distrust you. Yet though I distrust,
Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must.
For women fear too much, even as they love,
And women’s fear and love hold quantity:
Either none, in neither aught, or in extremity.
Now what my lord is, proof hath made you know,
And as my love is sized, my fear is so.
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.
3.2.Sp54King
Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too;
My operant powers their functions leave to do.
And thou shalt live in this fair world behind,
Honored, beloved; and haply one as kind
For husband shalt thou—
3.2.Sp55Queen
Oh, confound the rest!
Such love must needs be treason in my breast.
In second husband let me be accurst!
None wed the second but who killed the first.
3.2.Sp57
Queen
The instances that second marriage move
Are base respects of thrift, but none of love.
A second time I kill my husband dead
When second husband kisses me in bed.
3.2.Sp58King
I do believe you think what now you speak,
But what we do determine, oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity,
Which now the fruit unripe sticks on the tree,
But fall unshaken when they mellow be.
Most necessary ’tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy.
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joy, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For ’tis a question left us yet to prove
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark his favorite flies;
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies;
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend,
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try
Directly seasons him his enemy.
But orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;
So, think thou wilt no second husband wed,
But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.
3.2.Sp59Queen
Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light,
Sport and repose lock from me day and night,
To desperation turn my trust and hope,
And anchor’s cheer in prison be my scope!
Each opposite that blanks the face of joy
Meet what I would have well, and it destroy!
Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife,
If once I be a widow, ever I be a wife!
3.2.Sp61King
The Player King sleeps.
Exit Player Queen.
’Tis deeply sworn. Sweet, leave me here awhile.
My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile
The tedious day with sleep.
3.2.Sp69Hamlet
Enter Lucianus.
The Mousetrap. Marry, how? Tropically. This play is the image
of a murder done in Vienna. Gonzago is the Duke’s name, his wife
Baptista. You shall see anon. ’Tis a knavish piece of work, but what of
that? Your majesty and we that have free souls, it touches us not.
Let the galled jade winch, our withers are unwrung.
—This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King.
3.2.Sp75Hamlet
So you mistake your husbands.—Begin, murderer, leave
thy damnable faces and begin. Come, the croaking raven doth bellow
for revenge.
3.2.Sp76Lucianus
Pours the poison in his ears. Exit.
Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing,
Considerate season, else no creature seeing,
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice invected,
Thy natural magic and dire property
On wholesome life usurps immediately.
3.2.Sp77Hamlet
Exeunt all but Hamlet and Horatio.
’A poisons him i’th’ garden for his estate. His name’s
Gonzago. The story is extant, and written in very choice Italian. You shall see
anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife.
3.2.Sp83Hamlet
"Why, let the strucken deer go weep,
The heart ungallèd play,
For some must watch while some must sleep;
Thus runs the world away."
Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers—if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk
with me—with provincial
roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players?
3.2.Sp85Hamlet
A whole one, I.
For thou dost know, O Damon dear,
This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself, and now reigns here
A very, very pajock.
3.2.Sp91Hamlet
Enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Aha, come, some music! Come, the recorders.
For if the King like not the comedy,
Why, then belike he likes it not, perdy.
Come, some music.
3.2.Sp99Hamlet
Your wisdom should show itself more richer to signify
this to the doctor, for, for me to put him to his purgation would perhaps plunge him
into more choler.
3.2.Sp100Guildenstern
Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame,
and stare not so wildly from my affair.
3.2.Sp102Guildenstern
The Queen your mother, in most great affliction of spirit,
hath sent me to you.
3.2.Sp104Guildenstern
Nay, good my lord, this courtesy is not of the right breed. If
it shall please you to make me a wholesome answer, I will do your
mother’s commandment. If not, your pardon and my return shall
be the end of business.
3.2.Sp107Hamlet
Make you a wholesome answer; my wit’s diseased. But, sir, such
answer as I can make, you shall command, or rather, as you say, my
mother. Therefore no more, but to the matter. My mother, you say.
3.2.Sp108Rosencrantz
Then thus she says: your behavior hath struck her into
amazement and admiration.
3.2.Sp109Hamlet
Oh, wonderful son, that can so ’stonish a mother! But is there
no sequel at the heels of this mother’s admiration? Impart.
3.2.Sp114Rosencrantz
Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do
surely bar the door upon your own liberty if you deny your griefs to
your friend.
3.2.Sp116Rosencrantz
Enter the Players, with recorders.
How can that be, when you have the voice of the King
himself for your succession in Denmark?
3.2.Sp117Hamlet
Ay, sir, but "while the grass grows"—the proverb is something
musty.—Oh, the recorders. Let me see one.
He takes a recorder.
To withdraw with you, why
do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive
me into a toil?
3.2.Sp125Hamlet
It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your
fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse
most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
3.2.Sp127Hamlet
Enter Polonius.
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of
me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops,
you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me
from my lowest note to my compass, and there is much music,
excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood,
do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what
instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot play upon me.
To Polonius, as he enters
God bless you, sir.
3.2.Sp135Hamlet
Exit.
Then I will come to my mother by and by.
Aside
They fool me to the top of my bent.
Aloud
I will come by and by. Leave me, friends. I will, say so. "By and by" is easily said.
Exeunt all but Hamlet.
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breaks out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such business as the bitter day
Would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother.
O heart, loose not thy nature! Let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.
Let me be cruel, not unnatural;
I will speak dagger to her, but use none.
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites:
How in my words somever she be shent,
To give them seals never my soul consent!
3.3
Enter King, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.3.3.Sp1King
I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you.
I your commission will forthwith dispatch,
And he to England shall along with you.
The terms of our estate may not endure
Hazard so near’s as doth hourly grow
Out of his brows.
3.3.Sp2Guildenstern
We will ourselves provide.
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your majesty.
3.3.Sp3Rosencrantz
The single and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armor of the mind
To keep itself from noyance, but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cess of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What’s near it with it, or it is a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined, which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist’rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
3.3.Sp4King
Exeunt gentlemen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Enter Polonius.
Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy voyage,
For we will fetters put about this fear
Which now goes too free-footed.
3.3.Sp6Polonius
Exit Polonius.
My lord, he’s going to his mother’s closet.
Behind the arras I’ll convey myself
To hear the process. I’ll warrant she’ll tax him home.
And, as you said—and wisely was it said—
’Tis meet that some more audience than a mother,
Since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear
The speech of vantage. Fare you well, my liege.
I’ll call upon you ere you go to bed,
And tell you what I know.
3.3.Sp7King
He kneels.
Enter Hamlet.
Thanks, dear my lord.
Oh, my offense is rank! It smells to heaven.
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will;
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
And like a man to double business bound
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursèd hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offense?
And what’s in prayer but this twofold force,
To be forestallèd ere we come to fall,
Or pardoned being down? Then I’ll look up.
My fault is past. But, oh, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? "Forgive me my foul murder"?
That cannot be, since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder:
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardoned and retain th’offense?
In the corrupted currents of this world,
Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law. But ’tis not so above:
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? What rests?
Try what repentance can. What can it not?
Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?
O wretched state, O bosom black as death,
O limèd soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay.
Bow, stubborn knees, and heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.
3.3.Sp8Hamlet
Exit.
Exit.
Now might I do it. But now ’a is a-praying,
And now I’ll do’t.
He draws his sword.
And so ’a goes to heaven,
And so am I revenged. That would be scanned:
A villain kills my father, and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is base and silly, not revenge.
’A took my father grossly full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May,
And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought
’Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?
No.
He sheathes his sword.
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent.
When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At game a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in’t,
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays.
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.
3.4
Enter Gertrude and Polonius.3.4.Sp1Polonius
Enter Hamlet.
Polonius conceals himself behind the arras.
’A will come straight. Look you lay home to him.
Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with,
And that your grace hath screened and stood between
Much heat and him. I’ll silence me even here.
Pray you, be round.
3.4.Sp11Hamlet
No, by the rood, not so.
You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife,
And, would it were not so, you are my mother.
3.4.Sp13Hamlet
Hamlet thrusts through the arras with his sword and fatally stabs Polonius.
Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge.
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
3.4.Sp23Hamlet
Ay, lady, it was my word.
He parts the arras and discovers the dead Polonius.
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better. Take thy fortune.
Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger.
To the Queen
Leave wringing of your hands. Peace, sit you down,
And let me wring your heart, for so I shall
If it be made of penetrable stuff,
If damnèd custom have not brassed it so
That it be proof and bulwark against sense.
3.4.Sp25Hamlet
Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love
And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows
As false as dicers’ oaths—oh, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words. Heaven’s face does glow
O’er this solidity and compound mass
With heated visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.
3.4.Sp27Hamlet
Showing her two likenesses, of Hamlet senior and Claudius
Look here upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See what a grace was seated on this brow:
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.
This was your husband. Look you now what follows:
Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear,
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed
And batten on this moor? Ha, have you eyes?
You cannot call it love, for at your age
The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble,
And waits upon the judgment, and what judgment
Would step from this to this? Sense, sure, you have,
Else could you not have motion, but sure that sense
Is apoplexed, for madness would not err,
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thralled
But it reserved some quantity of choice
To serve in such a difference. What devil was’t
That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind?
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope. O shame, where is thy blush?
Rebellious hell,
If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax
And melt in her own fire. Proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardor gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn,
And reason pardons will.
3.4.Sp28Queen
Oh, Hamlet speak no more!
Thou turn’st my very eyes into my soul,
And there I see such black and grievèd spots
As will leave there their tinct.
3.4.Sp29Hamlet
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!
3.4.Sp30Queen
Oh, speak to me no more!
These words like daggers enter in my ears.
No more, sweet Hamlet.
3.4.Sp31Hamlet
Enter Ghost in his nightgown.
A murderer and a villain,
A slave that is not twentieth part the kith
Of your precedent lord, a vice of kings,
A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole
And put it in his pocket—
3.4.Sp33Hamlet
A king of shreds and patches—
Seeing the Ghost
Save me and hover o’er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure?
3.4.Sp35Hamlet
Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by
Th’important acting of your dread command?
Oh, say!
3.4.Sp36Ghost
Do not forget. This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But look, amazement on thy mother sits.
Oh, step between her and her fighting soul!
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.
3.4.Sp38Queen
Alas, how is’t with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep,
And, as the sleeping soldiers in th’alarm,
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
Start up and stand on end. O gentle son,
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look?
3.4.Sp39Hamlet
On him, on him! Look you how pale he glares!
His form and cause conjoined, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable.
To the Ghost
Do not look upon me,
Lest with this piteous action you convert
My stern effects. Then what I have to do
Will want true color, tears perchance for blood.
3.4.Sp45Hamlet
Exit Ghost.
Why, look you there, look how it steals away!
My father in his habit as he lived.
Look where he goes, even now out at the portal!
3.4.Sp46Queen
This is the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.
3.4.Sp47Hamlet
My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time,
And makes as healthful music. It is not madness
That I have uttered. Bring me to the test,
And I the matter will reword, which madness
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul
That not your trespass but my madness speaks.
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven,
Repent what’s past, avoid what is to come,
And do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue,
For in the fatness of these pursy times
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg,
Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good.
3.4.Sp49Hamlet
Oh, throw away the worser part of it,
And leave the purer with the other half.
Good night. But go not to my uncle’s bed;
Assume a virtue if you have it not.
That monster custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery
That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence; the next more easy:
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency. Once more good night,
And when you are desirous to be blest,
I’ll blessing beg of you. For this same lord,
I do repent; but heaven hath pleased it so
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So, again, good night.
I must be cruel only to be kind.
This bad begins, and worse remains behind.
One word more, good lady.
3.4.Sp51Hamlet
Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed,
Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse,
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out
That I essentially am not in madness,
But mad in craft. ’Twere good you let him know,
For who that’s but a queen, fair, sober, wise,
Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib,
Such dear concernings hide? Who would do so?
No, in dispite of sense and secrecy,
Unpeg the basket on the house’s top,
Let the birds fly, and like the famous ape,
To try conclusions, in the basket creep,
And break your own neck down.
3.4.Sp52Queen
Be thou assured, if words be made of breath
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me.
3.4.Sp55Hamlet
Exit.
There’s letters sealed, and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged,
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work,
For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard, and’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon. Oh ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.
This man shall set me packing.
I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room.
Mother, good night indeed. This counselor
Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,
Who was in life a most foolish prating knave.—
Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.—
Good night, mother.
4.1
Enter King, and Queen, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.4.1.Sp1King
There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves.
You must translate; ’tis fit we understand them.
Where is your son?
4.1.Sp2Queen
To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Bestow this place on us a little while.
Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Ah, mine own lord, what have I seen tonight!
4.1.Sp4Queen
Mad as the sea and wind when both contend
Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit,
Behind the arras hearing something stir,
Whips out his rapier, cries, "A rat, a rat!"
And in this brainish apprehension kills
The unseen good old man.
4.1.Sp5King
Oh, heavy deed!
It had been so with us had we been there.
His liberty is full of threats to all—
To you yourself, to us, to everyone.
Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?
It will be laid to us, whose providence
Should have kept short, restrained, and out of haunt
This mad young man. But so much was our love,
We would not understand what was most fit,
But like the owner of a foul disease,
To keep it from divulging, let it feed
Even on the pith of life. Where is he gone?
4.1.Sp6Queen
To draw apart the body he hath killed,
O’er whom his very madness, like some ore
Among a mineral of metals base,
Shows itself pure: ’a weeps for what is done.
4.1.Sp7King
Exeunt.
Oh, Gertrude, come away!
The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch
But we will ship him hence, and this vile deed
We must with all our majesty and skill
Both countenance and excuse.—Ho, Guildenstern!
(Enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)
Friends both, go join you with some further aid.
Hamlet in madness hath Polonius slain,
And from his mother’s closet hath he dragged him.
Go seek him out, speak fair, and bring the body
Into the chapel. I pray you haste in this.
Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Come, Gertrude, we’ll call up our wisest friends
And let them know both what we mean to do
And what’s untimely done.
Whose whisper o’er the world’s diameter,
As level as the cannon to his blank,
Transports his poisoned shot, may miss our name
And hit the woundless air. Oh, come away!
My soul is full of discord and dismay.
4.2
Enter Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and others.4.2.Sp7Hamlet
That I can keep your counsel and not mine own. Besides,
to be demanded of a sponge, what replication should be made by
the son of a king?
4.2.Sp9Hamlet
Exeunt.
Ay, sir, that soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his
authorities. But such officers do the King best service in the end: he
keeps them, like an ape an apple in the corner of his jaw, first mouthed to be
last swallowed. When he needs what you have gleaned, it is but
squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again.
4.3
Enter King, and two or three.4.3.Sp1King
Enter Rosencrantz and all the rest.
They Guildenstern and Guards enter with Hamlet.
I have sent to seek him and to find the body.
How dangerous is it that this man goes loose!
Yet must not we put the strong law on him;
He’s loved of the distracted multitude,
Who like not in their judgment but their eyes,
And where ’tis so, th’offender’s scourge is weighed,
But never the offense. To bear all smooth and even,
This sudden sending him away must seem
Deliberate pause. Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.
4.3.Sp11Hamlet
Not where he eats, but where ’a is eaten. A certain
convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only
emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat
ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service:
two dishes but to one table. That’s the end.
4.3.Sp13Hamlet
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and
eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
4.3.Sp17Hamlet
Exeunt attendants.
In heaven. Send thither to see. If your messenger find him
not there, seek him i’th’ other place yourself. But if indeed you find
him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the
stairs into the lobby.
4.3.Sp20King
Hamlet, this deed, for thine especial safety—
Which we do tender, as we dearly grieve
For that which thou hast done—must send thee hence.
Therefore prepare thyself.
The bark is ready, and the wind at help,
Th’associates tend, and everything is bent
For England.
4.3.Sp27Hamlet
Exit.
My mother. Father and mother is man and wife,
man and wife is one flesh, so, my mother.
Come, for England!
4.3.Sp28King
Exit.
Follow him at foot.
Tempt him with speed aboard.
Delay it not. I’ll have him hence tonight.
Away! For everything is sealed and done
That else leans on th’affair. Pray you, make haste.
Exeunt all but the King.
And England, if my love thou hold’st at aught,
As my great power thereof may give thee sense,
Since yet thy cicatrice looks raw and red
After the Danish sword, and thy free awe
Pays homage to us, thou mayst not coldly set
Our sovereign process, which imports at full
By letters congruing to that effect
The present death of Hamlet. Do it, England,
For like the hectic in my blood he rages,
And thou must cure me. Till I know ’tis done,
Howe’er my haps, my joys will ne’er begin.
4.4
Enter Fortinbras and a Captain with his army over the stage.4.4.Sp1Fortinbras
Exeunt all but the Captain.
Enter Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, etc.
Go, captain, from me greet the Danish King.
Tell him that by his license Fortinbras
Craves the conveyance of a promised march
Over his kingdom. You know the rendezvous.
If that his majesty would aught with us,
We shall express our duty in his eye;
And let him know so.
4.4.Sp11Captain
Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it,
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.
4.4.Sp14Hamlet
Exit.
Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw.
This is th’impostume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.
4.4.Sp17Hamlet
Exit.
I’ll be with you straight. Go a little before.
Exeunt all but Hamlet.
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’event—
A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake. How stand I, then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? Oh, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
4.5
Enter Horatio, Queen Gertrude, and a Gentleman.4.5.Sp4Gentleman
She speaks much of her father, says she hears
There’s tricks i’th’ world, and hems, and beats her heart,
Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt
That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshapèd use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they yawn at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts,
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.
4.5.Sp5Horatio
Exit Gentleman.
Enter Ophelia.
’Twere good she were spoken with, for she may strew
Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.
Let her come in.
4.5.Sp6Queen
Enter Ophelia.
Aside
To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is,
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.
So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.
4.5.Sp9Ophelia
(She sings.)
“How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon.”
4.5.Sp11Ophelia
Say you? Nay, pray you, mark.
Song. He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone.
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
Oho!
White his shroud as the mountain snow—Enter King.
4.5.Sp15Ophelia
(Song.)
“Larded all with sweet flowers,
Which bewept to the ground did not go
With true-love showers.”
4.5.Sp17Ophelia
Song.
Well Good dild you. They say the owl was a baker’s
daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
God be at your table!
Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window To be your Valentine. Then up he rose, and donned his close And dupped the chamber door, Let in the maid, that out a maid Never departed more.
4.5.Sp21Ophelia
Indeed? Without an oath I’ll make an end on’t.
Song
“By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do’t if they come to’t;
By Cock, they are too blame.
Quoth she, "Before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.”
He answers,
“So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.”
4.5.Sp23Ophelia
Exit.
I hope all will be well. We must be patient. But I cannot choose
but weep to think they would lay him i’th’ cold ground. My brother
shall know of it. And so I thank you for your good counsel. Come,
my coach! Good night, ladies, good night,
sweet ladies, good night, good night.
4.5.Sp24King
A noise within.
Enter a Messenger.
To Horatio
Follow her close. Give her good watch, I pray you.
Exit Horatio.
Oh, this is the poison of deep grief! It springs
All from her father’s
death and now behold!
Oh, Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions. First, her father slain;
Next, your son gone, and he most violent author
Of his own just remove; the people muddied,
Thick and unwholesome in thoughts and whispers
For good Polonius’ death, and we have done but greenly
In hugger-mugger to inter him; poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair judgment,
Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts;
Last, and as much containing as all these,
Her brother is in secret come from France,
Feeds on this wonder, keeps himself in clouds,
And wants not buzzers to infect his ear
With pestilent speeches of his father’s death,
Wherein necessity, of matter beggared,
Will nothing stick our person to arraign
In ear and ear. O my dear Gertrude, this,
Like to a murd’ring piece, in many places
Gives me superfluous death.
4.5.Sp26Messenger
Save yourself, my lord!
The ocean, overpeering of his list,
Eats not the flats with more impiteous haste
Than young Laertes, in a riotous head,
O’erbears your officers. The rabble call him lord,
And, as the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every word,
They cry, "Choose we! Laertes shall be king!"
Caps, hands, and tongues applaud it to the clouds:
"Laertes shall be king, Laertes king!"
4.5.Sp27Queen
Enter Laertes with others.
How cheerfully on the false trail they cry!
(A noise within.)
Oh, this is counter, you false Danish dogs!
4.5.Sp33Laertes
I thank you. Keep the door.
Exeunt followers and Messenger.
O thou vile king,
Give me my father!
4.5.Sp35Laertes
That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard,
Cries "Cuckold!" to my father, brands the harlot
Even here between the chaste unsmirchèd brow
Of my true mother.
4.5.Sp36King
What is the cause, Laertes,
That thy rebellion looks so giant-like?—
Let him go, Gertrude. Do not fear our person.
There’s such divinity doth hedge a king
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will.—Tell me, Laertes,
Why thou art thus incensed?—Let him go, Gertrude.—
Speak, man.
4.5.Sp41Laertes
How came he dead? I’ll not be juggled with.
To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation. To this point I stand,
That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes, only I’ll be revenged
Most throughly for my father.
4.5.Sp43Laertes
My will, not all the world’s.
And for my means, I’ll husband them so well
They shall go far with little.
4.5.Sp44King
Good Laertes,
If you desire to know the certainty
Of your dear father, is’t writ in your revenge
That, swoopstake, you will draw both friend and foe,
Winner and loser?
4.5.Sp47Laertes
To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms,
And, like the kind life-rend’ring pelican,
Repast them with my blood.
4.5.Sp48King
A noise within.
Enter Ophelia as before.
Why, now you speak
Like a good child and a true gentleman.
That I am guiltless of your father’s death,
And am most sensibly in grief for it,
It shall as level to your judgment ’pear
As day does to your eye.
4.5.Sp49Laertes
Let her come in.
How now, what noise is that?
O heat, dry up my brains! Tears seven times salt
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!
By heaven, thy madness shall be paid with weight
Till our scale turn the beam. O rose of May,
Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!
O heavens, is’t possible a young maid’s wits
Should be as mortal as a poor man’s life?
Nature is fine in love, and where ’tis fine
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.
4.5.Sp50Ophelia
(Song.)
“They bore him bare-faced on the bier,
And in his grave rained many a tear.”
Fare you well, my dove.
4.5.Sp52Ophelia
You must sing "a-down, a-down,"an you call him "a-down-a." Oh, how the wheel becomes
it!It is the false steward that stole his master’s daughter.
4.5.Sp54Ophelia
There’s rosemary; that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love,
remember. And there is pansies; that’s for thoughts.
4.5.Sp56Ophelia
There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for
you, and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’Sundays.
You may wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would
give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.
They say ’a made a good end.
She sings.
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.
4.5.Sp58Ophelia
Exit Ophelia, followed by the Queen.
(Song.)
“And will ’a not come again?
And will ’a not come again?
No, no, he is dead,
Go to thy deathbed,
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
Flaxen was his poll.
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God ’a’ mercy on his soul!”
And of all Christians’ souls, I pray God.
God b’wi’you!
4.5.Sp60King
Laertes, I must commune with your grief,
Or you deny me right. Go but apart,
Make choice of whom your wisest friends you will,
And they shall hear and judge ’twixt you and me.
If by direct or by collateral hand
They find us touched, we will our kingdom give,
Our crown, our life, and all that we call ours
To you in satisfaction; but if not,
Be you content to lend your patience to us,
And we shall jointly labor with your soul
To give it due content.
4.5.Sp61Laertes
Exeunt.
Let this be so.
His means of death, his obscure funeral—
No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones,
No noble rite, nor formal ostentation—
Cry to be heard as ’twere from heaven to earth,
That I must call’t in question.
4.6
Enter Horatio, and others including a Gentleman.4.6.Sp3Horatio
Enter Sailors.
Let them come in.
Exit Gentleman.
I do not know from what part of the world
I should be greeted, if not from Lord Hamlet.
4.6.Sp6Sailor
He gives a letter.
’A shall, sir, an please him. There’s a letter for you, sir. It came
from th’ambassador that was bound for England, if your name be
Horatio, as I am let to know it is.
4.6.Sp7Horatio
Reads the letter
“Horatio, when thou shalt have overlooked this, give these
fellows some means to the King; they have letters for him. Ere we
were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave
us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled
valor, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got
clear of our ship, so I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt
with me like thieves of mercy, but they knew what they did: I am to
do a turn for them. Let the King have the letters I have sent, and
repair thou to me with as much speed as thou wouldest fly death.
I have words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb, yet are
they much too light for the bore of the matter. These good fellows
will bring thee where I am. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their
course for England. Of them I have much to tell thee. Farewell.
He that thou knowest thine, Hamlet.”
4.6.Sp8Horatio
Exeunt.
Come, I will give you way for these your letters,
And do’t the speedier that you may direct me
To him from whom you brought them.
4.7
Enter King and Laertes.4.7.Sp1King
Now must your conscience my acquittance seal,
And you must put me in your heart for friend,
Sith you have heard, and with a knowing ear,
That he which hath your noble father slain
Pursued my life.
4.7.Sp2Laertes
It well appears. But tell me
Why you proceed not against these feats
So criminal and so capital in nature,
As by your safety, greatness, wisdom, all things else,
You mainly were stirred up.
4.7.Sp3King
Oh for two special reasons,
Which may to you perhaps seem much unsinewed,
But yet to me they’re strong. The Queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks, and for myself—
My virtue or my plague, be it either which—
She is so conjunct to my life and soul
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her. The other motive
Why to a public count I might not go
Is the great love the general gender bear him,
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Work, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces, so that my arrows,
Too slightly timbered for so lovèd armed,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
But not where I have aimed them.
4.7.Sp4Laertes
And so have I a noble father lost,
A sister driven into desp’rate terms,
Whose worth, if praises may go back again,
Stood challenger on mount of all the age
For her perfections. But my revenge will come.
4.7.Sp5King
Enter a Messenger with letters.
He gives letters.
Break not your sleeps for that. You must not think
That we are made of stuff so flat and dull
That we can let our beard be shook with danger
And think it pastime. You shortly shall hear more.
I loved your father, and we love ourself,
And that, I hope, will teach you to imagine—
4.7.Sp8Messenger
Sailors, my lord, they say. I saw them not.
They were given me by Claudio. He received them
Of him that brought them.
4.7.Sp9King
Laertes, you shall hear them.
To the Messenger
Leave us.
Exit Messenger.
He reads.
High and mighty, you shall know I am set naked on your kingdom.
Tomorrow shall I beg leave to see your kingly eyes, when I shall first,
asking you pardon, thereunto recount the occasion of my sudden
return. Hamlet.
What should this mean? Are all the rest come back?
Or is it some abuse, and no such thing?
4.7.Sp11King
’Tis Hamlet’s character. "Naked!"
And in a postscript here he says "alone."
Can you devise me?
4.7.Sp12Laertes
I am lost in it, my lord. But let him come.
It warms the very sickness in my heart
That I live and tell him to his teeth
"Thus didst thou."
4.7.Sp15King
To thine own peace. If he be now returned
As checking at his voyage, and that he means
No more to undertake it, I will work him
To an exploit, now ripe in my device,
Under the which he shall not choose but fall;
And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe,
But even his mother shall uncharge the practice
And call it accident.
4.7.Sp16Laertes
My lord, I will be ruled,
The rather if you could devise it so
That I might be the organ.
4.7.Sp17King
It falls right.
You have been talked of since your travel much,
And that in Hamlet’s hearing, for a quality
Wherein they say you shine. Your sum of parts
Did not together pluck such envy from him
As did that one, and that, in my regard,
Of the unworthiest siege.
4.7.Sp19King
A very riband in the cap of youth,
Yet needful too, for youth no less becomes
The light and careless livery that it wears
Than settled age his sables and his weeds
Importing health and graveness. Two months since
Here was a gentleman of Normandy.
I have seen myself, and served against, the French,
And they can well on horseback, but this gallant
Had witchcraft in’t; he grew unto his seat,
And to such wondrous doing brought his horse
As had he been incorpsed and demi-natured
With the brave beast. So far he topped my thought
That I in forgery of shapes and tricks
Come short of what he did.
4.7.Sp25King
He made confession of you,
And gave you such a masterly report
For art and exercise in your defense,
And for your rapier most especial,
That he cried out ’twould be a sight indeed
If one could match you. Th’escrimers of their nation,
He swore, had neither motion, guard, nor eye
If you opposed them. Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy
That he could nothing do but wish and beg
Your sudden coming o’er to play with you.
Now, out of this—
4.7.Sp27King
Laertes, was your father dear to you?
Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?
4.7.Sp29King
Not that I think you did not love your father,
But that I know love is begun by time,
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it,
And nothing is at a like goodness still,
For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,
Dies in his own too much. That we would do
We should do when we would, for this "would" changes
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents,
And then this "should" is like a spendthrift’s sigh,
That hurts by easing. But to the quick of th’ulcer:
Hamlet comes back. What would you undertake
To show yourself indeed your father’s son
More than in words?
4.7.Sp31King
No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize.
Revenge should have no bounds. But, good Laertes,
Will you do this: keep close within your chamber.
Hamlet returned shall know you are come home.
We’ll put on those shall praise your excellence
And set a double varnish on the fame
The Frenchman gave you, bring you in fine together,
And wager o’er your heads. He being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils, so that with ease,
Or with a little shuffling, you may choose
A sword unbated, and in a pass of practice
Requite him for your father.
4.7.Sp32Laertes
I will do’t,
And for that purpose I’ll anoint my sword.
I bought an unction of a mountebank
So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratched withal. I’ll touch my point
With this contagion, that if I gall him slightly,
It may be death.
4.7.Sp33King
Enter Queen.
Lets further think of this.
Weigh what convenience both of time and means
May fit us to our shape. If this should fail,
And that our drift look through our bad performance,
’Twere better not assayed. Therefore this project
Should have a back or second, that might hold
If this did blast in proof. Soft, let me see.
We’ll make a solemn wager on your cunnings—
I ha’t! When in your motion you are hot and dry—
As make your bouts more violent to that end—
And that he calls for drink, I’ll have preferred him
A chalice for the nonce, whereon but sipping,
If he by chance escape your venomed stuck,
Our purpose may hold there.
A cry within.
But stay, what noise?
4.7.Sp34Queen
One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,
So fast they follow. Your sister’s drowned, Laertes.
4.7.Sp36Queen
There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cull-cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
4.7.Sp39Laertes
Exit.
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears. But yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will.
He weeps.
When these are gone,
The woman will be out. Adieu, my lord.
I have a speech o’fire that fain would blaze,
But that this folly drowns it.
4.7.Sp40King
Exeunt.
Let’s follow, Gertrude.
How much I had to do to calm his rage!
Now fear I this will give it start again;
Therefore let’s follow.
5.1
Enter two Clowns with spades and mattocks.5.1.Sp2Other
I tell thee she is; therefore make her grave straight. The
crowner hath sat on her, and finds it Christian burial.
5.1.Sp5Clown
It must be so offended, it cannot be else, for here lies the
point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath
three branches: it is to act, to do, and to perform. Argal, she drowned
herself wittingly.
5.1.Sp7Clown
Give me leave. Here lies the water; good. Here stands the
man; good. If the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will
he, nill he, he goes. Mark you that. But if the water come to him and
drown him, he drowns not himself. Argal, he that is not guilty of
his own death shortens not his own life.
5.1.Sp10Other
Will you ha’ the truth on’t? If this had not been a
gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’Christian burial.
5.1.Sp11Clown
Why, there thou say’st, and the more pity that great folk
should have count’nance in this world to drown or hang themselves
more than their even-Christen. Come, my spade. There is no
ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and gravemakers. They hold
up Adam’s profession.
5.1.Sp13Clown
’A was the first that ever bore arms. I’ll put another question to thee. If thou answerest
me not to the purpose, confess thyself.
5.1.Sp15Clown
What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the
shipwright, or the carpenter?
5.1.Sp17Clown
I like thy wit well, in good faith, the gallows does well.
But how does it well? It does well to those that do ill. Now, thou
dost ill to say the gallows is built stronger than the church. Argal,
the gallows may do well to thee. To’t again, come.
5.1.Sp23Clown
Song.
Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull ass will
not mend his pace with beating; and when you are asked this question
next, say "a grave-maker." The houses he makes lasts till doomsday.
Go get thee in, and fetch me a soope of liquor.
Exit Second Clown.
The First Clown digs.
In youth when I did love, did love, Methought it was very sweet To contract—oh—the time for-a—my behove, Oh, methought there—a—was nothing—a—meet.Enter Hamlet and Horatio.
5.1.Sp27ClownSong.But age with his stealing steps
Hath clawed me in his clutch,
And hath shipped me into the land,
As if I had never been such.
The Clown throws up a skull.
5.1.Sp28Hamlet
That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the
knave jowls it to the ground, as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the
first murder! This might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now
o’erreaches, one that would circumvent God, might it not?
5.1.Sp30Hamlet
Or of a courtier, which could say, "Good morrow, sweet lord,
how dost thou, sweet lord?" This might be my Lord Such-a-one, that
praised my Lord Such-a-one’s horse when ’a went to beg it, might it not?
5.1.Sp32Hamlet
Song.
Why, e’en so. And now my Lady Worm’s, chopless, and knocked
about the massene with a sexton’s spade. Here’s fine revolution, an
we had the trick to see’t. Did these bones cost no more the breeding
but to play at loggets with them? Mine ache to think on’t.
5.1.Sp33ClownA pickax and a spade, a spade,
For and a shrouding sheet;
Oh, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet.
He throws up another skull.
5.1.Sp34Hamlet
There’s another. Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities
now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this
mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell
him of his action of battery? H’m! This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of
land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries,
to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will
vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length
and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his
lands will scarcely lie in this box, and must th’inheritor himself have
no more, ha?
5.1.Sp38Hamlet
Sings.
They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in
that. I will speak to this fellow.—Whose grave’s this, sirrah?
Oh, a pit of clay for to be made —
5.1.Sp41Clown
You lie out on’t, sir, and therefore ’tis not yours. For my part, I
do not lie in’t, yet it is mine.
5.1.Sp42Hamlet
Thou dost lie in’t, to be in’t and say it is thine. ’Tis for the dead,
not for the quick; therefore thou liest.
5.1.Sp50Hamlet
To Horatio
How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or
equivocation will undo us. By the Lord, Horatio, this three years I
have took note of it, the age is grown so picked that the toe of the
peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe.—How
long hast thou been grave-maker?
5.1.Sp51Clown
Of the days i’th’ year, I came to’t that day that our last King
Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
5.1.Sp53Clown
Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was that
very day that young Hamlet was born—he that is mad and sent into
England.
5.1.Sp55Clown
Why, because ’a was mad. ’A shall recover his wits there, or if
’a do not, ’tis no great matter there.
5.1.Sp65Clown
Faith, if ’a be not rotten before ’a die—as we have many
pocky corses nowadays that will scarce hold the laying in—’a will last you some eight
year, or nine year. A tanner will last you nine year.
5.1.Sp67Clown
Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade that ’a will keep
out water a great while; and your water is a sore decayer of your
whoreson dead body.
He picks up a skull.
Here’s a skull now hath lyen you i’th’earth 23 years.
5.1.Sp71Clown
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! ’A poured a flagon of
Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the
King’s jester.
5.1.Sp74Hamlet
He throws the skull down.
taking the skull
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite
jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a
thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge
rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how
oft.—Where be your gibes now? Your gambols, your songs, your
flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now to mock your own grinning? Quite chopfall’n? Now get you
to my lady’s table and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this
favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.
Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
5.1.Sp80Hamlet
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not
imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ’a find it stopping
a bunghole?
5.1.Sp82Hamlet
Hamlet and Horatio conceal themselves. Ophelia’s body is taken to the grave.
No, faith, not a jot. But to follow him thither with modesty
enough, and likelihood to lead it: Alexander died, Alexander was
buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we
make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might
they not stop a beer-barrel?
“
Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
Oh, that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’expel the water’s flaw!”
(Enter King, Queen, Laertes, and the corse of Ophelia, in funeral procession, with the "Doctor" or Priest, and others.)
But soft, but soft awhile! Here comes the King,
The Queen, the courtiers. Who is this they follow?
And with such maimèd rites? This doth betoken
The corse they follow did with desp’rate hand
Fordo it own life. ’Twas of some estate.
Couch we awhile and mark.
5.1.Sp86Doctor
Her obsequies have been as far enlarged
As we have warranty. Her death was doubtful,
And, but that great command o’ersways the order,
She should in ground unsanctified been lodged
Till the last trumpet. For charitable prayers,
Flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her;
Yet here she is allowed her virgin crants,
Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home
Of bell and burial.
5.1.Sp88Doctor
No more be done.
We should profane the service of the dead
To sing a requiem and such rest to her
As to peace-parted souls.
5.1.Sp89Laertes
Lay her i’th’ earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A minist’ring angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling.
5.1.Sp91Queen
Scattering flowers
Sweets to the sweet! Farewell.
I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife.
I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid,
And not have strewed thy grave.
5.1.Sp92Laertes
Oh, treble woe
Fall ten times double on that cursèd head
Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Deprived thee of!—Hold off the earth awhile,
Till I have caught her once more in mine arms.
He leaps in the grave
Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made
T’o’ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.
5.1.Sp93Hamlet
Coming forward
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
5.1.Sp95Hamlet
Hamlet and Laertes are parted.
Thou pray’st not well. I prithee take thy fingers from my throat,
For, though I am not splenative rash,
Yet have I in me something dangerous,
Which let thy wisdom fear. Hold off thy hand!
5.1.Sp102Hamlet
I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.—What wilt thou do for her?
5.1.Sp105Hamlet
’Swounds, show me what thou’lt do.
Woo’t weep? Woo’t fight? Woo’t fast? Woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisil? Eat a crocodile?
I’ll do’t. Dost come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I.
And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart. Nay, an thou’lt mouth,
I’ll rant as well as thou.
5.1.Sp106Queen
This is mere madness,
And this awhile the fit will work on him;
Anon, as patient as the female dove
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping.
5.1.Sp107Hamlet
Exit Hamlet.
To Laertes
Hear you, sir,
What is the reason that you use me thus?
I loved you ever. But it is no matter.
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.
5.1.Sp108King
Exeunt.
I pray thee, good Horatio, wait upon him.
(And Horatio exits too.)
Aside to Laertes
Strengthen your patience in our last night’s speech;
We’ll put the matter to the present push.—
Good Gertrard, set some watch over your son.—
This grave shall have a living monument.
An hour of quiet thereby shall we see;
Till then, in patience our proceeding be.
5.2
Enter Hamlet and Horatio.5.2.Sp1Hamlet
So much for this, sir. Now shall you see the other.
You do remember all the circumstance?
5.2.Sp3Hamlet
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it: let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do fall, and that should learn us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
5.2.Sp5Hamlet
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them, had my desire,
Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again, making so bold,
My fears forgetting manners, to unfold
Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio—
Ah, royal knavery!—an exact command,
Larded with many several sorts of reasons
Importing Denmark’s health, and England’s too,
With ho! such bugs and goblins in my life,
That on the supervise, no leisure bated,
No, not to stay the grinding of the ax,
My head should be struck off.
5.2.Sp7Hamlet
Showing a document
Here’s the commission. Read it at more leisure.
But wilt thou hear now how I did proceed?
5.2.Sp9Hamlet
Being thus benetted round with villains—
Or I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play—I sat me down,
Devised a new commission, wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labored much
How to forget that learning, but, sir, now
It did me yeoman’s service. Wilt thou know
Th’effect of what I wrote?
5.2.Sp11Hamlet
An earnest conjuration from the King,
As England was his faithful tributary,
As love between them like the palm might flourish,
As peace should still her wheaten garland wear
And stand a comma ’tween their amities,
And many suchlike "as, sir" of great charge,
That on the view and knowing of these contents,
Without debatement further more or less,
He should those bearers put to sudden death,
Not shriving time allowed.
5.2.Sp13Hamlet
Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.
I had my father’s signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal;
Folded the writ up in the form of th’other,
Subscribed it, gave’t th’impression, placed it safely,
The changeling never known. Now the next day
Was our sea fight, and what to this was sequent
Thou knowest already.
5.2.Sp15Hamlet
They are not near my conscience. Their defeat
Does by their own insinuation grow.
’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensèd points
Of mighty opposites.
5.2.Sp17Hamlet
Enter a Courtier Osric.
Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon?
He that hath killed my King and whored my mother,
Popped in between th’election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such coz’nage—is’t not perfect conscience?
5.2.Sp21Hamlet
Aside to Horatio
Thy state is the more gracious, for ’tis a vice to know him.
He hath much land, and fertile. Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his
crib shall stand at the King’s mess. ’Tis a chough, but, as I say, spacious in the
possession of dirt.
5.2.Sp22Courtier
Sweet lord, if your lordship were at leisure, I should
impart a thing to you from his majesty.
5.2.Sp23Hamlet
I will receive it, sir, with all diligence of spirit. Put your bonnet
to his right use. ’Tis for the head.
5.2.Sp28Courtier
Exceedingly, my lord, it is very sultry, as ’twere—I
cannot tell how. My lord, his majesty bade me signify to you that ’a
has laid a great wager on your head. Sir, this is the matter—
5.2.Sp30Courtier
Nay, good my lord, for my ease, in good faith. Sir, here is newly
come to court Laertes—believe me, an absolute gentlemen, full of most
excellent differences, of very soft society and great showing.
Indeed, to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or calendar of
gentry, for you shall find in him the continent of what part a
gentleman would see.
5.2.Sp31Hamlet
Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you, though I
know to divide him inventorially would dazzle th’arithmetic of
memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail. But
in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article,
and his infusion of such dearth and rareness as, to make true diction
of him, his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his
umbrage, nothing more.
5.2.Sp35Horatio
To Hamlet
Is’t not possible to understand in another tongue? You will
do’t, sir, really.
5.2.Sp41Hamlet
I would you did, sir. Yet in faith if you did, it would not
much approve me. Well, sir?
5.2.Sp43Hamlet
I dare not confess that, lest I should compare with
him in excellence. But to know a man well were to know himself.
5.2.Sp44Cour.
I mean, sir, for his weapon. But in the imputation laid on
him by them, in his meed he’s unfellowed.
5.2.Sp48Courtier
The King, sir, hath wagered with him six Barbary horses,
against the which he has impawned, as I take it, six French rapiers
and poniards, with their assigns, as girdle, hanger, and so. Three
of the carriages, in faith, are very dear to fancy, very responsive to
the hilts, most delicate carriages, and of very liberal conceit.
5.2.Sp52Hamlet
The phrase would be more germane to the matter if we
could carry a cannon by our sides; I would it might be "hangers" till
then. But on. Six Barbary horses against six French swords, their
assigns, and three liberal-conceited carriages: that’s the French
bet against the Danish. Why is this all you call it?
5.2.Sp53Courtier
The King, sir, hath laid, sir, that in a dozen passes between
yourself and him, he shall not exceed you three hits. He hath
laid on twelve for nine, and it would come to immediate trial, if your lordship would
vouchsafe the answer.
5.2.Sp56Hamlet
Sir, I will walk here in the hall. If it please his majesty, it
is the breathing time of day with me. Let the foils be brought, the
gentleman willing, and the King hold his purpose, I will win
for him an I can; if not, I will gain nothing but my shame and
the odd hits.
5.2.Sp60Hamlet
Yours.
Exit Courtier, Osric.
’A does well to commend it himself; there are no
tongues else for’s turn.
5.2.Sp62Hamlet
Enter a Lord.
’A did so, sir, with his dug before ’a sucked it. Thus has he, and
many more of the same breed that I know the drossy age dotes on,
only got the tune of the time and, out of an habit of encounter, a
kind of yeasty collection, which carries them through and through
the most profane and winnowed opinions; and do but blow
them to their trial, the bubbles are out.
5.2.Sp63Lord
My lord, his majesty commended him to you by young
Osric, who brings back to him that you attend him in the hall.
He sends to know if your pleasure hold to play with Laertes, or that
you will take longer time?
5.2.Sp64Hamlet
I am constant to my purposes; they follow the King’s
pleasure. If his fitness speaks, mine is ready: now or whensoever,
provided I be so able as now.
5.2.Sp67Lord
Exit Lord.
The Queen desires you to use some gentle entertainment
to Laertes before you fall to play.
5.2.Sp70Hamlet
I do not think so. Since he went into France, I have been
in continual practice; I shall win at the odds. Thou wouldst not
think how ill all’s here about my heart, but it is no matter.
5.2.Sp72Hamlet
It is but foolery, but it is such a kind of gaingiving as
would perhaps trouble a woman.
5.2.Sp73Horatio
If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their
repair hither and say you are not fit.
5.2.Sp74Hamlet
A table prepared. Enter Trumpets, drums, and officers with cushions,
King, Queen, Osric, and all the state, foils, daggers,
and Laertes. Wine is borne in.
The King puts Laertes’s hand into Hamlet’s.
Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now,
yet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of aught of what he leaves knows
what is’t to leave betimes.
Let be.
5.2.Sp76Hamlet
To Laertes
Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong,
But pardon’t as you are a gentleman. This presence knows,
And you must needs have heard, how I am punished
With a sore distraction. What I have done
That might your nature, honor, and exception
Roughly awake, I hear proclaim was madness.
Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness. If’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts
That I have shot my arrow o’er the house
And hurt my brother.
5.2.Sp77Laertes
I am satisfied in nature,
Whose motive in this case should stir me most
To my revenge. But in my terms of honor
I stand aloof, and will no reconcilement,
Till by some elder masters of known honor
I have a voice and precedent of peace
To keep my name ungored. But all that time
I do receive your offered love like love,
And will not wrong it.
5.2.Sp80Hamlet
I’ll be your foil, Laertes. In mine ignorance
Your skill shall like a star i’th’ darkest night
Stick fiery off indeed.
5.2.Sp83King
He exchanges his foil for another.
They prepare to play.
Give them the foils, young Osric.
Foils are handed to Hamlet and Laertes.
Cousin Hamlet,
You know the wager.
5.2.Sp89King
They fence. Hamlet scores a hit.
Drum, trumpets, and shot. Flourish. A piece goes off.
Set me the stoups of wine upon that table.
If Hamlet give the first or second hit,
Or quit in answer of the third exchange,
Let all the battlements their ordnance fire.
The King shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath,
And in the cup an onyx shall he throw
Richer then that which four successive kings
In Denmark’s crown have worn. Give me the cups,
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth,
"Now the King drinks to Hamlet." Come, begin.
(Trumpets the while.)
And you, the judges, bear a wary eye.
5.2.Sp97King
Stay. Give me drink. Hamlet this pearl is thine.
He drinks, and throws a pearl in Hamlet’s cup.
Here’s to thy health.—Give him the cup.
5.2.Sp98Hamlet
I’ll play this bout first. Set it by awhile.
Come.
They fence.
Come, another hit. What say you?
5.2.Sp101Queen
She drinks.
He’s fat and scant of breath.—
Here, Hamlet, take my napkin, rub thy brows.
The Queen takes a cup of wine to offer a toast to Hamlet.
The Queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet.
5.2.Sp111Hamlet
They fence.
Laertes wounds Hamlet with his unbated rapier. In scuffling they change rapiers. Hamlet wounds Laertes.
Laertes falls down. The Queen falls down.
Come for the third, Laertes, you do but dally.
I pray you, pass with your best violence;
I am sure you make a wanton of me.
5.2.Sp120Laertes
She dies.
Exit Osric.
Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric;
I am justly killed with mine own treachery.
5.2.Sp125Laertes
He stabs the King.
It is here. Hamlet, thou art slain.
No med’cine in the world can do thee good;
In thee there is not half an hour’s life.
The treacherous instrument is in my hand,
Unbated and envenomed. The foul practice
Hath turned itself on me. Lo, here I lie
Never to rise again. Thy mother’s poisoned.
I can no more. The King, the King’s to blame.
5.2.Sp129Hamlet
The King dies.
Forcing the King to drink
Here, thou incestuous, damnèd Dane,
Drink off this potion. Is the onyx here?
Follow my mother.
5.2.Sp130Laertes
He dies.
He is justly served.
It is a poison tempered by himself.
Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet.
Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me!
5.2.Sp131Hamlet
Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee.
I am dead, Horatio. Wretched Queen, adieu.
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time, as this fell sergeant Death
Is strict in his arrest, oh, I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
5.2.Sp132Horatio
He attempts to drink from the poisoned cup, but is prevented by Hamlet.
Never believe it.
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.
Here’s yet some liquor left.
5.2.Sp133Hamlet
Enter Osric.
As thou’rt a man,
Give me the cup! Let go! By heaven I’ll ha’t.
Oh, God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
(A march afar off.)
What warlike noise is this?
5.2.Sp134Osric
Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland,
To th’ambassadors of England gives this warlike volley.
5.2.Sp135Hamlet
He dies.
Oh, I die, Horatio.
The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit.
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th’election lights
On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th’occurrents more and less
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.
5.2.Sp136Horatio
Enter Fortinbras, with the English Ambassadors, with Drum, Colors, and Attendants.
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
March within.
Why does the drum come hither?
5.2.Sp139Fortinbras
This quarry cries on havoc. O proud Death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
5.2.Sp140Ambassador
The sight is dismal,
And our affairs from England come too late.
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing,
To tell him his commandment is fulfilled,
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Where should we have our thanks?
5.2.Sp141Horatio
Not from his mouth,
Had it th’ability of life to thank you;
He never gave commandment for their death.
But since so jump upon this bloody question
You from the Polack wars and you from England
Are here arrived, give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placèd the view,
And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and for no cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
5.2.Sp142Fortinbras
Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience.
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune.
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,
Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.
5.2.Sp143Horatio
Of that I shall have also cause to speak,
And from his mouth whose voice will draw no more.
But let this same be presently performed,
Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.
5.2.Sp144Fortinbras
Exeunt.
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royal; and for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go bid the soldiers shoot.
FINIS.
Characters
Prosopography
David Bevington
David Bevington was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus
in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His books include From
Mankindto Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), Action Is Eloquence (1985), Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience (2005), This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (2007), Shakespeare’s Ideas (2008), Shakespeare and Biography (2010), and Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011). He was the editor of Medieval Drama (1975), The Bantam Shakespeare, and The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The latter was published in a seventh edition in 2014. He was a senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama, and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012). Professor Bevington passed away on August 2, 2019.
Donald Bailey
Eric Rasmussen
Eric Rasmussen is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at
the University of Nevada. He is co-editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works and general editor, with Paul Werstine, of the New Variorum Shakespeare. He has received the Falstaff Award from PlayShakespeare.com for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year in 2007, 2012, and 2013.
James D. Mardock
James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate
General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake
Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto
and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance
literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonson’s representation of urban space as an element in
his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and
he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in
early modern English drama.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Kate LeBere
Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator
and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English
at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History
Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management
in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth
and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet
during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University
of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media
Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities
projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the
Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020.
He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Michael Best
Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the
Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the
ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery,
a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on
Electronic Shakespeares,and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.
Rachael Ruth
Rachael Ruth is completing her Bachelor of Arts in Leadership Studies and French Studies
with a minor in Business Administrations at the University of Richmond. She is an
intern under Janelle Jenstad and is an Encoder of the MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology.
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
William Shakespeare
Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | Hamlet, Q2 Modern |
| Type of text | Primary Source Text |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | |
| Source |
This file has been converted from IML, the SGML markup language of the Internet Shakespeare
Editions platform. IML files do not indicate the copy or copytext transcribed. LEMDO
acknowledges that we are not the main source of transcription, and that we do not
know the witness transcribed in this transcription. As time permits, we will compare
this transcription to an open-access digital surrogate and align the transcription
that surrogate. If you have worked on ISE and/or may have an idea as to the source
of this file, please contact lemdo@uvic.ca.
The edition follows the Guidelines of the Internet Shakespeare Editions.
|
| Editorial declaration | This text has been edited by David Bevington for the Internet Shakespeare Editions. It is a composite edition derived from the Second Quarto of 1604 and the First Folio of 1623. |
| Edition | |
| Encoding description | |
| Document status | IML-TEI |
| License/availability |