The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works

by William Shakespeare

  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.

  G. After 3.4.151, Q2 has this more expansive version of Hamlet’s lines of which F retains only ‘refrain . . . abstinence’:

  That monster custom, who all sense doth eat,

  Of habits devilish, 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 in the devil, or throw him out

  With wondrous potency.

  H. At 3.4.185, Q2 has these additional lines before ‘This man . . .’:

  HAMLET

  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 engineer

  Hoised with his own petard; and’t shall go hard

  But I will delve one yard below their mines

  And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet

  When in one line two crafts directly meet.

  1. After ‘done’ in 4.1.39, Q2 has these additional lines continuing the King’s speech (the first three words are an editorial conjecture):

  So envious slander,

  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.

  J. Q2 has this more expansive version of the ending of 4.4:

  CAPTAIN I will do’t, my lord.

  FORTINBRAS

  Go softly on.

  Exit with his army

  Enter Prince Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, etc.

  HAMLET (to the Captain) Good sir, whose powers are these?

  CAPTAIN

  They are of Norway, sir.

  HAMLET

  How purposed, sir, I pray you?

  CAPTAIN

  Against some part of Poland.

  HAMLET

  Who commands them, sir?

  CAPTAIN

  The nephew to old Norway, Fortinbras.

  HAMLET

  Goes it against the main of Poland, sir, Or for some frontier?

  CAPTAIN

  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.

  HAMLET

  Why then, the Polack never will defend it.

  CAPTAIN

  Yes, it is already garrisoned.

  HAMLET

  Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats

  Will now debate the question of this straw.

  This is th’imposthume of much wealth and peace,

  That inward breaks and shows no cause without

  Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.

  CAPTAIN

  God buy you, sir. Exit

  ROSENCRANTZ Will’t please you go, my lord?

  HAMLET

  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 god-like 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 honour’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. O, from this time forth

  My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!

  Exit

  K. After ‘accident’ at 4.7.67, Q2 has these additional lines:

  LAERTES

  My lord, I will be ruled,

  The rather if you could devise it so

  That I might be the organ.

  KING CLAUDIUS

  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.

  LAERTES

  What part is that, my lord?

  KING CLAUDIUS

  A very ribbon 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.

  L. After ‘match you’ at 4.7.85, Q2 has these additional lines continuing the King’s speech:Th’escrimers of their nation

  He swore had neither motion, guard, nor eye

  If you opposed them.

  M. After 4.7.96, Q2 has these additional lines continuing the King’s speech:

  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 plurisy,

  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—

  N. After ‘Sir’ at 5.2.107, Q2 has these lines (in place of F’s ‘you are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is at his weapon’):her
e is newly come to court Laertes, believe me, an absolute gentleman, 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.

  HAMLET Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you, though I know to divide him inventorially would dizzy 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.

  OSRIC Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him.

  HAMLET The concernancy, sir? Why do we wrap the gentleman in our more rawer breath?

  OSRIC Sir?

  HORATIO Is’t not possible to understand in another tongue? You will to’t, sir, rarely.

  HAMLET What imports the nomination of this gentleman? OSRIC Of Laertes?

  HORATIO (aside to Hamlet) His purse is empty already; all ’s golden words are spent.

  HAMLET (to Osric) Of him, sir.

  OSRIC I know you are not ignorant—

  HAMLET I would you did, sir; yet, in faith, if you did it would not much approve me. Well, sir?

  OSRIC You are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is.

  HAMLET I dare not confess that, lest I should compare with him in excellence. But to know a man well were to know himself.

  OSRIC I mean, sir, for his weapon. But in the imputation laid on him by them, in his meed he’s unfellowed.

  O. After 5.2.118, Q2 has the following additional speech:

  HORATIO (aside to Hamlet) I knew you must be edified by the margin ere you had done.

  P. After 5.2.154, Q2 has the following (in place of F’s ‘HORATIO You will lose this wager, my lord’):Enter a Lord

  LORD (to Hamlet) 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.

  HAMLET 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.

  LORD The King and Queen and all are coming down.

  HAMLET In happy time.

  LORD The Queen desires you to use some gentle entertainment to Laertes before you fall to play.

  HAMLET She well instructs me. Exit Lord

  HORATIO You will lose, my lord.

  TWELFTH NIGHT

  TWELFTH NIGHT, the end of the Christmas season, was traditionally a time of revelry and topsy-turvydom; Shakespeare’s title for a play in which a servant aspires to his mistress’s hand has no more specific reference. It was thought appropriate to the festive occasion of Candlemas (2 February) 1602 when, in the first known allusion to it, John Manningham, a law student of the Middle Temple in London, noted ‘at our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night, or What You Will’. References to ‘the Sophy’—the Shah of Persia (2.5.174; 3.4.271)—probably post-date Sir Robert Shirley’s return from Persia, in a ship named The Sophy, in 1599; and ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ (3.2.75) appears to be one published in 1599 and reissued in 1600. Shakespeare may have picked up the name Orsino for his young duke from a Tuscan nobleman whom Queen Elizabeth entertained at Whitehall with a play performed by Shakespeare’s company on Twelfth Night 1601. Probably he wrote Twelfth Night during that year.

  Twelfth Night’s romantic setting is Illyria, the Greek and Roman name for Adriatic territory roughly corresponding to the former Yugoslavia. Manningham had noted that the play was ‘much like The Comedy of Errors or Menaechmi in Plautus’, thinking no doubt of the confusions created by identical twins. Shakespeare may also have known an anonymous Italian comedy, GI’Ingannati (The Deceived Ones), acted in 1531 and first printed in 1537, which influenced a number of other plays and prose tales including Barnaby Riche’s story of Apolonius and Silla printed as part of Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession (1581). Riche gave Shakespeare his main plot of a shipwrecked girl (Viola) who, disguised as a boy (Cesario), serves a young Duke (Orsino) and undertakes love-errands on his behalf to a noble lady (Olivia) who falls in love with her but mistakenly marries her twin brother (Sebastian). Shakespeare idealizes Riche’s characters and purges the story of some of its explicit sexuality: Riche’s Olivia, for example, is pregnant before marriage, and his Viola reveals her identity, in a manner impractical for a boy actor, by stripping to the waist. Shakespeare complicates the plot by giving Olivia a reprobate uncle, Sir Toby Belch, and two additional suitors, the asinine Sir Andrew Aguecheek and her steward, Malvolio, tricked by members of her household into believing that she loves him. More important to the play than to the plot is the entirely Shakespearian clown, Feste, a wry and oblique commentator whose wit in folly is opposed to Malvolio’s folly in wit.

  Twelfth Night is the consummation of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, a play of wide emotional range, extending from the robust, brilliantly orchestrated humour of the scene of midnight revelry (2.2) to the rapt wonder of the antiphon of recognition (5.1.224-56) between the reunited twins. In performance the balance shifts, favouring sometimes the exposure and celebration of folly, at other times the poignancy of unattained love and of unheeded wisdom; but few other plays have so consistently provided theatrical pleasure of so high an order.

  THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

  ORSINO, Duke of Illyria

  FIRST OFFICER

  SECOND OFFICER

  VIOLA, a lady, later disguised as Cesario

  A CAPTAIN

  SEBASTIAN, her twin brother

  ANTONIO, another sea-captain

  OLIVIA, a Countess

  MARIA, her waiting-gentlewoman

  SIR TOBY Belch, Olivia’s kinsman

  SIR ANDREW Aguecheek, companion of Sir Toby

  MALVOLIO, Olivia’s steward

  FABIAN, a member of Olivia’s household

  FESTE the Clown, her jester

  A PRIEST

  A SERVANT of Olivia

  Musicians, sailors, lords, attendants

  Twelfth Night, or What You Will

  1.1 Music. Enter Orsino Duke of Illyria, Curio, and other lords

  ORSINO

  If music be the food of love, play on,

  Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,

  The appetite may sicken and so die.

  That strain again, it had a dying fall.

  O, it came o‘er my ear like the sweet sound

  That breathes upon a bank of violets,

  Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more,

  ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

  ⌈Music ceases⌉

  O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou

  That, notwithstanding thy capacity

  Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there,

  Of what validity and pitch so e’er,

  But falls into abatement and low price

  Even in a minute! So full of shapes is fancy

  That it alone is high fantastical.

  CURIO

  Will you go hunt, my lord?

  ORSINO

  What, Curio?

  CURIO

  The hart.

  ORSINO

  Why so I do, the noblest that I have.

  O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first

  Methought she purged the air of pestilence;

  That instant was I turned into a hart,

  And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,

  E’er since pursue me.

  Enter Valentine

  How now, what news from her?

  VALENTINE

  So please my lord, I might not be admitted,

  But from her handmaid do return this answer:

  The element itself till seven years’ heat

  Shall not behold her face at ample view,


  But like a cloistress she will veiled walk

  And water once a day her chamber round

  With eye-offending brine—all this to season

  A brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh

  And lasting in her sad remembrance.

  ORSINO

  O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame

  To pay this debt of love but to a brother,

  How will she love when the rich golden shaft

  Hath killed the flock of all affections else

  That live in her—when liver, brain, and heart,

  These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and filled

  Her sweet perfections with one self king!

  Away before me to sweet beds of flowers.

  Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers.

  Exeunt

  1.2 Enter Viola, a Captain, and sailors

  VIOLA

  What country, friends, is this?

  CAPTAIN

  This is Illyria, lady.

  VIOLA

  And what should I do in Illyria?

  My brother, he is in Elysium.

  Perchance he is not drowned. What think you sailors?

  CAPTAIN

  It is perchance that you yourself were saved.

  VIOLA

  O my poor brother!—and so perchance may he be.

  CAPTAIN

  True, madam, and to comfort you with chance,

  Assure yourself, after our ship did split,

  When you and those poor number saved with you

  Hung on our driving boat, I saw your brother,

  Most provident in peril, bind himself—

  Courage and hope both teaching him the practice—

  To a strong mast that lived upon the sea,

  Where, like Arion on the dolphin’s back,

  I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves

  So long as I could see.

  VIOLA (giving money)

  For saying so, there’s gold.