Hamlet - William Shakespeare (best free ebook reader .TXT) 📗

or no
That thus he suffers for.

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 honours.

Oph.
Madam, I wish it may.

[Exit Queen.]

Pol.
Ophelia, walk you here.--Gracious, so please you,
We will bestow ourselves.--[To Ophelia.] Read on this book;
That show of such an exercise may colour
Your loneliness.--We are oft to blame in this,--
'Tis too much prov'd,--that with devotion's visage
And pious action we do sugar o'er
The Devil himself.

King.
[Aside.] O, 'tis too true!
How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot's cheek, beautied with plastering art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word:
O heavy burden!

Pol.
I hear him coming: let's withdraw, my lord.

[Exeunt King and Polonius.]

[Enter Hamlet.]

Ham.
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 wish'd. 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,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,--
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller 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 of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith 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 remember'd.

Oph.
Good my lord,
How does your honour for this many a day?

Ham.
I humbly thank you; well, well, well.

Oph.
My lord, I have remembrances of yours
That I have longed long to re-deliver.
I pray you, now receive them.

Ham.
No, not I;
I never gave you aught.

Oph.
My honour'd lord, you know right well you did;
And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd
As made the 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.

Ham.
Ha, ha! are you honest?

Oph.
My lord?

Ham.
Are you fair?

Oph.
What means your lordship?

Ham.
That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no
discourse to your beauty.

Oph.
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

Ham.
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.

Oph.
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

Ham.
You should not have believ'd me; for virtue cannot so
inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you
not.

Oph.
I was the more deceived.

Ham.
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 offences 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, all;
believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where's your
father?

Oph.
At home, my lord.

Ham.
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool
nowhere but in's own house. Farewell.

Oph.
O, help him, you sweet heavens!

Ham.
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, go: 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.

Oph.
O heavenly powers, restore him!

Ham.
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath
given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you
amble, and you lisp, and nickname God's creatures, and make your
wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made
me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are
married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as
they are. To a nunnery, go.

[Exit.]

Oph.
O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword,
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observ'd of all observers,--quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

[Re-enter King and Polonius.]

King.
Love! his affections do not that way tend;
Nor what he spake, though it lack'd 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?

Pol.
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 plac'd, 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.

King.
It shall be so:
Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.

[Exeunt.]


Scene II. A hall in the Castle.

[Enter Hamlet and cartain Players.]

Ham.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you,
trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your
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 passion, you must acquire and beget a
temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the
soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to
tatters, to very rags, to split the cars 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.

I Player.
I warrant your honour.

Ham.
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 overdone 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 own image,
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 make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious
grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance,
o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I
have seen play,--and heard others praise, and that highly,--not
to speak it profanely, that, neither having the 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 abominably.

I Player.
I hope we have reform'd that indifferently with us, sir.

Ham.
O, 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 villanous
and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go
make you ready.

[Exeunt Players.]

[Enter Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.]

How now, my lord! will the king hear this piece of work?

Pol.
And the queen too, and that presently.

Ham.
Bid the players make haste.

[Exit Polonius.]

Will you two help to hasten them?

Ros. and Guil.
We will, my lord.

[Exeunt Ros. and Guil.]

Ham.
What, ho, Horatio!

[Enter Horatio.]

Hor.
Here, sweet lord, at your service.

Ham.
Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man
As e'er my conversation cop'd withal.

Hor.
O, my dear lord,--

Ham.
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 flatter'd?
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
Hath seal'd thee for herself: for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks: and bles'd are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
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,