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And madly play with my forefathers' joints?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?
Oh, look! methinks, I see my cousin's ghost
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body
Upon a rapier's point :-Stay, Tybalt, stay!-

Romeo, Romeo, Romeo,-here's drink—I drink to thee. [She throws herself on the bed.

HAMLET'S SOLILOQUY ON HIS MOTHER'S

MARRIAGE.

Hamlet.

Он, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fye on 't! O fye! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank, and gross in nature,
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead !-nay, not so much, not two;
So excellent a king; that was, to this,

Hyperion to a satyr: so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on: And yet, within a month,—
Let me not think on 't;-Frailty, thy name is woman!-
A little month; or ere those shoes were old,
With which she followed my poor father's body,

Like Niobe, all tears;

why she, even she,—

O heaven! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,

Would have mourned longer,—married with mine uncle,
My father's brother; but no more like my father,
Than I to Hercules: Within a month;

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing of her galled eyes—

It is not, nor it cannot come to, good;

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!

HAMLET'S ADDRESS TO HIS FATHER'S GHOST.

Hamlet.

ANGELS and ministers of

grace,

defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned,

Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell,

Be thy intents wicked, or charitable,

Thou comest in such a questionable shape,

That I will speak to thee; I'll call thee, Hamlet,

King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me:
Let me not burst in ignorance! but tell,

Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements! why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urned,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again! What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again, in complete steel,
Revisitest thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature,
So horridly to shake our disposition,
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?

HAMLET'S SOLILOQUY ON HIS IRRESOLUTION.

Hamlet.

Now I am alone.

Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his whole conceit,
That from her working, all his visage warmed;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion,

That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,'
Confound the ignorant; and amaze, indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears.

Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property, and most dear life,
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?

Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?

Ha!

Why, I should take it: for it cannot be,

1 Free from offence.

2 A sleepy fellow.

But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or, ere this,
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal.

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain !
O vengeance!

What an ass am I! ay, sure, this is most brave;
That I, the son of the dear murdered,

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

Must fall a cursing, like a very scullion!

Fye upon 't! foh! About, my brains! I have heard,
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father,
Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick; if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape: yea, and, perhaps,
Out of my weakness, and my melancholy,
(As he is very potent with such spirits,)
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this: The play's the thing,
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

HAMLET'S SOLILOQUY ON DEATH.

Hamlet.

To be, or not to be, that is the question :
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?-To die,-to sleep,-
No more; and, by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,-'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, -to sleep ;-

To sleep! perchance to dream ;—ay, there's the rub
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect,
That makes calamity of so long life:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin?1 who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life;
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will;

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all :
And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn away,
And lose the name of action.

1 A small sword.

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