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 some time 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 believed 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 offenses at my back 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 heaven and earth! 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; 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. 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 of'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, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers! quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatched 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 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 to prevent,
I have, in quick determination,
Thus set it down: He shall with speed to Eng-
land,

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 shew 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,

Enter HAMLET, and certain 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 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. 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 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'er-doing Termagant; it out-herods Herod : pray you, avoid it.

1st Play. I warrant your honor.

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'er-step 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 't were, the mirror up to nature; to shew virtue her own 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 make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of 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.

1st Play. I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us.

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 mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villanous, and shews a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready. [Exeunt Players.

Enter POLONIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDEN

No, let the candied tongue lick ábsurd 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,
She hath sealed thee for herself: for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Has ta'en with equal thanks: and blessed are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled,
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

Ham. Ay, or any show that you'll shew him: be not you ashamed to shew, he'll not shame to tell you what it means.

P. QUEEN.

The instances that second marriage move
Are base respects of thrift, but none of love;

mark the play.

PROLOGUE.

For us, and for our tragedy,

Here stooping to your clemency,

We beg your hearing patiently.

P. KING.

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:

ring?

Oph. 'Tis brief, my lord.

Ham. As woman's love.

Enter a KING and QUEEN.

P. KING.

Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round Neptune's salt wash and Tellus' orbed 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.

P. QUEEN.

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 your former state,
That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust,
Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must:
For women's fear and love hold quantity;
In neither aught, or in extremity.

Now, what my love 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.

P. KING.

'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-

P. QUEEN.

O, 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.

Ham. That's wormwood.

But fall unshaken when they mellow be.
Most necessary 't is that we forgot

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 joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye; nor 't is not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 't is 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.

Ham. Madam, how like you this play? Queen. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Ham. O, but she 'll keep her word.

King. Have you heard the argument? Is there no offense in 't?

Ham. No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest? no offense i' the world.

King. What do you call the play?

Ham. 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; 't is 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 wince; our withers are unwrung.

Enter LUCIANUS.

This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king.
Oph. You are as good as a chorus, my lord.
Ham. I could interpret between you and your

love, if I could see the puppets dallying.

Oph. You are keen, my lord, you are keen. Ham. It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.

Oph. Still better and worse.

Ham. So you must take your husbands, -Begin, murderer; leave thy damnable faces, and begin. Come;

The croaking raven

Doth bellow for revenge.

LUCIANUS.

Oph. The king rises.

Ham. What, frighted with false fire!
Queen. How fares my lord?

Pol. Give o'er the play.

King. Give me some light: away!
Pol. Lights, lights, lights!

[Exeunt all but HAMLET and HORATIO Hum. Why, let the strucken deer go weep, The hart ungalléd 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 two
Provincial roses on my raised shoes, get me a fel-
lowship in a cry of players, sir?
Hor. Half a share.
Ham. 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-peacock.

Hor. You might have rhymed.

Ham. O, good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound. Didst perceive?

Hor. Very well, my lord.

Ham. Upon the talk of the poisoning,-
Hor. I did very well note him.

Ham. Ah, ha!-Come, some music; come, the recorders. —

"For if the king like not the comedy,

Why then, belike, he likes it not, perdy."

Enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN. Come, some music.

Guil. Good, my lord, vouchsafe me a word with

Ham. Sir, a whole history

Guil. The king, sir,

Ham. Ay, sir, what of him?

Guil. Is, in his retirement, marvelous distempered.

Ham. With drink, sir?

Guil. No, my lord, with choler.

Ham. Your wisdom should shew 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.