66 "It came to pass, As most like it was." The first row of the pious chanson will shew you more; for look where my abridgments come. Enter Four or Five Players. You are welcome, masters; welcome, all:-I am glad to see thee well:-welcome, good friends.— O, old friend! why thy face is valanced since I saw thee last; comest thou to beard me in Denmark?—What, my young lady and mistress! By-'r-lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine. Pray God, your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring.— Masters, you are all welcome. We'll e'en to it like French falconers, fly at anything we see: we'll have a speech straight: come, give us a taste of your quality; come, a passionate speech. 1st Play. What speech, my lord? Ham. I heard thee speak me a speech once,— but it was never acted; or, if it was, not above once for the play, I remember, pleased not the million: 'twas caviarie to the general: but it was (as I received it, and others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine) an excellent play; well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember one said, there were no sallets in the lines, to make the matter savoury: nor no matter in the phrase that might indite the author of affectation: but called it, an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine. One speech in it I chiefly loved: 't was Æneas' tale to Dido; and thereabout of it especially, where he speaks of Priam's slaughter. If it live in your memory, begin at this line; let me see, let me see ; The rugged Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,— The rugged Pyrrhus,-he, whose sable arms, Now is he total gules; horridly tricked With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons; To their lord's murder: roasted in wrath and fire, So, proceed you. Pol. 'Fore God, my lord, well spoken; with good accent and good discretion. 1st Player. Anon he finds him Striking too short at Greeks; his antique sword Of reverend Priam, seemed in the air to stick : But as we often see, against some storm, Out, out, thou strumpet, Fortune! All you gods, Pol. This is too long. Ham. It shall to the barber's, with your beard. -Pr'y thee, say on: he's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps: say on: come to Hecuba. 1st Player. But who, ah woe! had seen the mobled queen- Pol. That's good; mobled queen is good. Run barefoot up and down, threatening the flames But if the gods themselves did see her then, Pol. Look whether he has not turned his colour, and has tears in 's eyes!-Pr'y thee, no more. Ham. "Tis well; I'll have thee speak out the rest of this soon.-Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph, than their ill report while you live. Pol. My lord, I will use them according to their desert. Ham. Odd's bodikin, man, much better: use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in. But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, Why, what an ass am I? This is most brave; Fie upon 't! foh!-About, my brains!-Humph! That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, SCENE I.-A Room in the Castle. ACT II. Enter KING, QUEEN, POLONIUS, OPHELIA, King. And can you by no drift of conference, Ros. He does confess he feels himself distracted; But from what cause he will by no means speak. Guil. Nor do we find him forward to be sounded; But, with a crafty madness, keeps aloof, To hear him so inclined. Good gentlemen, give him a further edge, [Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN. Her father and myself (lawful espials) Queen. Ham. To be, or not to be, that is the question: No more ;—and, by a sleep, to say we end rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, tumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, I never gave you aught. Oph. My honoured lord, you know right well you did; And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed As made the things more rich their perfume lost, Take these again; for to the noble mind, Ham. Ha, ha! are you honest? 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. So. Oph. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe 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 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 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, [Exit. go. 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, 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; Thus set it down:- He shall with speed to For the demand of our neglected tribute : 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 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'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 Ham. Nay, do not think I flatter: No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp; |