Complete Plays, The
Page 71
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 tristful 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 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 mildew’d 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 hey-day 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 apoplex’d; for madness would not err,
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thrall’d
But it reserved some quantity of choice,
To serve in such a difference. What devil was’t
That thus hath cozen’d 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 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 enseamed bed,
Stew’d 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 twentieth 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 Ghost
Save me, and hover o’er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure?
Queen Gertrude
Alas, he’s mad!
Hamlet
Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by
The 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 the incorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep;
And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
Starts up, and stands 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 conjoin’d, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable. 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 Ghost
Queen Gertrude
This 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 utter’d: bring me to the test,
And I the matter will re-word; which madness
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that mattering 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 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.
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.
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 to-night,
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. On
ce more, good night:
And when you are desirous to be bless’d,
I’ll blessing beg of you. For this same lord,
Pointing to Polonius
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.
One word more, good lady.
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 damn’d 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
There’s letters seal’d: and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d,
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
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: O, ’tis most sweet,
When in one line two crafts directly meet.
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.
Exeunt severally; Hamlet dragging in Polonius
ACT IV
SCENE I. A ROOM IN THE CASTLE.
Enter King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern
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
Bestow this place on us a little while.
Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Ah, my good lord, what have I seen to-night!
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,
Whips out his rapier, cries, ‘A rat, a rat!’
And, in this 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 every one.
Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answer’d?
It will be laid to us, whose providence
Should have kept short, restrain’d 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 kill’d:
O’er whom his very madness, like some ore
Among a mineral of metals base,
Shows itself pure; he 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, Guildenstern!
Re-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 dragg’d 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. O, come away!
My soul is full of discord and dismay.
Exeunt
SCENE II. ANOTHER ROOM IN THE CASTLE.
Enter Hamlet
Hamlet
Safely stowed.
Rosencrantz
and
Guildenstern
[Within] Hamlet! Lord Hamlet!
Hamlet
What noise? who calls on Hamlet?
O, here they come.
Enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Rosencrantz
What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?
Hamlet
Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin.
Rosencrantz
Tell us where ’tis, that we may take it thence
And bear it to the chapel.
Hamlet
Do not believe it.
Rosencrantz
Believe what?
Hamlet
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?
Rosencrantz
Take you me for a sponge, my lord?
Hamlet
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, 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.
Rosencrantz
I understand you not, my lord.
Hamlet
I am glad of it: a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.
Rosencrantz
My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king.
Hamlet
The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing —
Guildenstern
A thing, my lord!
Hamlet
Of nothing: bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after.
Exeunt
SCENE III. ANOTHER ROOM IN THE CASTLE.
Enter King Claudius, attended
King Claudius
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 th
eir eyes;
And where tis so, the offender’s scourge is weigh’d,
But never the offence. 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.
Enter Rosencrantz
How now! what hath befall’n?
Rosencrantz
Where the dead body is bestow’d, my lord,
We cannot get from him.
King Claudius
But where is he?
Rosencrantz
Without, my lord; guarded, to know your pleasure.
King Claudius
Bring him before us.
Rosencrantz
Ho, Guildenstern! bring in my lord.
Enter Hamlet and Guildenstern
King Claudius
Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
Hamlet
At supper.
King Claudius
At supper! where?
Hamlet
Not where he eats, but where he 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.
King Claudius
Alas, alas!
Hamlet
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
King Claudius
What dost you mean by this?
Hamlet
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
King Claudius
Where is Polonius?
Hamlet
In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i’ the other place yourself. But indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.
King Claudius
Go seek him there.
To some Attendants
Hamlet
He will stay till ye come.
Exeunt Attendants
King Claudius
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
With fiery quickness: therefore prepare thyself;
The bark is ready, and the wind at help,
The associates tend, and every thing is bent
For England.
Hamlet
For England!
King Claudius
Ay, Hamlet.
Hamlet
Good.
King Claudius
So is it, if thou knew’st our purposes.
Hamlet
I see a cherub that sees them. But, come; for
England! Farewell, dear mother.
King Claudius
Thy loving father, Hamlet.