The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works
Page 230
We will haste us.
Exeunt both
Enter Polonius
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.
KING CLAUDIUS
Thanks, dear my lord.
Exit Polonius
O, my offence 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 cursed 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 offence?
And what’s in prayer but this twofold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardoned being down? Then I’ll look up.
My fault is past-but O, 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’offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’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 limed 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 new-born babe.
All may be well.
He kneels.
Enter Prince Hamlet behind him
HAMLET
Now might I do it pat, now a is 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.
O, this is hire and salary, 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 hint.
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th‘incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At gaming, 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.
Exit
KING CLAUDIUS
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Exit
3.4 Enter Queen Gertrude and Polonius
POLONIUS
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 e’en here.
Pray you be round with him.
HAMLET (within) Mother, mother, mother!
QUEEN GERTRUDE
I’ll warr’nt you. Fear me not. Withdraw; I hear himcoming.
Polonius hides behind the arras.
Enter Prince Hamlet
HAMLET Now, mother, what’s the matter?
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,.
HAMLET
Mother, you have my father much offended.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
HAMLET
Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Why, how now, Hamlet?
HAMLET
What’s the matter now?
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Have you forgot me?
HAMLET
No, by the rood, not so.
You are the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife. But—would you were not so—you are my mother.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Nay, then, I’ll set those to you that can speak.
HAMLET
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.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?
Help, help, ho!
POLONIUS (behind the arras) What ho! Help, help, help!
HAMLET
How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead.
He thrusts his sword through the arras
POLONIUS
O, I am slain!
QUEEN GERTRUDE (to Hamlet) O me, what hast thou done?
HAMLET
Nay, I know not. Is it the King?
QUEEN GERTRUDE
O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!
HAMLET
A bloody deed—almost as bad, good-mother,
As kill a king and marry with his brother.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
As kill a king?
HAMLET Ay, lady, ’twas my word.
(To 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.—
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 damned custom have not brassed it so
That it is proof and bulwark against sense.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
What have I done, that thou dar’st wag thy tongue
In noise so rude against me?
HAMLET 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—O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words. Heaven’s face doth glow,
Yea, this solidity and compound mass
With trist
ful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Ay me, what act,
That roars so loud and thunders in the index?
HAMLET
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 or 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 judgement; and what judgement
Would step from this to this? What devil was’t
That thus hath cozened you at hood-man blind?
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 ardour gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn,
And reason panders will.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
O Hamlet, speak no more!
Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.
HAMLET Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty—
QUEEN GERTRUDE
O, speak to me no more!
These words like daggers enter in mine ears.
No more, sweet Hamlet.
HAMLET A murderer and a villain,
A slave that is not twenti’th part the tithe
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—
QUEEN GERTRUDE No more.
HAMLET A king of shreds and patches—
Enter the Ghost in his nightgown
Save me and hover o’er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards! (To the Ghost) What would
you, gracious figure? 95
QUEEN GERTRUDE Alas, he’s mad.
HAMLET (to the Ghost)
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?
O, say!
GHOST Do not forget. This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But look, amazement on thy mother sits.
O, step between her and her fighting soul.
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.
HAMLET How is it with you, lady?
QUEEN GERTRUDE 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?
HAMLET
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 colour—tears perchance for blood.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
To whom do you speak this?
HAMLET Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.
HAMLET
Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN GERTRUDE No, nothing but ourselves.
HAMLET
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.
Exit the Ghost
QUEEN GERTRUDE
This is the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.
HAMLET Ecstasy?
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 a flattering unction to your soul
That not your trespass but my madness speaks.
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place
Whilst 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 o’er 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.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!
HAMLET
O, throw away the worser part of it,
And live the purer with the other half!
Good night—but go not to mine uncle’s bed.
Assume a virtue if you have it not.
Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence. 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.
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
QUEEN GERTRUDE What shall I do?
HAMLET
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 despite 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.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
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.
HAMLET
I must to England.
You know that?
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Alack, I had forgot.
’Tis so concluded on.
HAMLET
This man shall set me packing.
I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.
Mother, good night indeed. This counsellor
Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,
Who was in life a foolish prating knave.—
Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.—
Good night, mother. Exit, tugging in Polonius
4.1 Enter King Claudius to Queen Gertrude
KING CLAUDIUS
There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves;
You must translate. ’Tis fit we understand them.
Where is your son?
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Ah, my good lord, what have I seen tonight!
KING CLAUDIUS What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?
QUEEN GERTRUDE
Mad as the sea and wind when both contend
Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit,
Behind the arras hearing something stir,
He whips his rapier out and cries ‘A rat, a ratl’,
And in his brainish apprehension kills
The unseen good old man.
KING CLAUDIUS
O 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?
QUEEN GERTRUDE
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.
KING CLAUDIUS
O 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, GuildensternlEnter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Friends both, go join you with some further aid.
Hamlet in madness hath Polonius slain,