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Jacobethan Downloads
The Plays of William Shakespeare
Acting/Rehearsal Edition
Hamlet
William Shakespeare

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
William Shakespeare

MEN
Dramatis Personae
CLAUDIUS, King of Denmark
MARCELLUS, Officer
HAMLET, son to the former, and nephew to the present king
POLONIUS, Lord Chamberlain
HORATIO, friend to Hamlet
LAERTES, son to Polonius
VOLTEMAND, courtier
CORNELIUS, courtier
ROSENCRANTZ, courtier
GUILDENSTERN, courtier
OSRIC, courtier
MARCELLUS, officer
BERNARDO, officer
FRANCISCO, a soldier
REYNALDO, servant to Polonius
TWO CLOWNS, gravediggers
FORTINBRAS, Prince of Norway
GHOST of Hamlet's Father
A Norwegian Captain
English Ambassadors
A Gentleman, courtier
A Priest
Players
WOMEN
GETRUDE, Queen of Denmark, mother to Hamlet
OPHELIA, daughter to Polonius
Lords, ladies, Officers, Soldiers, Sailors, Messengers,
Attendants.
Scene: Elsinore in Denmark

Jacobethan Downloads
The Plays of William Shakespeare
Acting/Rehearsal Edition
Hamlet
William Shakespeare

Introduction

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23
April 1616) 1 was an English poet and playwright, widely
regarded as the greatest writer in the English language
and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. 2 He is often called
England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon.” 3,4 His
surviving works, including some collaborations, consist
of about 38 plays, 5 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems,
and several other poems. His plays have been translated
into every major living language and are performed more
often than those of any other playwright. 6
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon.
At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he
had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith.
Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in
London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing
company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as
1 Greenblatt, Stephen (2005). Will in the World: How Shakespeare
Became Shakespeare. London: Pimlico, p. 11; Bevington, David (2002).
Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–3; Wells, Stanley (1997).
Shakespeare: A Life in Drama, New York: W. W. Norton, p. 399.
2 Dates follow the Julian calendar, used in England throughout
Shakespeare’s lifespan, but with the start of year adjusted to 1
January (see Old Style and New Style dates). Under the Gregorian
calendar, adopted in Catholic countries in 1582, Shakespeare died on
3 May (Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987). William Shakespeare: A Compact
Documentary Life (Revised ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press p.
xv).
3 The “national cult” of Shakespeare, and the “bard” identification,
dates from September 1769, when the actor David Garrick organised a
week-long carnival at Stratford to mark the town council awarding him
the freedom of the town. In addition to presenting the town with a
statue of Shakespeare, Garrick composed a doggerel verse, lampooned
in the London newspapers, naming the banks of the Avon as the
birthplace of the “matchless Bard” (McIntyre, Ian [1999]. Garrick.
Harmondsworth, England: Allen Lane, pp. 412–432)
4 Dobson, Michael (1992). The Making of the National Poet. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 185–186
5 Craig, Leon Harold (2003). Of Philosophers and Kings: Political
Philosophy in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “King Lear”. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, p. 3.
6 The exact figures are unknown. See Shakespeare’s collaborations and
Shakespeare Apocrypha for further details.
i

the King’s Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford
around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records
of Shakespeare’s private life survive, and there has been
considerable speculation about such matters as his
physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and
whether the works attributed to him were written by
others. 7
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589
and 1613. 8,9 His early plays were mainly comedies and
histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication
and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then
wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including
Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some
of the finest works in the English language. In his last
phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances,
and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying
quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of
his former theatrical colleagues published the First
Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that
included all but two of the plays now recognised as
Shakespeare’s.
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his
own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present
heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in
particular, acclaimed Shakespeare’s genius, and the
Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that
George Bernard Shaw called “bardolatry.” In the 20th
century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered
by new movements in scholarship and performance. His
plays remain highly popular today and are constantly
studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural
and political contexts throughout the world.
7 Individual play dates and precise writing span are unknown. See
Chronology of Shakespeare’s plays for further details.
8 The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare’s name in 1599
without his permission, includes early versions of two of his
sonnets, three extracts from Love’s Labour’s Lost, several poems
known to be by other poets, and eleven poems of unknown authorship
for which the attribution to Shakespeare has not been disproved
(Wells, Stanley; Taylor, Gary; Jowett, John et al., eds. (2005). The
Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford
University Press, p. 805)
9 Chambers, E.K. (1930). William Shakespeare: a Study of Facts and
Problems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Vol. 1, pp. 270–71; Taylor, Gary
(1987). William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 109-134
ii

Life
Early life
William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, a
successful glover and alderman originally from
Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent
landowning farmer. 10 He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon
and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual birthdate
remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23
April, St George’s Day. 11 This date, which can be traced
back to an 18th-century scholar’s mistake, has proved
appealing to biographers, since Shakespeare died 23 April
1616. 12 He was the third child of eight and the eldest
surviving son. 13
Although no attendance records for the period survive,
most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably
educated at the King’s New School in Stratford, a free
school chartered in 1553, 14 about a quarter-mile from his
home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the
Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law
throughout England, 15 and the school would have provided
an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics.
At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old
Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of
Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582.
The next day two of Hathaway’s neighbours posted bonds
guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage. 16
The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since
the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be
read once instead of the usual three times, [15] and six
months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter,
Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583. 17 Twins, son Hamnet and
daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were
10 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 24, 296; Honan, Park
(1998). Shakespeare: a Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press 15–16.
11 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 23–24.
12 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 62–63; Ackroyd, Peter
(2006). Shakespeare: The Biography, London: Vintage, p. 53; Wells et
al. (2005) op. cit., pp. xv–xvi
13 Baldwin, T. W. (1944). William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse
Greek, 1, Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, p. 464
14 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 77–78.
15 Wood, Michael (2003). Shakespeare, New York: Basic Books, p. 84;
Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 78–79.
16 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. Cit.
17 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 224.
iii

aptised 2 February 1585. 18 Hamnet died of unknown causes
at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596. 19
After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few
historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the
London theatre scene in 1592, and scholars refer to the
years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare’s “lost
years.” 20 Biographers attempting to account for this
period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas
Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a
Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for
London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the
estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also
supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a
scurrilous ballad about him. 21 Another 18th-century story
has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding
the horses of theatre patrons in London. 22 John Aubrey
reported that Shakespeare had been a country
schoolmaster. 23 Some 20th-century scholars have suggested
that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster
by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner
who named a certain “William Shakeshafte” in his will. 24
No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay
collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common
name in the Lancashire area. 25
London and Theatrical Career
It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing,
but contemporary allusions and records of performances
show that several of his plays were on the London stage
by 1592. 26 He was well enough known in London by then to
be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in
his Groats-Worth of Wit:
... there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our
feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a
Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to
bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and
18 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 95.
19 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 97–108; Rowe, Nicholas
(1709). Gray, Terry A., ed., Some Acount of the Life &c. of Mr.
William Shakespear, Online at Mr. William Shakespeare and the
Internet, 1997, http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/rowe.htm, retrieved 30
July 2007.
20 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 144–45.
21 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 110–11.
22 Honigmann, E. A. J. (1999). Shakespeare: Tthe Lost Years.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 1; Wells et al. (2005)
op. cit., p. xvii
23 Honigmann, E. A. J. (1999) op. cit., pp. 95–117; Wood, Michael
(2003) op. cit., pp. 97–109.
24 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p. 666
25 Chambers (1930) op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 287, 292
26 Greenblatt, Stephen (2005) op. cit., p. 213; Schoenbaum 1987, 153.
iv

eing an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own
conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. 27
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words, 28 but
most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of
reaching above his rank in trying to match universityeducated
writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas
Nashe and Greene himself (the “university wits”). 29 The
italicised phrase parodying the line “Oh, tiger’s heart
wrapped in a woman’s hide” from Shakespeare’s Henry VI,
Part 3, along with the pun “Shake-scene”, identifies
Shakespeare as Greene’s target. Here Johannes Factotum—
”Jack of all trades” — means a second-rate tinkerer with
the work of others, rather than the more common
“universal genius.” 30
Greene’s attack is the earliest surviving mention of
Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Biographers suggest
that his career may have begun any time from the mid-
1580s to just before Greene’s remarks. 31 From 1594,
Shakespeare’s plays were performed only by the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men, a company owned by a group of players,
including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading
playing company in London. 32 After the death of Queen
Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent
by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the
King’s Men. 33
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own
theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they
called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over
the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare’s
property purchases and investments indicate that the
company made him a wealthy man. 34 In 1597, he bought the
second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in
1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in
Stratford. 35
27 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p. 176.
28 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 151–52
29 Wells, Stanley (2006). Shakespeare & Co, New York: Pantheon, p.
28; Schoenbaum 1987, 144–46; Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 59.
30 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 184.
31 Chambers, E. K. (1923). The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, Volume 2, pp. 208–209.
32 Chambers, E. K. (1930). William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and
Problems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Vol. 2, pp. 67–71.
33 Bentley, G.E (1961). Shakespeare: a Biographical Handbook. New
Haven: Yale University Press, p. 36.
34 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 188; Kastan, David Scott
(1999). Shakespeare After Theory. London: Routledge, p. 37; Knutson,
Roslyn (2001). Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 17
35 Adams, Joseph Quincy (1923). A Life of William Shakespeare,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 275
v

Some of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto
editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a
selling point and began to appear on the title pages. 36
Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays
after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of
Ben Jonson‘s Works names him on the cast lists for Every
Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603). 37
The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for
Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that
his acting career was nearing its end. 38 The First Folio
of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of “the
Principal Actors in all these Plays”, some of which were
first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for
certain which roles he played. 39 In 1610, John Davies of
Hereford wrote that “good Will” played “kingly” roles. 40
In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare
played the ghost of Hamlet’s father. 41 Later traditions
maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and
the Chorus in Henry V, 42 though scholars doubt the sources
of the information. 43
Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford
during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New
Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was
living in the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, north
of the River Thames. 44 He moved across the river to
Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the
Globe Theatre there. 45 By 1604, he had moved north of the
river again, to an area north of St Paul’s Cathedral with
many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French
Huguenot called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies’
wigs and other headgear. 46
Later Years and Death
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition
that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before
his death; 47 but retirement from all work was uncommon at
36 Wells, Stanley (2006) op. cit., p. 28
37 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 200.
38 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 200–201.
39 Rowe, Nicholas (1709) op. Cit.
40 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p. 357; Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p.
xxii
41 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 202–3.
42 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 121.
43 Shapiro, James (2005). 1599: A Year in the Life of William
Shakespeare, London: Faber and Faber, p. 122
44 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 325; Greenblatt, Stephen (2005)
op. cit., p. 405.
45 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p. 476.
46 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 382–83.
47 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 326; Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p.
462–464.
vi

that time, 48 and Shakespeare continued to visit London. [47]
In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case
concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy’s
daughter, Mary. 49 In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in
the former Blackfriars priory; 50 and from November 1614 he
was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John
Hall. 51
After 1606–1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none
are attributed to him after 1613. 52 His last three plays
were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, 53 who
succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s
Men. 54
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 55 and was survived by
his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a
physician, John Hall, in 1607, 56 and Judith had married
Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s
death. 57
In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large
estate to his elder daughter Susanna. 58 The terms
instructed that she pass it down intact to “the first son
of her body.” 59 The Quineys had three children, all of
whom died without marrying. 60 The Halls had one child,
Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in
1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line. 61 Shakespeare’s
will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably
entitled to one third of his estate automatically. 62 He
did make a point, however, of leaving her “my second best
bed”, a bequest that has led to much speculation. 63 Some
scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas
48 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 272–274.
49 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 387.
50 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 279.
51 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., pp. 375–78.
52 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 276.
53 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 25, 296.
54 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 287.
55 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 292, 294.
56 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 304.
57 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., pp. 395–96.
58 Chambers (1930) op. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 8, 11, 104; Schoenbaum,
Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 296.
59 Chambers (1930) op. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 7, 9, 13; Schoenbaum, Samuel
(1987) op. cit., pp. 289, 318–19.
60 Charles Knight, 1842, in his notes on Twelfth Night, quoted in
Schoenbaum, Samuel (1991). Shakespeare's Lives, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, p. 275
61 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p. 483; Frye, Roland Mushat (2005). The
Art of the Dramatist. London and New York: Routledge 16; Greenblatt,
Stephen (2005) op. cit., pp. 145–6.
62 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 301–3.
63 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 306–07; Wells et al.
(2005) op. cit., p. xviii
vii

others believe that the second-best bed would have been
the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity
Church two days after his death. The epitaph carved into
the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse
against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided
during restoration of the church in 2008: 64
Modern spelling:
Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones. 65
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he who moves my bones. 66
Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in
his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him
in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor,
Socrates, and Virgil. 67 In 1623, in conjunction with the
publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving
was published. 68
Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and
memorials around the world, including funeral monuments
in Southwark Cathedral and Poets’ Corner in Westminster
Abbey.
Plays
Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated
with others at some point, and critics agree that
Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his
career. 69 Some attributions, such as Titus Andronicus and
the early history plays, remain controversial, while The
Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio have well -
attested contemporary documentation. Textual evidence
also supports the view that several of the plays were
revised by other writers after their original
composition.
64 “Bard’s ‘cursed’ tomb is revamped”, BBC News, 28 May 2008.
Retrieved 23 April 2010.
65 National Portrait Gallery, Searching for Shakespeare, NPG
publications, 2006
66 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 308–10.
67 Thomson, Peter, “Conventions of Playwriting.” In Wells, Stanley
and Orlin, Lena Cowen (eds) (2003). Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 49
68 Frye, R. M. (2005) op. cit., p. 9; Honan 1998, 166.
69 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 159–61; Frye, R. M. (2005)
op. cit., p. 9.
viii

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III
and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early
1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare’s
plays are difficult to date, however, 70 and studies of the
texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of
Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of
Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period. 71
His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587
edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England,
Scotland, and Ireland, 72 dramatise the destructive results
of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a
justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. 73 The
early plays were influenced by the works of other
Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and
Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama,
and by the plays of Seneca. 74 The Comedy of Errors was
also based on classical models, but no source for The
Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related
to a separate play of the same name and may have derived
from a folk story. 75 Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in
which two friends appear to approve of rape, 76 the Shrew’s
story of the taming of a woman’s independent spirit by a
man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors. 77
Shakespeare’s early classical and Italianate comedies,
containing tight double plots and precise comic
sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic
atmosphere of his greatest comedies. 78 A Midsummer Night’s
Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and
comic lowlife scenes. 79 Shakespeare’s next comedy, the
equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal
of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which
70 Dutton, Richard and Howard, Jean (2003). A Companion to
Shakespeare’s Works: The Histories. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 147.
71 Ribner, Irving (2005). The English History Play in the Age of
Shakespeare, London: Routledge, pp. 154-155
72 Frye, R. M. (2005) op. cit., p. 105; Ribner, Irving (2005) op.
cit., p. 67; Cheney, Patrick Gerard (2004). The Cambridge Companion
to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, p.
100.
73 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 136; Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op.
cit., p. 166.
74 Frye, R. M. (2005) op. cit., p. 91; Honan 1998, 116–117; Werner
2001, 96–100.
75 Friedman, Michael D. (2006). “I’m not a Feminist Director but...”:
Recent Feminist Productions of The Taming of the Shrew. In Nelson,
Paul and Schlueter, June (eds), Acts of Criticism: Performance
Matters in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of
James P. Lusardi. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
p. 159.
76 Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 2006, 235.
77 Wood, Michael (2003) op. cit., pp. 161–162.
78 Wood, Michael (2003) op. cit., pp. 205–206; Honan 1998, 258.
79 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p. 359.
ix

eflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to
modern audiences. 80 The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About
Nothing, 81 the charming rural setting of As You Like It,
and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete
Shakespeare’s sequence of great comedies. 82 After the
lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse,
Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of
the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His
characters become more complex and tender as he switches
deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and
poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature
work. 83 This period begins and ends with two tragedies:
Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually
charged adolescence, love, and death; 84 and Julius Caesar
— based on Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives — which introduced a new kind
of drama. 85 According to Shakespearean scholar James
Shapiro, in Julius Caesar “the various strands of
politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events,
even Shakespeare’s own reflections on the act of writing,
began to infuse each other.” 86
In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the socalled
“problem plays“ Measure for Measure, Troilus and
Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well and a number of
his best known tragedies. 87 Many critics believe that
Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies represent the peak of
his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare’s most
famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed
more than any other Shakespearean character, especially
for his famous soliloquy “To be or not to be; that is the
question.” 88 Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal
flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that
followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty
80 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., pp. 362–383.
81 Shapiro, James (2005) op. cit., p. 150; Gibbons, Brian (1993).
Shakespeare and Multiplicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
p. 1; Ackroyd (2006), op. cit., p. 356.
82 Wood, Michael (2003) op. cit., p. 161; Honan 1998, 206.
83 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., pp. 353, 358; Shapiro, James (2005) op.
cit., pp. 151–153.
84 Shapiro, James (2005) op. cit., p. 151.
85 Bradley, A. C. (1991). Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet,
Othellor, King Lear and Macbeth. London: Penguin, p. 85; Muir,
Kenneth (2005). Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence, London: Routledge, pp.
12-16
86 Bradley (1991) op. cit., p. 94.
87 Bradley (1991) op. cit., p. 86.
88 Bradley (1991) op. cit., pp. 40, 48.
x

errors of judgment. 89 The plots of Shakespeare’s tragedies
often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn
order and destroy the hero and those he loves. 90 In
Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello’s sexual
jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife
who loves him. 91 In King Lear, the old king commits the
tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the
events which lead to the murder of his daughter and the
torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester. According
to the critic Frank Kermode, “the play offers neither its
good characters nor its audience any relief from its
cruelty.” 92 In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed
of Shakespeare’s tragedies, 93 uncontrollable ambition
incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the
rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt
destroys them in turn. 94 In this play, Shakespeare adds a
supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last
major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus,
contain some of Shakespeare’s finest poetry and were
considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and
critic T. S. Eliot. 95
In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or
tragicomedy and completed three more major plays:
Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, as well as
the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak
than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone
than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with
reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic
errors. 96 Some commentators have seen this change in mood
as evidence of a more serene view of life on
Shakespeare’s part, but it may merely reflect the
theatrical fashion of the day. 97 Shakespeare collaborated
on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two
Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher. 98
Performances
89 Bradley (1991) op. cit., pp. 42, 169, 195; Greenblatt, Stephen
(2005) op. cit., p. 304.
90 Bradley (1991) op. cit., p. 226; Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p. 423;
Kermode, Frank (2004). The Age of Shakespeare. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, pp. 141–2.
91
McDonald, Russ (2006). Shakespeare's Late Style, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 43-46
92 Bradley (1991) op. cit., p. 306.
93 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p. 444; McDonald, Russ (2006) op. cit.,
pp. 69–70; Eliot, T.S. (1934). Elizabethan Essays. London: Faber &
Faber, p. 59.
94 Dowden, Edward (1881) Shakspeare. New York: Appleton & Company, p.
57.
95 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., pp. 1247, 1279
96 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p. xx
97 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p. xxi
98
Shapiro, James (2005) op. cit., p. 16.
xi

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his
early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus
Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three
different troupes. 99 After the plagues of 1592–3,
Shakespeare’s plays were performed by his own company at
The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the
Thames. 100 Londoners flocked there to see the first part
of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, “Let but Falstaff
come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a
room.” 101 When the company found themselves in dispute
with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and
used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the
first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south
bank of the Thames at Southwark. 102 The Globe opened in
autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays
staged. Most of Shakespeare’s greatest post-1599 plays
were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and
King Lear. 103
After the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were renamed the King’s
Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the
new King James. Although the performance records are
patchy, the King’s Men performed seven of Shakespeare’s
plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October
1605, including two performances of The Merchant of
Venice. 104 After 1608, they performed at the indoor
Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe
during the summer. 105 The indoor setting, combined with
the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed
Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In
Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends “in thunder and
lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a
thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees.” 106
99 Foakes, R. A. (1990). “Playhouses and Players” in Braunmuller, A.,
and Hattaway, Michael (eds) The Cambridge Companion to English
Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 6;
Shapiro, James (2005) op. cit., pp. 125–31.
100 Foakes, R. A. (1990), op. cit., p. 6; Nagler, A. M. (1958).
Shakespeare's Stage. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press,
p. 7; Shapiro, James (2005) op. cit., pp. 131–2.
101 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p. xxii
102 Foakes, R. A. (1990) op. cit., p. 33.
103 Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p. 454; Holland, Peter (2000).
“Introduction” in Holland, Peter (ed). Cymbeline. London: Penguin, p.
xli.
104 Ringler, William, Jr. (1997). "Shakespeare and His Actors: Some
Remarks on King Lear", in Ogden, James; Scouten, In Lear from Study
to Stage: Essays in Criticism, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, p. 127
105 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 210; Chambers 1930, Vol. 1:
341.
106
Shapiro, James (2005) op. cit., pp. 247–9.
xii

The actors in Shakespeare’s company included the famous
Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John
Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first
performances of many of Shakespeare’s plays, including
Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. 107 The
popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter
in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About
Nothing, among other characters. 108 He was replaced around
the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played
roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool
in King Lear. 109 In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that
Henry VIII “was set forth with many extraordinary
circumstances of pomp and ceremony.” 110 On 29 June,
however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and
burned the theatre to the ground, an event which
pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare
precision.
Textual sources
In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of
Shakespeare’s friends from the King’s Men, published the
First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays.
It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first
time. 111 Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto
versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded
twice to make four leaves. 112 No evidence suggests that
Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First
Folio describes as “stol’n and surreptitious copies.” 113
Alfred Pollard termed some of them “bad quartos“ because
of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may
in places have been reconstructed from memory. 114 Where
several versions of a play survive, each differs from the
other. The differences may stem from copying or printing
errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from
107 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p. 1247
108 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p. xxxvii
109 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p. xxxiv
110 Pollard, Alfred W. (1909). Shakespeare Quartos and Folios: A Study
in the Bibliography of Shakespeare's Plays, 1594–1685, London:
Methuen, p. xi
111 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., p. xxxiv; Pollard, Alfred W. (1909)
op. cit., p. xi; Maguire, Laurie E. (1996). Shakespearean Suspect
Texts: The "Bad" Quartos and Their Contexts, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p. 28
112 Bowers, Fredson (1955). On Editing Shakespeare and the
Elizabethan Dramatists: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, pp. 8–10; Wells et al. 2005, xxxiv–xxxv
113 Wells et al. (2005) op. cit., pp. 909, 1153
114 Rowe, John (2006). "Introduction", in Rowe, John (ed.). The Poems:
Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle,
The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint, by William Shakespeare
(2nd revised ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 21.
xiii

Shakespeare’s own papers. 115 In some cases, for example
Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare
could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio
editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most
modern additions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version
is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the Oxford
Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be
conflated without confusion. 116
Poems
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because
of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on
erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis
rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape
of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the
lustful Tarquin. 117 Influenced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 118
the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result
from uncontrolled lust. 119 Both proved popular and were
often reprinted during Shakespeare’s lifetime. A third
narrative poem, A Lover’s Complaint, in which a young
woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was
printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most
scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover’s
Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are
marred by leaden effects. 120 The Phoenix and the Turtle,
printed in Robert Chester’s 1601 Love’s Martyr, mourns
the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the
faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of
sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim,
published under Shakespeare’s name but without his
permission. 121
Sonnets
Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of
Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars
are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was
composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote
115 Frye, R. M. (2005) op. cit., p. 288.
116 Rowe, John (2006) op. cit., pp. 3, 21.
117 Rowe, John (2006) op. cit., p. 1; Jackson, Macdonald P. (2004). “A
Lover’s Complaint Revisited.” In Zimmerman, Susan (ed) Shakespeare
Studies. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press pp. 267–294;
Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 289.
118 Rowe, John (2006) op. cit., p. 1; Honan 1998, 289; Schoenbaum
1987, 327.
119 Wood, Michael (2003) op. cit., p. 178; Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987)
op. cit., p. 180.
120 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 180.
121
Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., p. 268.
xiv

sonnets throughout his career for a private readership. 122
Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The
Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in
1598 to Shakespeare’s “sugred Sonnets among his private
friends.” 123 Few analysts believe that the published
collection follows Shakespeare’s intended sequence. 124 He
seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about
uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark
complexion (the “dark lady”), and one about conflicted
love for a fair young man (the “fair youth”). It remains
unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or
if the authorial “I” who addresses them represents
Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with
the sonnets “Shakespeare unlocked his heart.” 125 The 1609
edition was dedicated to a “Mr. W.H.”, credited as “the
only begetter” of the poems.
It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare
himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose
initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor
is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories,
or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication. 126
Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on
the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death,
and time. 127
Style
Shakespeare’s first plays were written in the
conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a
stylised language that does not always spring naturally
from the needs of the characters or the drama. 128 The
poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors
and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—
written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The
grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some
critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the
verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described
as stilted. 129
122 Honan, Park (1998) op. cit., p. 180; Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op.
cit., p. 180.
123 Shakespeare 1914.
124 Schoenbaum, Samuel (1987) op. cit., pp. 268–269.
125 Wood, Michael (2003) op. cit., p. 177.
126 Clemen, Wolfgang (2005a). Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art: Collected
Essays. New York: Routledge, p. 150.
127 Frye, R. M. (2005) op. cit., pp. 105, 177; Clemen, Wolfgang
(2005b). Shakespeare’s Imagery. London: Routledge, p. 29.
128 Brooke, Nicholas, “Language and Speaker in Macbeth”, 69; and
Bradbrook, M.C., “Shakespeare’s Recollection of Marlowe”, 195: both
in Edwards, Philip, Ewbank Inga-Stina, and Hunter, G.K. (eds) (2004).
Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
129
Clemen (2005b) op. cit., p. 63.
xv

Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional
styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of
Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice
in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid
self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of
Shakespeare’s mature plays. 130 No single play marks a
change from the traditional to the freer style.
Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with
Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing
of the styles. 131 By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard
II, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the mid-1590s,
Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He
increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs
of the drama itself.
Shakespeare’s standard poetic form was blank verse,
composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant
that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten
syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second
syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite
different from that of his later ones. It is often
beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and
finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. 132
Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he
began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique
releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in
plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses
it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet’s mind:
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly —
And prais’d be rashness for it — let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...
Hamlet, V.ii. 4–8
After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style
further, particularly in the more emotional passages of
the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley
described this style as “more concentrated, rapid,
varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom
twisted or elliptical.” 133 In the last phase of his
career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve
these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular
pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence
structure and length. 134 In Macbeth, for example, the
130 Frye, R. M. (2005) op. cit., p. 185.
131 Wright, George T. (2004). "The Play of Phrase and Line", in
McDonald, Russ, Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory,
1945–2000, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 868
132 Bradley (1991) op. cit., p. 91.
133 McDonald, Russ (2006) op. cit., pp. 42–6.
134 McDonald, Russ (2006) op. cit., pp. 36, 39, 75.
xvi

language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to
another: “was the hope drunk/Wherein you dressed
yourself?” (1.7.35–38); “ ... pity, like a naked new-born
babe/Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, hors’d/
Upon the sightless couriers of the air ... “ (1.7.21–25).
The listener is challenged to complete the sense. The
late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising
turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long
and short sentences are set against one another, clauses
are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words
are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.
Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense
of the theatre. 135 Like all playwrights of the time, he
dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and
Holinshed. 136 He reshaped each plot to create several
centres of interest and to show as many sides of a
narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of
design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive
translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss
to its core drama. 137 As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he
gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations
and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects
of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In
Shakespeare’s late romances, he deliberately returned to
a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of
theatre. 138
Influence
Shakespeare’s work has made a lasting impression on later
theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the
dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language,
and genre. 139 Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance
had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. 140
Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information
about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to
explore characters’ minds. 141 His work heavily influenced
later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive
Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success.
Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas
135 Gibbons, B. (1993) op. cit., p. 4.
136 Gibbons, B. (1993) op. cit., pp. 1–4.
137 Gibbons, B. (1993) op. cit., pp. 1–7, 15.
138 McDonald, Russ (2006) op. cit., p. 13; Meagher, John C. (2003).
Pursu Shakespeare's Dramaturgy: Some Contexts, Resources, and
Strategies in his Playmaking, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, p. 358
139 Chambers, E. K. (1944). Shakespearean Gleanings. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, p. 35.
140 Levenson, Jill (2000). “Introduction” in Levenson, Jill (ed) Romeo
and Juliet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 49–50.
141 Clemen, Wolfgang (1987). Shakespeare’s Soliloquies. London:
Routledge, p. 179.
xvii

from Coleridge to Tennyson as “feeble variations on
Shakespearean themes.” 142
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy,
William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American
novelist Herman Melville’s soliloquies owe much to
Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic
tragic hero, inspired by King Lear. 143 Scholars have
identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare’s
works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello
and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that
of the source plays. 144 Shakespeare has also inspired many
painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-
Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a
friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into
German. 145 The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on
Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet,
for his theories of human nature.
In Shakespeare’s day, English grammar, spelling and
pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, 146
and his use of language helped shape modern English. 147
Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other
author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the
first serious work of its type. 148 Expressions such as
“with bated breath” (Merchant of Venice) and “a foregone
conclusion” (Othello) have found their way into everyday
English speech. 149
Critical reputation
“He was not of an age, but for all time” – Ben Jonson
Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he
received his share of praise. 150 In 1598, the cleric and
142 Steiner, George (1996). The Death of Tragedy, New Haven: Yale
University Press, p. 145
143 Bryant, John (1998). “Moby Dick as Revolution” in Levine, Robert
Steven (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 82.
144 Gross, John, “Shakespeare’s Influence” in Wells & Orlin (2003) op.
cit., pp. 641–2.
145 Paraisz, Júlia (2006). "The Nature of a Romantic Edition", in
Holland, Peter, Shakespeare Survey, 59, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p. 130.
146 Cercignani, Fausto (1981). Shakespeare’s Works and Elizabethan
Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press)
147 Crystal, David (2001). The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 55–65, 74.
148 Wain, John (1975). Samuel Johnson, New York: Viking, p. 194
149 Johnson, Samuel (2002). In Lynch, Jack (ed) Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary: Selections from the Work that Defined the English
Language. Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, p. 12; Crystal (2001) op.
cit., p. 63.
150 Jonson, Ben (1996). "To the memory of my beloued, The AVTHOR MR.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: AND what he hath left vs", in Shakespeare,
xviii

author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of
English writers as “the most excellent” in both comedy
and tragedy. 151 And the authors of the Parnassus plays at
St John’s College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer,
Gower and Spenser. 152 In the First Folio, Ben Jonson
called Shakespeare the “Soul of the age, the applause,
delight, the wonder of our stage”, though he had remarked
elsewhere that “Shakespeare wanted art.”
Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the
end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue.
As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare
below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. 153 Thomas Rymer, for
example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with
the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden
rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, “I admire
him, but I love Shakespeare.” 154 For several decades,
Rymer’s view held sway; but during the 18th century,
critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms
and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series
of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of
Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added
to his growing reputation. By 1800, he was firmly
enshrined as the national poet. 155 In the 18th and 19th
centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those
who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe,
Stendhal and Victor Hugo. 156
During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the
poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge;
and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his
plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. 157 In the 19th
William; Hinman, Charlton (ed.); Blayney, The First Folio of
Shakespeare (2nd ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 10.
151 Dominik, Mark (1988). Shakespeare-Middleton Collaborations.
Beaverton, Oregon: Alioth Press, p. 9; Grady, Hugh (2001b).
“Shakespeare Criticism 1600-1900.” In deGrazia, Margreta and Wells,
Stanley (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 267.
152 Grady, Hugh (2001b) op. cit., p. 265; Greer, Germaine (1986).
William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 9.
153 Grady, Hugh (2001b) op. cit., 266.
154 Dryden, John (1889). In Arnold, Thomas (ed) An Essay of Dramatic
Poesie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 71.
155 Grady, Hugh (2001b) op. cit., pp. 270–27; Levin, Harry (1986).
"Critical Approaches to Shakespeare from 1660 to 1904", in Wells,
Stanley, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 217
156 Dobson (1992), op. Cit. Cited by Grady, Hugh (2001b) op. cit., p.
270.
157 Grady cites Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters (1733); Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795); Stendhal’s two-part pamphlet
Racine et Shakespeare (1823–5); and Victor Hugo’s prefaces to
Cromwell (1827) and William Shakespeare (1864). Grady, Hugh (2001b)
op. cit., pp. 272–274.
xix

century, critical admiration for Shakespeare’s genius
often bordered on adulation. 158 “That King Shakespeare,”
the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, “does not he
shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the
noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs;
indestructible.” The Victorians produced his plays as
lavish spectacles on a grand scale. The playwright and
critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare
worship as “bardolatry”. He claimed that the new
naturalism of Ibsen’s plays had made Shakespeare
obsolete.
The modernist revolution in the arts during the early
20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly
enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The
Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow
mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and
director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the
influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T.S. Eliot
argued against Shaw that Shakespeare’s “primitiveness” in
fact made him truly modern. [168] Eliot, along with G.
Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a
movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare’s
imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches
replaced modernism and paved the way for “post-modern“
studies of Shakespeare. By the eighties, Shakespeare
studies were open to movements such as structuralism,
feminism, New Historicism, African American studies, and
queer studies. 159,160
Speculation about Shakespeare
Authorship
Around 150 years after Shakespeare’s death, doubts began
to be expressed about the authorship of the works
attributed to him. 161 Proposed alternative candidates
include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de
Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. 162 Several “group theories”
have also been proposed. 163 Only a small minority of
academics believe there is reason to question the
158 Levin, Harry (1986). "Critical Approaches to Shakespeare from 1660
to 1904", in Wells, Stanley (ed) The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 223
159 Levin, Harry (1986) op. cit., p. 223.
160 Sawyer, Robert (2003). Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare,
New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, p. 113.
161 Carlyle, Thomas (1907). In Adams, John Chester (ed) On Heroes,
Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and
Company, p. 161.
162 Schoch, Richard (2002). "Pictorial Shakespeare", in Wells, Stanley
and Stanton, Sarah (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on
Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 58-59
163 Grady 2001b, 276.
xx

traditional attribution, 164 but interest in the subject,
particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare
authorship, continues into the 21st century. 165
Religion
Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare’s family
were Catholics, at a time when Catholic practice was
against the law. 166 Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden,
certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The
strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith
signed by John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters
of his former house in Henley Street. The document is now
lost, however, and scholars differ as to its
authenticity. 167 In 1591 the authorities reported that
John Shakespeare had missed church “for fear of process
for debt”, a common Catholic excuse. 168 In 1606 the name
of William’s daughter Susanna appears on a list of those
who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford. 169
Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare’s
Catholicism in his plays, but the truth may be impossible
to prove either way. 170
Sexuality
Few details of Shakespeare’s sexuality are known. At 18,
he married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was
pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was
born six months later on 26 May 1583. However, over the
centuries readers have pointed to Shakespeare’s sonnets
as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the
same passages as the expression of intense friendship
rather than sexual love. 171 At the same time, the 26 socalled
“Dark Lady” sonnets, addressed to a married woman,
are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.
164 Grady, Hugh (2001a) op. cit., pp. 22–6.
165 Grady, Hugh (2001a). “Modernity, Modernism and Post-Modernism in
the Twentieth Century’s Shakespeare”. In Bristol, Michael and
McLuskie, Kathleen (eds) Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The
Performance of Modernity. New York: Routledge, p. 24.
166 Grady, Hugh (2001a) op. cit., p. 29.
167 Drakakis, John (1985). Alternative Shakespeare. New York: Methuen,
pp. 16–17, 23–25
168 McMichael, George and Glenn, Edgar M. (1962). Shakespeare and his
Rivals: A Casebook on the Authorship Controversy. New York: Odyssey
Press
169 Gibson, H. N. (2005). The Shakespeare Claimants: a Critical Survey
of the Four Principal Theories Concerning the Authorship of
Shakespearean Plays. London: Routledge, pp. 48, 72, 124.
170 McMichael, George and Glenn, Edgar M. (1962) op. cit., p. 56
171 “Did He or Didn’t He? That Is the Question”. The New York Times,
22 April 2007
xxi

Portraiture
There is no written description of Shakespeare’s physical
appearance and no evidence that he ever commissioned a
portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson
approved of as a good likeness, 172 and his Stratford
monument provide the best evidence of his appearance.
From the 18th century, the desire for authentic
Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various
surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also
led to the production of several fake portraits, as well
as misattributions, repaintings and relabelling of
portraits of other people. 173,174
List of works
Shakespeare’s works include the 36 plays printed in the
First Folio of 1623, listed below according to their
folio classification as comedies, histories and
tragedies. 175 Two plays not included in the First Folio,
The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are
now accepted as part of the canon, with scholars agreed
that Shakespeare made a major contribution to their
composition. 176 No Shakespearean poems were included in
the First Folio.
In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four
of the late comedies as romances, and though many
scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, his term is
often used. 177 In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term
“problem plays“ to describe four plays: All’s Well That
Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and
172 Kathman, David, “The Question of Authorship” in Wells & Orlin
(2003) op. cit., pp. 620, 625–626; Love, Harold (2002). Attributing
Authorship: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 194–209; Schoenbaum, Samuel (1991) op. cit., pp. 430–40.
173 Pritchard 1979, 3.
174 Wood, Michael (2003) op. cit., pp. 75–8; Ackroyd (2006) op. cit.,
p. 22–3.
175 Wood, Michael (2003) op. cit., p. 78; Ackroyd (2006) op. cit., p.
416; Schoenbaum 1987, 41–2, 286.
176 Wilson, Richard (2004). Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre,
Religion and Resistance, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p.
34; Shapiro, James (2005) op. cit., p. 167.
177 Casey, Charles (Fall, 1998). “Was Shakespeare gay? Sonnet 20 and
the politics of pedagogy.” College Literature (25), 3; archived from
original on 16 May 2007.
http://web.archive.org/20070516062509/http://findarticles.com/p/artic
les/mi_qa3709/is_199810/ai_n8827074, retrieved 2 May 2007; Pequigney,
Joseph (1985). Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Evans, G. Blakemore (1996). “Commentary” in Evans, G. Blakemore (ed)
William Shakespeare: The Sonnets. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, p. 132.
xxii

Hamlet. 178 “Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot
be strictly called comedies or tragedies”, he wrote. “We
may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre
of today and class them together as Shakespeare’s problem
plays.” 179 The term, much debated and sometimes applied to
other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is
definitively classed as a tragedy. 180
Works
Comedies Histories Tragedies
All's Well That Ends
Well
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of
Venice
The Merry Wives of
Windsor
A Midsummer Night's
Dream
Much Ado About
Nothing
Pericles, Prince of
Tyre
The Taming of the
Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
The Two Gentlemen of
Verona
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Winter's Tale
King John
Richard II
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, Part 1
Henry VI, Part 2
Henry VI, Part 3
Richard III
Henry VIII
xxiii
Romeo and Juliet
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
Troilus and Cressida
King Lear
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline
Poetry Lost Plays Apocrypha
Sonnets
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
The Passionate
Pilgrim
The Phoenix and the
Turtle
A Lover's Complaint
Cardenio
Love’s Labour’s Won
A Yorkshire Tragedy
Arden of Faversham
Edward III
Fair Em
Locrine
Mucedorus
Sir John Oldcastle
Sir Thomas More
The Birth of Merlin
The London Prodigal
The Merry Devil
The Puritan Widow
The Two Noble Kinsmen
Thomas, Lord Cromwell
178 Fort, J. A. (October 1927). “The Story Contained in the Second
Series of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. The Review of English Studies,
3(12), pp. 406–414.
179 Tarnya Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare, National Portrait
Gallery, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 48; 57.
180 Pressly, William L. “The Ashbourne Portrait of Shakespeare:
Through the Looking Glass.” Shakespeare Quarterly. 1993: pp. 54–72.

About the Play
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or
more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare,
believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The
play, set in the Kingdom of Denmark, recounts how Prince
Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius for murdering
the old King Hamlet (Claudius’s brother and Prince
Hamlet’s father) and then succeeding to the throne and
marrying Gertrude (the King Hamlet’s widow and mother of
Prince Hamlet). The play vividly portrays real and
feigned madness — from overwhelming grief to seething
rage — and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest,
and moral corruption.
Three different early versions of the play have survived:
these are known as the First Quarto (Q1), the Second
Quarto (Q2) and the First Folio (F1). Each has lines, and
even scenes, that are missing from the others.
Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth,
preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in
his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by 16th-century
scholar François de Belleforest. He may have also drawn
on, or perhaps written, an earlier (hypothetical)
Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet.
The play’s structure and depth of characterization have
inspired much critical scrutiny, of which one example is
the centuries-old debate about Hamlet’s hesitation to
kill his uncle. Some see it as a plot device to prolong
the action, and others see it as the result of pressure
exerted by the complex philosophical and ethical issues
that surround cold-blooded murder, calculated revenge and
thwarted desire. More recently, psychoanalytic critics
have examined Hamlet’s unconscious desires, and feminist
critics have re-evaluated and rehabilitated the often
maligned characters of Ophelia and Gertrude.
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play and among the most
powerful and influential tragedies in the English
language. It has a story capable of “seemingly endless
retelling and adaptation by others.” 181 During
Shakespeare’s lifetime, the play was one of his most
popular works, 182 and it still ranks high among his mostperformed,
topping, for example, what eventually became
the Royal Shakespeare Company’s list since 1879. 183 It has
inspired writers from Goethe and Dickens to Joyce and
181 Thompson and Taylor (eds) (2006a). The Arden Shakespeare: Hamlet
Q2 p. 74
182
Taylor (2002, 18)
183
Crystal and Crystal (2005, 66)
xxiv

Murdoch, and has been described as “the world’s most
filmed story after Cinderella“. 184
The title role was almost certainly created for Richard
Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare’s time. 185
In the four hundred years since, it has been performed by
highly acclaimed actors and actresses from each
successive age.
Plot
The protagonist of Hamlet is Prince Hamlet of Denmark,
son of deceased King Hamlet and his wife, Queen Gertrude.
The story opens on a chilly night at Elsinore, the Danish
royal castle. Francisco, one of the sentinels, is
relieved of his watch by Bernardo, another sentinel, and
exits while Bernardo remains. A third sentinel,
Marcellus, enters with Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend. The
sentinels inform Horatio that they have seen a ghost that
looks like the dead King Hamlet. After hearing from
Horatio of the Ghost’s appearance, Hamlet resolves to see
the Ghost himself. That night, the Ghost appears again.
It leads Hamlet to a secluded place, claims that it is
the actual spirit of his father, and discloses that he —
the elder Hamlet — was murdered by Claudius’ pouring
poison in his ear. The Ghost demands that Hamlet avenge
him; Hamlet agrees, swears his companions to secrecy, and
tells them he intends to “put an antic disposition on” 186
(presumably to avert suspicion). Hamlet initially attests
to the ghost’s reliability, calling him both an “honest
ghost” and “truepenny.” Later, however, he expresses
doubts about the ghost’s nature and intent, claiming
these as reasons for his inaction.
Polonius is Claudius’ trusted chief counsellor;
Polonius‘s son, Laertes, is returning to France, and
Polonius‘s daughter, Ophelia, is courted by Hamlet. Both
Polonius and Laertes warn Ophelia that Hamlet is surely
not serious about her. Shortly afterward, Ophelia is
alarmed by Hamlet’s strange behaviour, reporting to her
father that Hamlet rushed into her room, stared at her,
184 Thompson and Taylor (2006a, 17)
185 See Taylor (2002, 4); Banham (1998, 141); Hattaway asserts that
“Richard Burbage ... played Hieronimo and also Richard III but then
was the first Hamlet, Lear, and Othello” (1982, 91); Peter Thomson
argues that the identity of Hamlet as Burbage is built into the
dramaturgy of several moments of the play: “We will profoundly
misjudge the position if we do not recognise that, whilst this is
Hamlet talking about the groundlings, it is also Burbage talking to
the groundlings” (1983, 24); see also Thomson on the first player's
beard (1983, 110)
186 "Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, Line 172.". http://shakespearenavigators.com/hamlet/H15.html#171.
xxv

and said nothing. Polonius assumes that the “ecstasy of
love” 187 is responsible for Hamlet’s “mad” behavior, and
he informs Claudius and Gertrude.
Perturbed by Hamlet’s continuing deep mourning for his
father and his increasingly erratic behavior, Claudius
sends for two of Hamlet’s acquaintances—Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern—to find out the cause of Hamlet’s changed
behavior. Hamlet greets his friends warmly but quickly
discerns that they have been sent to spy on him.
Together, Claudius and Polonius convince Ophelia to speak
with Hamlet while they secretly listen. When Hamlet
enters, she offers to return his remembrances, upon which
Hamlet questions her honesty and furiously rants at her
to “get thee to a nunnery.” 188
Hamlet remains uncertain whether the Ghost has told him
the truth, but the arrival of a troupe of actors at
Elsinore presents him with a solution. He will have them
stage a play, The Murder of Gonzago, re-enacting his
father’s murder and determine Claudius’s guilt or
innocence by studying his reaction to it. The court
assembles to watch the play; Hamlet provides an agitated
running commentary throughout. When the murder scene is
presented, Claudius abruptly rises and leaves the room,
which Hamlet sees as proof of his uncle’s guilt.
Gertrude summons Hamlet to her closet to demand an
explanation. On his way, Hamlet passes Claudius in
prayer, but hesitates to kill him, reasoning that death
in prayer would send him to heaven. However, it is
revealed that the King is not truly praying, remarking
that “words” never made it to heaven without
“thoughts.” 189 An argument erupts between Hamlet and
Gertrude. Polonius, spying on the scene from behind an
arras and convinced that the prince’s madness is indeed
real, panics when it seems as if Hamlet is about to
murder the Queen and cries out for help. Hamlet,
believing it is Claudius hiding behind the arras, stabs
wildly through the cloth, killing Polonius. When he
realizes that he has killed Ophelia’s father, he is not
remorseful, but calls Polonius “Thou wretched, rash,
intruding fool.” 190 The Ghost appears, urging Hamlet to
187 Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, Line 99
188 This is widely interpreted as having a double meaning, since
“nunnery” was slang for a brothel (Pauline Kiernan, Filthy
Shakespeare, Quercus, 2006, p. 34). This interpretation has been
challenged by Jenkins (1982, 493–495; also H. D. F. Kitto) on the
grounds of insufficient and inconclusive evidence of a precedent for
this meaning; Jenkins states that the literal meaning is better
suited to the dramatic context.
189 Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 98
190 Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 98
xxvi

treat Gertrude gently, but reminding him to kill
Claudius. Unable to see or hear the Ghost herself,
Gertrude takes Hamlet’s conversation with it as further
evidence of madness.
Claudius, now fearing for his life, finds a legitimate
excuse to get rid of the prince: he sends Hamlet to
England on a diplomatic pretext, accompanied (and closely
watched) by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Alone, Claudius
discloses that he is actually sending Hamlet to his
death. Prior to embarking for England, Hamlet hides
Polonius’s body, ultimately revealing its location to the
King. Upon leaving Elsinore, Hamlet encounters the army
of Prince Fortinbras en route to do battle in Poland.
Upon witnessing so many men going to their death on the
brash whim of an impulsive prince, Hamlet declares, “O,
from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be
nothing worth!” 191
At Elsinore, further demented by grief at her father
Polonius’s death, Ophelia wanders the castle, acting
erratically and singing bawdy songs. Her brother,
Laertes, returns from France, horrified by his father’s
death and his sister’s madness. She appears briefly to
give out herbs and flowers. Claudius convinces Laertes
that Hamlet is solely responsible; then news arrives that
Hamlet is still alive—a story is spread that his ship was
attacked by pirates on the way to England, and he has
returned to Denmark. Claudius swiftly concocts a plot to
kill his nephew but make it appear to be an accident,
taking all of the blame off his shoulders. Knowing of
Hamlet’s jealousy of Laertes’ prowess with a sword, he
proposes a fencing match between the two. Laertes,
enraged at the murder of his father, informs the king
that he will further poison the tip of his sword so that
a mere scratch would mean certain death. Claudius, unsure
that capable Hamlet could receive even a scratch, plans
to offer Hamlet poisoned wine if that fails. Gertrude
enters to report that Ophelia has drowned.
In the Elsinore churchyard, two “clowns”, typically
represented as “gravediggers,” enter to prepare Ophelia’s
grave, and, although the coroner has ruled her death
accidental so that she may receive Christian burial, they
argue about its being a case of suicide. Hamlet arrives
with Horatio and banters with one of them, who unearths
the skull of a jester whom Hamlet once knew, Yorick
(“Alas, Poor Yorick; I knew him, Horatio.”). Ophelia’s
funeral procession approaches, led by her mournful
brother Laertes. Distraught at the lack of ceremony (due
191 Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 4, Lines 65–66.
xxvii

to the actually-deemed suicide) and overcome by emotion,
Laertes leaps into the grave, cursing Hamlet as the cause
of her death. Hamlet interrupts, professing his own love
and grief for Ophelia. He and Laertes grapple, but the
fight is broken up by Claudius and Gertrude. Claudius
reminds Laertes of the planned fencing match.
Later that day, Hamlet tells Horatio how he escaped death
on his journey to England, disclosing that Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern have been sent to their deaths instead.
A courtier, Osric, interrupts to invite Hamlet to fence
with Laertes. Despite Horatio’s warnings, Hamlet accepts
and the match begins. After several rounds, Gertrude
toasts Hamlet —against the urgent warning of Claudius—
accidentally drinking the wine he poisoned. Between
bouts, Laertes attacks and pierces Hamlet with his
poisoned blade; in the ensuing scuffle, Hamlet is able to
use Laertes’s own poisoned sword against him. Gertrude
falls and, in her dying breath, announces that she has
been poisoned.
In his dying moments, Laertes is reconciled with Hamlet
and reveals Claudius’s murderous plot. Hamlet stabs
Claudius with the poisoned sword, and then forces him to
drink from his own poisoned cup to make sure he dies. In
his final moments, Hamlet names Prince Fortinbras of
Norway as the probable heir to the throne, since the
Danish kingship is an elected position, with the
country’s nobles having the final say. Horatio attempts
to kill himself with the same poisoned wine but is
stopped by Hamlet, as he will be the only one left alive
who can give a full account of the story.
When Fortinbras arrives to greet King Claudius, he
encounters the deadly scene: Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes,
and Hamlet are all dead. Horatio asks to be allowed to
recount the tale to “the yet unknowing world,” and
Fortinbras orders Hamlet’s body borne off in honour.
Sources
Hamlet - like legends are so widely found (for example in
Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and Arabia) that
the core “hero-as-fool” theme is possibly Indo-European
in origin. 192 Several ancient written precursors to Hamlet
can be identified. The first is the anonymous
Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki. In this, the murdered
king has two sons — Hroar and Helgi — who spend most of
the story in disguise, under false names, rather than
feigning madness, in a sequence of events that differs
from Shakespeare’s. 193 The second is the Roman legend of
192 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 36–37)
193 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 16–25)
xxviii

Brutus, recorded in two separate Latin works. Its hero,
Lucius (“shining, light”), changes his name and persona
to Brutus (“dull, stupid”), playing the role of a fool to
avoid the fate of his father and brothers, and eventually
slaying his family’s killer, King Tarquinius. A 17thcentury
Nordic scholar, Torfaeus, compared the Icelandic
hero Amlodi and the Spanish hero Prince Ambales (from the
Ambales Saga) to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Similarities
include the prince’s feigned madness, his accidental
killing of the king’s counsellor in his mother’s bedroom,
and the eventual slaying of his uncle. 194
Many of the earlier legendary elements are interwoven in
the 13th-century Vita Amlethi (“The Life of Amleth”) 195 by
Saxo Grammaticus, part of Gesta Danorum. [19] Written in
Latin, it reflects classical Roman concepts of virtue and
heroism, and was widely available in Shakespeare’s day. 196
Significant parallels include the prince feigning
madness, his mother’s hasty marriage to the usurper, the
prince killing a hidden spy, and the prince substituting
the execution of two retainers for his own. A reasonably
faithful version of Saxo’s story was translated into
French in 1570 by François de Belleforest, in his
Histoires tragiques. 197 Belleforest embellished Saxo’s
text substantially, almost doubling its length, and
introduced the hero’s melancholy. 198
According to a popular theory, Shakespeare’s main source
is believed to be an earlier play — now lost — known
today as the Ur-Hamlet. Possibly written by Thomas Kyd or
even William Shakespeare himself, the Ur-Hamlet would
have been in performance by 1589 and the first version of
the story known to incorporate a ghost. 199 Shakespeare’s
company, the Chamberlain’s Men, may have purchased that
play and performed a version for some time, which
Shakespeare reworked. 200 Since no copy of the Ur-Hamlet
has survived, however, it is impossible to compare its
language and style with the known works of any of its
putative authors. Consequently, there is no direct
evidence that Kyd wrote it, nor any evidence that the
play was not an early version of Hamlet by Shakespeare
himself. This latter idea—placing Hamlet far earlier than
the generally accepted date, with a much longer period of
194 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 5–15)
195 Books 3 & 4 – see online text
196 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 1–5)
197 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 25–37)
198 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 66–67)
199 Jenkins (1982, 82–85).
200 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 67)
xxix

development—has attracted some support, though others
dismiss it as speculation. 201
The upshot is that scholars cannot assert with any
confidence how much material Shakespeare took from the
Ur-Hamlet (if it even existed), how much from Belleforest
or Saxo, and how much from other contemporary sources
(such as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy). No clear evidence
exists that Shakespeare made any direct references to
Saxo’s version. However, elements of Belleforest’s
version which are not in Saxo’s story do appear in
Shakespeare’s play. Whether Shakespeare took these from
Belleforest directly or through the Ur-Hamlet remains
unclear. 202
Most scholars reject the idea that Hamlet is in any way
connected with Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet
Shakespeare, who died in 1596 at age eleven. Conventional
wisdom holds that Hamlet is too obviously connected to
legend, and the name Hamnet was quite popular at the
time. 203 However, Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the
coincidence of the names and Shakespeare’s grief for the
loss of his son may lie at the heart of the tragedy. He
notes that the name of Hamnet Sadler, the Stratford
neighbour after whom Hamnet was named, was often written
as Hamlet Sadler and that, in the loose orthography of
the time, the names were virtually interchangeable. 204
Sadler’s first name is spelled “Hamlett” in Shakespeare’s
will. 205
Scholars have often speculated that Hamlet’s Polonius
might have been inspired by William Cecil (Lord
Burghley)—Lord High Treasurer and chief counsellor to
Queen Elizabeth I. E. K. Chambers suggested Polonius’s
advice to Laertes may have echoed Burghley’s to his son
Robert Cecil. John Dover Wilson thought it almost certain
that the figure of Polonius caricatured Burleigh, while
A. L. Rowse speculated that Polonius’s tedious verbosity
might have resembled Burghley’s. 206 Lilian Winstanley
thought the name Corambis (in the Ist Quarto) did suggest
201 In his 1936 book The Problem of Hamlet: A Solution Andrew
Cairncross asserted that the Hamlet referred to in 1589 was written
by Shakespeare; Peter Alexander (1964), Eric Sams (according to
Jackson 1991, 267) and, more recently, Harold Bloom (2001, xiii and
383; 2003, 154) have agreed. Harold Jenkins, the editor of the second
series Arden edition of the play, dismisses the idea as groundless
(1982, 84 n4).
202 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 66–68)
203 Saxo and Hansen (1983, 6)
204 Greenblatt (2004a, 311); Greenblatt (2004b)
205 Shakespeare's Last Will and Testament.
206 Chambers (1930) 418: J.D. Wilson (1932) 104: Rowse (1963)
xxx

Cecil and Burghley. 207 Harold Jenkins criticised the idea
of any direct personal satire as “unlikely” and
“uncharacteristic of Shakespeare”, 208 while G.R.Hibbard
hypothesized that differences in names
(Corambis/Polonius:Montano/Raynoldo) between the First
Quarto and other editions might reflect a desire not to
offend scholars at Oxford University. 209
Date
“Any dating of Hamlet must be tentative”, cautions the
New Cambridge editor, Phillip Edwards. 210 The earliest
date estimate relies on Hamlet’s frequent allusions to
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, itself dated to mid-1599. 211
The latest date estimate is based on an entry, of 26 July
1602, in the Register of the Stationers’ Company,
indicating that Hamlet was “latelie Acted by the Lo:
Chamberleyne his servantes“.
In 1598, Francis Meres published in his Palladis Tamia a
survey of English literature from Chaucer to its present
day, within which twelve of Shakespeare’s plays are
named. Hamlet is not among them, suggesting that it had
not yet been written. As Hamlet was very popular, the New
Swan series editor Bernard Lott believes it “unlikely
that he [Meres] would have overlooked ... so significant
a piece”. 212
The phrase “little eyases” 213 in the First Folio (F1) may
allude to the Children of the Chapel, whose popularity in
London forced the Globe company into provincial touring.
This became known as the War of the Theatres, and
supports a 1601 dating. 214
207 Lilian Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, Cambridge
University Press, 1921, 114
208
H.Jenkins (ed.) Hamlet, Methuen, 1982, p.142
209 Polonius was close to the Latin name for Robert Pullen, founder of
Oxford University, and Reynaldo too close for safety to John
Rainolds, the President of Corpus Christi College. G.R.Hibbard (ed.)
Hamlet, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp.74–5
210 MacCary suggests 1599 or 1600 (1998, 13); James Shapiro offers
late 1600 or early 1601 (2005, 341); Wells and Taylor suggest that
the play was written in 1600 and revised later (1988, 653); the New
Cambridge editor settles on mid-1601 (Edwards 1985, 8); the New Swan
Shakespeare Advanced Series editor agrees with 1601 (Lott 1970,
xlvi); Thompson and Taylor, tentatively ("according to whether one is
the more persuaded by Jenkins or by Honigmann") suggest a terminus ad
quem of either Spring 1601 or sometime in 1600 (2001a, 58–59)
211 MacCary (1998, 12–13) and Edwards (1985, 5–6)
212 Lott (1970, xlvi)
213 Hamlet F1 2.2.337. The whole conversation between Rozencrantz,
Guildenstern and Hamlet concerning the touring players' departure
from the city is at Hamlet "F1" 2.2.324–360
214
Edwards (1985, 5).
xxxi

A contemporary of Shakespere’s, Gabriel Harvey, wrote a
marginal note in his copy of the 1598 edition of
Chaucer’s works, which some scholars use as dating
evidence. Harvey’s note says that “the wiser sort” enjoy
Hamlet, and implies that the Earl of Essex—executed in
February 1601 for rebellion—was still alive. Other
scholars consider this inconclusive. Edwards, for
example, concludes that the “sense of time is so confused
in Harvey’s note that it is really of little use in
trying to date Hamlet”. This is because the same note
also refers to Spenser and Watson as if they were still
alive (“our flourishing metricians“), but also mentions
“Owen’s new epigrams”, published in 1607. 215
Texts
Three early editions of the text have survived, making
attempts to establish a single “authentic” text
problematic. Each is different from the others: 216
• First Quarto (Q1) In 1603 the booksellers Nicholas
Ling and John Trundell published, and Valentine Simmes
printed the so-called “bad“ first quarto. Q1 contains
just over half of the text of the later second quarto.
• Second Quarto (Q2) In 1604 Nicholas Ling published,
and James Roberts printed, the second quarto. Some copies
are dated 1605, which may indicate a second impression;
consequently, Q2 is often dated “1604/5”. Q2 is the
longest early edition, although it omits 85 lines found
in F1 (most likely to avoid offending James I’s queen,
Anne of Denmark). 217
• First Folio (F1) In 1623 Edward Blount and William
and Isaac Jaggard published the First Folio, the first
edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. 218
Other folios and quartos were subsequently published—
including John Smethwick’s Q3, Q4, and Q5 (1611–37)—but
these are regarded as derivatives of the first three
editions.
Early editors of Shakespeare’s works, beginning with
Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Lewis Theobald (1733), combined
material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet
available at the time, Q2 and F1. Each text contains
material that the other lacks, with many minor
differences in wording: scarcely 200 lines are identical
in the two. Editors have combined them in an effort to
create one “inclusive” text that reflects an imagined
215 Hattaway (1987, 13–20)
216 Chambers (1923, vol. 3, 486–487) and Halliday (1964, 204–205)
217 Halliday (1964, 204)
218 Thompson and Taylor (2006a, 78)
xxxii

“ideal” of Shakespeare’s original. Theobald’s version
became standard for a long time, 219 and his “full text”
approach continues to influence editorial practice to the
present day. Some contemporary scholarship, however,
discounts this approach, instead considering “an
authentic Hamlet an unrealisable ideal. ... there are
texts of this play but no text”. 220 The 2006 publication
by Arden Shakespeare of different Hamlet texts in
different volumes is perhaps the best evidence of this
shifting focus and emphasis. 221
Traditionally, editors of Shakespeare’s plays have
divided them into five acts. None of the early texts of
Hamlet, however, were arranged this way, and the play’s
division into acts and scenes derives from a 1676 quarto.
Modern editors generally follow this traditional
division, but consider it unsatisfactory; for example,
after Hamlet drags Polonius’s body out of Gertrude’s
bedchamber, there is an act-break 222 after which the
action appears to continue uninterrupted. 223
Comparison of the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy in the
first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying
quality of the text in the Bad Quarto, the Good Quarto
and the First Folio
The discovery in 1823 of Q1—whose existence had been
quite unsuspected—caused considerable interest and
excitement, raising many questions of editorial practice
and interpretation. Scholars immediately identified
apparent deficiencies in Q1, which was instrumental in
the development of the concept of a Shakespearean “bad
quarto”. 224 Yet Q1 has value: it contains stage directions
that reveal actual stage practices in a way that Q2 and
F1 do not; it contains an entire scene (usually labelled
4.6) 225 that does not appear in either Q2 or F1; and it is
useful for comparison with the later editions. The scene
order is more coherent, without the problems of Q2 and F1
of Hamlet seeming to resolve something in one scene and
enter the next drowning in indecision. This is a scene
219 Hibbard (1987, 22–23).
220 Hattaway (1987, 16)
221 Thompson and Taylor published Q2, with appendices, in their first
volume (2006a) and the F1 and Q1 texts in their second volume
(2006b). Bate and Rasmussen (2007) is the F1 text with additional Q2
passages in an appendix. The New Cambridge series has begun to
publish separate volumes for the separate quarto versions that exist
of Shakespeare's plays (Irace 1998)
222 Hamlet 3.4 and 4.1
223 Thompson and Taylor (2006a, 543–552)
224 Jenkins (1982, 14)
225 Hamlet Q1 14.
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order many modern theatrical productions follow. The
major deficiency of Q1 is that the language is not
“Shakespearean” enough, particularly noticeable in the
opening lines of the famous “To be, or not to be“
soliloquy: “To be, or not to be, aye there’s the point. /
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye all: / No, to sleep,
to dream, aye marry there it goes.”
Q1 is considerably shorter than Q2 or F1 and may be a
memorial reconstruction of the play as Shakespeare’s
company performed it, by an actor who played a minor role
(most likely Marcellus). 226 Scholars disagree whether the
reconstruction was pirated or authorised. Another theory,
considered by New Cambridge editor Kathleen Irace, holds
that Q1 is an abridged version intended especially for
travelling productions. 227 The idea that Q1 is not riddled
with error but is instead eminently fit for the stage has
led to at least 28 different Q1 productions since 1881. 228
Analysis and criticism
Critical history
From the early 17th century, the play was famous for its
ghost and vivid dramatization of melancholy and insanity,
leading to a procession of mad courtiers and ladies in
Jacobean and Caroline drama. 229 Though it remained popular
with mass audiences, late 17th-century Restoration
critics saw Hamlet as primitive and disapproved of its
lack of unity and decorum. 230 This view changed
drastically in the 18th century, when critics regarded
Hamlet as a hero — a pure, brilliant young man thrust
into unfortunate circumstances. 231 By the mid-18th
century, however, the advent of Gothic literature brought
psychological and mystical readings, returning madness
and the Ghost to the forefront. 232 Not until the late 18th
century did critics and performers begin to view Hamlet
as confusing and inconsistent. Before then, he was either
mad, or not; either a hero, or not; with no inbetweens.
233 These developments represented a fundamental
change in literary criticism, which came to focus more on
character and less on plot. 234 By the 19th century,
Romantic critics valued Hamlet for its internal,
226 Jackson (1986, 171)
227 Irace (1998); Thompson and Taylor (2006a, 85–86)
228 Thompson and Taylor (2006b, 36–37) and Checklist of Q1 Productions
in Thompson and Taylor (2006b, 38–39)
229 Wofford (1994) and Kirsch (1968)
230 Vickers (1974a, 447) and (1974b, 92).
231 Wofford (1994, 184–185)
232 Vickers (1974c, 5)
233 Wofford (1994, 185)
234 Wofford (1994, 186)
xxxiv

individual conflict reflecting the strong contemporary
emphasis on internal struggles and inner character in
general. 235 Then too, critics started to focus on Hamlet’s
delay as a character trait, rather than a plot device. 236
This focus on character and internal struggle continued
into the 20th century, when criticism branched in several
directions, discussed in context and interpretation
below.
Dramatic structure
Hamlet departed from contemporary dramatic convention in
several ways. For example, in Shakespeare’s day, plays
were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle
in his Poetics: that a drama should focus on action, not
character. In Hamlet, Shakespeare reverses this so that
it is through the soliloquies, not the action, that the
audience learns Hamlet’s motives and thoughts. The play
is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of
action, except in the “bad” quarto. At one point, as in
the Gravedigger scene, Hamlet seems resolved to kill
Claudius: in the next scene, however, when Claudius
appears, he is suddenly tame. Scholars still debate
whether these twists are mistakes or intentional
additions to add to the play’s theme of confusion and
duality. Finally, 237 in a period when most plays ran for
two hours or so, the full text of Hamlet—Shakespeare’s
longest play, with 4,042 lines, totalling 29,551 words—
takes over four hours to deliver. 238 Even today the play
is rarely performed in its entirety, and has only once
been dramatized on film completely, with Kenneth
Branagh‘s 1996 version. Hamlet also contains a favourite
Shakespearean device, a play within the play, a literary
device or conceit in which one story is told during the
action of another story. 239
Language
Compared with language in a modern newspaper, magazine or
popular novel, Shakespeare’s language can strike
contemporary readers as complex, elaborate and at times
difficult to understand. Remarkably, it still works well
enough in the theatre: audiences at the reconstruction of
‘Shakespeare’s Globe’ in London, many of whom have never
been to the theatre before, let alone to a play by
Shakespeare, seem to have little difficulty grasping the
235 Rosenberg (1992, 179)
236
Wofford (1994, 186)
237 MacCary (1998, 67–72, 84)
238
Based on the length of the first edition of The Riverside
Shakespeare (1974).
239
Also used in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Kermode (2000, 256)
xxxv

play’s action. 240 Much of Hamlet’s language is courtly:
elaborate, witty discourse, as recommended by Baldassare
Castiglione’s 1528 etiquette guide, The Courtier. This
work specifically advises royal retainers to amuse their
masters with inventive language. Osric and Polonius,
especially, seem to respect this injunction. Claudius’s
speech is rich with rhetorical figures—as is Hamlet’s
and, at times, Ophelia’s—while the language of Horatio,
the guards, and the gravediggers is simpler. Claudius’s
high status is reinforced by using the royal first person
plural (“we” or “us”), and anaphora mixed with metaphor
to resonate with Greek political speeches. 241
Hamlet is the most skilled of all at rhetoric. He uses
highly developed metaphors, stichomythia, and in nine
memorable words deploys both anaphora and asyndeton: “to
die: to sleep — / To sleep, perchance to dream”. 242 In
contrast, when occasion demands, he is precise and
straightforward, as when he explains his inward emotion
to his mother: “But I have that within which passes show,
/ These but the trappings and the suits of woe”. 243 At
times, he relies heavily on puns to express his true
thoughts while simultaneously concealing them. 244 His
“nunnery” remarks 245 to Ophelia are an example of a cruel
double meaning as nunnery was Elizabethan slang for
brothel. 246 His very first words in the play are a pun;
when Claudius addresses him as “my cousin Hamlet, and my
son”, Hamlet says as an aside: “A little more than kin,
and less than kind.” 247 An aside is a dramatic device in
which a character speaks to the audience. By convention
the audience realizes that the character’s speech is
unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be
addressed to the audience expressly (in character or out)
or represent an unspoken thought.
An unusual rhetorical device, hendiadys, appears in
several places in the play. Examples are found in
Ophelia’s speech at the end of the nunnery scene:
“Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state”; “And I, of
ladies most deject and wretched”. 248 Many scholars have
found it odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly
arbitrarily, use this rhetorical form throughout the
240
Adamson, Sylvia; Hunter, Lynette; Magnusson, Lynne; Thompson, Ann;
Wales, Katie (Oct 1 2010). Arden Shakespeare: Reading Shakespeare's
Dramatic Language. Los Angeles: Arden
241
MacCary (1998, 84–85)
242 Hamlet 3.1.63–64
243 Hamlet 1.2.85–86
244 MacCary (1998, 89–90)
245 Hamlet 3.1.87–148 especially lines 120, 129, 136, 139 and 148
246
Oxford English Dictionary (2004, CD)
247 Hamlet 2.1.63–65
248
Hamlet 3.1.151 and 3.1.154. The Nunnery Scene: Hamlet 3.1.87–160
xxxvi

play. One explanation may be that Hamlet was written
later in Shakespeare’s life, when he was adept at
matching rhetorical devices to characters and the plot.
Linguist George T. Wright suggests that hendiadys had
been used deliberately to heighten the play’s sense of
duality and dislocation. 249 Pauline Kiernan argues that
Shakespeare changed English drama forever in Hamlet
because he “showed how a character’s language can often
be saying several things at once, and contradictory
meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and
disturbed feelings.” She gives the example of Hamlet’s
advice to Ophelia, “get thee to a nunnery”, which is
simultaneously a reference to a place of chastity and a
slang term for a brothel, reflecting Hamlet’s confused
feelings about female sexuality. 250
Context and interpretation
Religious
Written at a time of religious upheaval, and in the wake
of the English Reformation, the play is alternately
Catholic (or piously medieval) and Protestant (or
consciously modern). The Ghost describes himself as being
in purgatory, and as dying without last rites. This and
Ophelia’s burial ceremony, which is characteristically
Catholic, make up most of the play’s Catholic
connections. Some scholars have observed that revenge
tragedies come from traditionally Catholic countries,
such as Spain and Italy; and they present a
contradiction, since according to Catholic doctrine the
strongest duty is to God and family. Hamlet’s conundrum,
then, is whether to avenge his father and kill Claudius,
or to leave the vengeance to God, as his religion
requires. 251
Much of the play’s Protestantism derives from its
location in Denmark—then and now a predominantly
Protestant country, though it is unclear whether the
fictional Denmark of the play is intended to mirror this
fact. The play does mention Wittenberg, where Hamlet,
Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attend
university, and where Martin Luther first proposed his 95
theses in 1517, effectively ushering in the Protestant
Reformation. 252 In Shakespeare’s day Denmark, as the
249 MacCary (1998, 87–88)
250 Pauline Kiernan, Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous
Sexual Puns, Quercus, 2006, p.34
251 MacCary (1998, 37–38); in the New Testament, see Romans 12:19:
"'Vengeance is mine, I will repay' sayeth the Lord."
252 MacCary (1998, 38).
xxxvii

majority of Scandinavia, was Lutheran. 253 When Hamlet
speaks of the “special providence in the fall of a
sparrow”, 254 he reflects the Protestant belief that the
will of God — Divine Providence — controls even the
smallest event. In Q1, the first sentence of the same
section reads: “There’s a predestinate providence in the
fall of a sparrow,” 255 which suggests an even stronger
Protestant connection through John Calvin’s doctrine of
predestination. Scholars speculate that Hamlet may have
been censored, as “predestined” appears only in this
quarto. 256
Philosophical
Hamlet is often perceived as a philosophical character,
expounding ideas that are now described as relativist,
existentialist, and skeptical. For example, he expresses
a subjectivistic idea when he says to Rosencrantz: “there
is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it
so”. 257 The idea that nothing is real except in the mind
of the individual finds its roots in the Greek Sophists,
who argued that since nothing can be perceived except
through the senses — and since all individuals sense, and
therefore perceive, things differently — there is no
absolute truth, only relative truth. 258 The clearest
example of existentialism is found in the “to be, or not
to be” 259 speech, where Hamlet uses “being” to allude to
both life and action, and “not being” to death and
inaction. Hamlet’s contemplation of suicide in this
scene, however, is less philosophical than religious as
he believes that he will continue to exist after death. 260
Scholars agree that Hamlet reflects the contemporary
skepticism that prevailed in Renaissance humanism. 261
Prior to Shakespeare’s time, humanists had argued that
man was God’s greatest creation, made in God’s image and
able to choose his own nature, but this view was
challenged, notably in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais of
1590. Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” echoes
many of Montaigne’s ideas, but scholars disagree whether
Shakespeare drew directly from Montaigne or whether both
253 Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare(1970, 92)
254 Hamlet 5.2.197–202
255 Hamlet Q1 17.45–46.
256 Blits (2001, 3–21)
257 Hamlet F1 2.2.247–248
258 MacCary (1998, 47–48)
259 Hamlet 3.1.55–87 especially line 55.
260 MacCary (1998, 28–49)
261 MacCary (1998, 49)
xxxviii

men were simply reacting similarly to the spirit of the
times. 262
Hamlet’s skepticism is juxtaposed in the play with
Horatio’s more traditional Christian worldview. Despite
the friends’ close bond, Hamlet counters Horatio’s faith
with the seemingly agnostic comment, “There are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.”
Psychoanalytic
In the first half of the 20th century, when
psychoanalysis was at the height of its influence, its
concepts were applied to Hamlet, notably by Sigmund
Freud, Ernest Jones, and Jacques Lacan, and these studies
influenced theatrical productions.
In his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud’s
analysis starts from the premise that “the play is built
up on Hamlet’s hesitations over fulfilling the task of
revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no
reasons or motives for these hesitations”. 263 After
reviewing various literary theories, Freud concludes that
Hamlet has an “Oedipal desire for his mother and the
subsequent guilt [is] preventing him from murdering the
man [Claudius] who has done what he unconsciously wanted
to do”. 264 Confronted with his repressed desires, Hamlet
realises that “he himself is literally no better than the
sinner whom he is to punish.” 265 Freud suggests that
Hamlet’s apparent “distaste for sexuality” — articulated
in his “nunnery” conversation with Ophelia — accords with
this interpretation. 266 , 267 [89] John Barrymore introduced
Freudian overtones into his landmark 1922 production in
New York, which ran for a record-breaking 101 nights.
Beginning in 1910, with the publication of The Oedipus-
Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in
Motive, 268 Ernest Jones — a psychoanalyst and Freud’s
biographer —developed Freud’s ideas into a series of
essays that culminated in his book Hamlet and Oedipus
(1949). Influenced by Jones’s psychoanalytic approach,
several productions have portrayed the “closet scene”, 269
where Hamlet confronts his mother in her private
262
Knowles (1999, 1049 and 1052–1053) cited by Thompson and Taylor
(2006a, 73–74); MacCary (1998, 49)
263 Freud (1900, 367)
264 Britton (1995, 207–211)
265
Freud (1900, 368)
266
Freud (1900, 368)
267 The nunnery conversation referred to in this sentence is Hamlet
3.1.87–160
268 The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (January, 1910): 72–113
269 The Closet Scene: Hamlet 3.4
xxxix

quarters, in a sexual light. In this reading, Hamlet is
disgusted by his mother’s “incestuous” relationship with
Claudius while simultaneously fearful of killing him, as
this would clear Hamlet’s path to his mother’s bed.
Ophelia’s madness after her father’s death may also be
read through the Freudian lens: as a reaction to the
death of her hoped-for lover, her father. She is
overwhelmed by having her unfulfilled love for him so
abruptly terminated and drifts into the oblivion of
insanity. 270 In 1937, Tyrone Guthrie directed Laurence
Olivier in a Jones-inspired Hamlet at the Old Vic. 271
Olivier later used some of these same ideas in his 1948
film version of the play.
In the 1950s, -Lacan’s structuralist theories about
Hamlet were first presented in a series of seminars given
in Paris and later published in “Desire and the
Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet”. Lacan postulated
that the human psyche is determined by structures of
language and that the linguistic structures of Hamlet
shed light on human desire. 272 His point of departure is
Freud’s Oedipal theories, and the central theme of
mourning that runs through Hamlet. In Lacan’s analysis,
Hamlet unconsciously assumes the role of phallus—the
cause of his inaction—and is increasingly distanced from
reality “by mourning, fantasy, narcissism and psychosis“,
which create holes (or lack (manque)) in the real,
imaginary, and symbolic aspects of his psyche. Lacan’s
theories influenced literary criticism of Hamlet because
of his alternative vision of the play and his use of
semantics to explore the play’s psychological landscape.
Feminist
In the 20th century feminist critics opened up new
approaches to Gertrude and Ophelia. New Historicist and
cultural materialist critics examined the play in its
historical context, attempting to piece together its
original cultural environment. 273 They focused on the
gender system of early modern England, pointing to the
common trinity of maid, wife, or widow, with whores alone
outside of the stereotype. In this analysis, the essence
of Hamlet is the central character’s changed perception
of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain
faithful to Old Hamlet. In consequence, Hamlet loses his
faith in all women, treating Ophelia as if she too were a
whore and dishonest with Hamlet. Ophelia, by some
critics, can be honest and fair; however, it is virtually
270 MacCary (1998, 104–107, 113–116) and de Grazia (2007, 168–170)
271 Smallwood (2002, 102)
272 Britton (1995, 207–211)
273 Wofford (1994, 199–202)
xl

impossible to link these two traits, since ‘fairness’ is
an outward trait, while ‘honesty’ is an inward trait. 274
Carolyn Heilbrun‘s 1957 essay “The Character of Hamlet’s
Mother” defends Gertrude, arguing that the text never
hints that Gertrude knew of Claudius poisoning King
Hamlet. This analysis has been championed by many
feminist critics. Heilbrun argued that men have for
centuries completely misinterpreted Gertrude, accepting
at face value Hamlet’s view of her instead of following
the actual text of the play. By this account, no clear
evidence suggests that Gertrude is an adulteress: she is
merely adapting to the circumstances of her husband’s
death for the good of the kingdom. 275,276
Ophelia has also been defended by feminist critics, most
notably Elaine Showalter. 277 Ophelia is surrounded by
powerful men: her father, brother, and Hamlet. All three
disappear: Laertes leaves, Hamlet abandons her, and
Polonius dies. Conventional theories had argued that
without these three powerful men making decisions for
her, Ophelia is driven into madness. 278 Feminist theorists
argue that she goes mad with guilt because, when Hamlet
kills her father, he has fulfilled her sexual desire to
have Hamlet kill her father so they can be together.
Showalter points out that Ophelia has become the symbol
of the distraught and hysterical woman in modern
culture. 279
Influence
Hamlet is one of the most quoted works in the English
language, and is often included on lists of the world’s
greatest literature. 280 As such, it reverberates through
the writing of later centuries. Academic Laurie Osborne
identifies the direct influence of Hamlet in numerous
modern narratives, and divides them into four main
categories: fictional accounts of the play’s composition,
simplifications of the story for young readers, stories
expanding the role of one or more characters, and
narratives featuring performances of the play. 281
274 Howard (2003, 411–415)
275 Heilbrun (1957)
276 Bloom (2003, 58–59); Thompson (2001, 4)
277 Showalter (1985)
278 Bloom (2003, 57)
279 MacCary (1998, 111–113)
280 Hamlet has 208 quotations in "The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations;
it takes up 10 of 85 pages dedicated to Shakespeare in the 1986
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (14th ed. 1968). For examples of lists
of the greatest books, see Harvard Classics, Great Books, Great Books
of the Western World, Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, St. John's
College reading list, and Columbia College Core Curriculum
281 Osborne (2007, 114–133 especially 115 and 120)
xli

Henry Fielding‘s Tom Jones, published about 1749,
describes a visit to Hamlet by Tom Jones and Mr
Partridge, with similarities to the “play within a
play”. 282 In contrast, Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship, written between 1776 and 1796,
not only has a production of Hamlet at its core but also
creates parallels between the Ghost and Wilhelm Meister’s
dead father. 283 In the early 1850s, in Pierre, Herman
Melville focuses on a Hamlet-like character’s long
development as a writer. 284 Ten years later, Dickens’s
Great Expectations contains many Hamlet-like plot
elements: it is driven by revenge-motivated actions,
contains ghost-like characters (Abel Magwich and Miss
Havisham), and focuses on the hero’s guilt. 285 Academic
Alexander Welsh notes that Great Expectations is an
“autobiographical novel” and “anticipates psychoanalytic
readings of Hamlet itself”. About the same time, George
Eliot‘s The Mill on the Floss was published, introducing
Maggie Tulliver “who is explicitly compared with
Hamlet” 286 though “with a reputation for sanity”. 287
In the 1920s, James Joyce managed “a more upbeat version”
of Hamlet—stripped of obsession and revenge — in Ulysses,
though its main parallels are with Homer‘s Odyssey. In
the 1990s, two women novelists were explicitly influenced
by Hamlet. In Angela Carter’s Wise Children, To be or not
to be 288 is reworked as a song and dance routine, and Iris
Murdoch’s The Black Prince has Oedipal themes and murder
intertwined with a love affair between a Hamlet-obsessed
writer, Bradley Pearson, and the daughter of his rival.
There is the story of the woman who read Hamlet for the
first time and said, “I don’t see why people admire that
play so. It is nothing but a bunch of quotations strung
together.” — Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare,
pg vii, Avenal Books, 1970
Performance History
The day we see Hamlet die in the theatre, something
of him dies for us. He is dethroned by the spectre
of an actor, and we shall never be able to keep the
usurper out of our dreams. – Maurice Maeterlinck
(1890) 289
Shakespeare’s day to the Interregnum
282
Thompson and Taylor (2006a, 123–126).
283
Loc. cit.
284 Loc. cit.
285
Welsh (2001, 131)
286 Thompson and Taylor (2006a, 126–131)
287 Novy (1994, 62, 77–78)
288 Hamlet 3.1.55–87
289
Writing in La Jeune Belgique in 1890; quoted by Braun (1982, 40)
xlii

Shakespeare almost certainly wrote the role of Hamlet for
Richard Burbage. He was the chief tragedian of the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men, with a capacious memory for lines and
a wide emotional range. Judging by the number of
reprints, Hamlet appears to have been Shakespeare’s
fourth most popular play during his lifetime — only Henry
IV Part 1, Richard III and Pericles eclipsed it.
Shakespeare provides no clear indication of when his play
is set; however, as Elizabethan actors performed at the
Globe in contemporary dress on minimal sets, this would
not have affected the staging. 290
Firm evidence for specific early performances of the play
is scant. What is known is that the crew of the ship Red
Dragon, anchored off Sierra Leone, performed Hamlet in
September 1607; 291 that the play toured in Germany within
five years of Shakespeare’s death; 292 and that it was
performed before James I in 1619 and Charles I in 1637. 293
Oxford editor George Hibbard argues that, since the
contemporary literature contains many allusions and
references to Hamlet (only Falstaff is mentioned more,
from Shakespeare), the play was surely performed with a
frequency that the historical record misses. 294
All theatres were closed down by the Puritan government
during the Interregnum. 295 Even during this time, however,
playlets known as drolls were often performed illegally,
including one called The Grave-Makers based on Act 5,
Scene 1 of Hamlet. 296
Restoration and 18th century
The play was revived early in the Restoration. When the
existing stock of pre-civil war plays was divided between
the two newly created patent theatre companies, Hamlet
was the only Shakespearean favourite that Sir William
Davenant’s Duke’s Company secured. 297 It became the first
of Shakespeare’s plays to be presented with movable flats
painted with generic scenery behind the proscenium arch
of Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. 298 This new stage
convention highlighted the frequency with which
Shakespeare shifts dramatic location, encouraging the
recurrent criticisms of his violation of the neoclassical
290 Taylor (2002, 13)
291 Thompson and Taylor (2006a; 53–55); Chambers (1930, vol. 1, 334),
cited by Dawson (2002, 176)
292
Dawson (2002, 176).
293 Pitcher and Woudhuysen (1969, 204)
294 Hibbard (1987, 17)
295
Marsden (2002, 21)
296
Holland (2007, 34)
297
Marsden (2002, 21–22).
298 Samuel Pepys records his delight at the novelty of Hamlet "done
with scenes"; see Thompson and Taylor (1996, 57)
xliii

principle of maintaining a unity of place. 299 Davenant
cast Thomas Betterton in the eponymous role, and he
continued to play the Dane until he was 74. 300 David
Garrick at Drury Lane produced a version that adapted
Shakespeare heavily; he declared: “I had sworn I would
not leave the stage till I had rescued that noble play
from all the rubbish of the fifth act. I have brought it
forth without the grave-digger’s trick, Osrick, & the
fencing match”. 301 The first actor known to have played
Hamlet in North America is Lewis Hallam. Jr., in the
American Company‘s production in Philadelphia in 1759. 302
John Philip Kemble made his Drury Lane debut as Hamlet in
1783. 303 His performance was said to be 20 minutes longer
than anyone else’s, and his lengthy pauses provoked the
suggestion that “music should be played between the
words”. 304 Sarah Siddons was the first actress known to
play Hamlet; many women have since played him as a
breeches role, to great acclaim. 305 In 1748, Alexander
Sumarokov wrote a Russian adaptation that focused on
Prince Hamlet as the embodiment of an opposition to
Claudius’s tyranny — a treatment that would recur in
Eastern European versions into the 20th century. 306 In the
years following America’s independence, Thomas Apthorpe
Cooper, the young nation’s leading tragedian, performed
Hamlet among other plays at the Chestnut Street Theatre
in Philadelphia, and at the Park Theatre in New York.
Although chided for “acknowledging acquaintances in the
audience” and “inadequate memorisation of his lines”, he
became a national celebrity. 307
19th century
From around 1810 to 1840, the best-known Shakespearean
performances in the United States were tours by leading
London actors — including George Frederick Cooke, Junius
Brutus Booth, Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready, and
Charles Kemble. Of these, Booth remained to make his
career in the States, fathering the nation’s most
notorious actor, John Wilkes Booth (who later
assassinated Abraham Lincoln), and its most famous
Hamlet, Edwin Booth. 308 Edwin Booth’s Hamlet was described
299 Taylor (1989, 16)
300
Thompson and Taylor (2006a, 98–99)
301 Letter to Sir William Young, 10 January 1773, quoted by Uglow
(1977, 473)
302 Morrison (2002, 231)
303 Moody (2002, 41)
304 Moody (2002, 44), quoting Sheridan
305 Gay (2002, 159)
306 Dawson (2002, 185–187)
307
Morrison (2002, 232–233)
308 Morrison (2002, 235–237)
xliv

as “like the dark, mad, dreamy, mysterious hero of a poem
... [acted] in an ideal manner, as far removed as
possible from the plane of actual life”. 309 Booth played
Hamlet for 100 nights in the 1864/5 season at The Winter
Garden Theatre, inaugurating the era of long-run
Shakespeare in America. 310
In the United Kingdom, the actor-managers of the
Victorian era (including Kean, Samuel Phelps, Macready,
and Henry Irving) staged Shakespeare in a grand manner,
with elaborate scenery and costumes. 311 The tendency of
actor-managers to emphasise the importance of their own
central character did not always meet with the critics’
approval. George Bernard Shaw’s praise for Johnston
Forbes-Robertson’s performance contains a sideswipe at
Irving: “The story of the play was perfectly
intelligible, and quite took the attention of the
audience off the principal actor at moments. What is the
Lyceum coming to?” 312
In London, Edmund Kean was the first Hamlet to abandon
the regal finery usually associated with the role in
favour of a plain costume, and he is said to have
surprised his audience by playing Hamlet as serious and
introspective. 313 In stark contrast to earlier opulence,
William Poel’s 1881 production of the Q1 text was an
early attempt at reconstructing the Elizabethan theatre’s
austerity; his only backdrop was a set of red curtains. 314
Sarah Bernhardt played the prince in her popular 1899
London production. In contrast to the “effeminate” view
of the central character that usually accompanied a
female casting, she described her character as “manly and
resolute, but nonetheless thoughtful ... [he] thinks
before he acts, a trait indicative of great strength and
great spiritual power”. 315
In France, Charles Kemble initiated an enthusiasm for
Shakespeare; and leading members of the Romantic movement
such as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas saw his 1827
Paris performance of Hamlet, particularly admiring the
madness of Harriet Smithson’s Ophelia. 316 In Germany,
Hamlet had become so assimilated by the mid-19th century
309 William Winter, New York Tribune 26 October 1875, quoted by
Morrison (2002, 241)
310
Morrison (2002, 241)
311 Schoch (2002, 58–75)
312 George Bernard Shaw in The Saturday Review 2 October 1897, quoted
in Shaw (1961, 81)
313 Moody (2002, 54)
314 Halliday (1964, 204) and O'Connor (2002, 77)
315 Sarah Bernhardt, in a letter to the London Daily Telegraph, quoted
by Gay (2002, 164)
316
Holland (2002, 203–205).
xlv

that Ferdinand Freiligrath declared that “Germany is
Hamlet”. 317 From the 1850s, the Parsi theatre tradition in
India transformed Hamlet into folk performances, with
dozens of songs added. 318
20th century
In 1908, Edward Gordon Craig designed the MAT production
of Hamlet (1911–12). The isolated figure of Hamlet
reclines in the dark foreground, while behind a gauze the
rest of the court are absorbed in a bright, unified
golden pyramid emanating from Claudius. Craig’s famous
screens are flat against the back in this scene.
Apart from some western troupes’ 19th-century visits, the
first professional performance of Hamlet in Japan was
Otojiro Kawakami’s 1903 Shimpa (“new school theatre”)
adaptation. 319 Shoyo Tsubouchi translated Hamlet and
produced a performance in 1911 that blended Shingeki
(“new drama”) and Kabuki styles. This hybrid-genre
reached its peak in Fukuda Tsuneari’s 1955 Hamlet. In
1998, Yukio Ninagawa produced an acclaimed version of
Hamlet in the style of Nō theatre, which he took to
London. 320
Constantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig—two of
the 20th century’s most influential theatre
practitioners—collaborated on the Moscow Art Theatre’s
seminal production of 1911–12. 321 While Craig favoured
stylised abstraction, Stanislavski, armed with his
‘system,’ explored psychological motivation. 322 Craig
conceived of the play as a symbolist monodrama, offering
a dream-like vision as seen through Hamlet’s eyes
alone. 323 This was most evident in the staging of the
first court scene. 324 The most famous aspect of the
317 Dawson (2002, 184)
318 Dawson (2002, 188)
319 Gillies et al. (2002, 259–262)
320 Dawson (2002, 180).
321 For more on this production, see the MAT production of Hamlet
article. Craig and Stanislavski began planning the production in 1908
but, due to a serious illness of Stanislavski's, it was delayed until
December, 1911. See Benedetti (1998, 188–211)
322 Benedetti (1999, 189, 195)
323 On Craig's relationship to Symbolism, Russian symbolism, and its
principles of monodrama in particular, see Taxidou (1998, 38–41); on
Craig's staging proposals, see Innes (1983, 153); on the centrality
of the protagonist and his mirroring of the 'authorial self', see
Taxidou (1998, 181, 188) and Innes (1983, 153)
324 The First Court Scene: Hamlet 1.2.1–128. A brightly lit, golden
pyramid descended from Claudius's throne, representing the feudal
hierarchy, giving the illusion of a single, unified mass of bodies.
In the dark, shadowy foreground, separated by a gauze, Hamlet lay, as
if dreaming. On Claudius's exit-line the figures remained but the
gauze was loosened, so that they appeared to melt away as if Hamlet's
xlvi

production is Craig’s use of large, abstract screens that
altered the size and shape of the acting area for each
scene, representing the character’s state of mind
spatially or visualising a dramaturgical progression. 325
The production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented
world-wide attention for the theatre and placed it “on
the cultural map for Western Europe”. 326
Hamlet is often played with contemporary political
overtones. Leopold Jessner’s 1926 production at the
Berlin Staatstheater portrayed Claudius’s court as a
parody of the corrupt and fawning court of Kaiser
Wilhelm. 327 In Poland, the number of productions of Hamlet
has tended to increase at times of political unrest,
since its political themes (suspected crimes, coups,
surveillance) can be used to comment on a contemporary
situation. 328 Similarly, Czech directors have used the
play at times of occupation: a 1941 Vinohrady Theatre
production “emphasised, with due caution, the helpless
situation of an intellectual attempting to endure in a
ruthless environment”. 329 In China, performances of Hamlet
often have political significance: Gu Wuwei’s 1916 The
Usurper of State Power, an amalgam of Hamlet and Macbeth,
was an attack on Yuan Shikai’s attempt to overthrow the
republic. [150] In 1942, Jiao Juyin directed the play in a
Confucian temple in Sichuan Province, to which the
government had retreated from the advancing Japanese. In
the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the protests
at Tiananmen Square, Lin Zhaohua staged a 1990 Hamlet in
which the prince was an ordinary individual tortured by a
loss of meaning. In this production, the actors playing
Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius exchanged roles at crucial
moments in the performance, including the moment of
Claudius’s death, at which point the actor mainly
associated with Hamlet fell to the ground. 330
Notable stagings in London and New York include
Barrymore’s 1925 production at the Haymarket; it
influenced subsequent performances by John Gielgud and
Laurence Olivier. 331 Gielgud played the central role many
times: his 1936 New York production ran for 136
performances, leading to the accolade that he was “the
thoughts had turned elsewhere. For this effect, the scene received an
ovation, which was unheard of at the MAT. See Innes (1983, 152)
325 See Innes (1983, 140–175; esp. 165–167 on the use of the screens)
326 Innes (1983, 172)
327 Hortmann (2002, 214)
328
Hortmann (2002, 223).
329 Burian (1993), quoted by Hortmann (2002, 224–225)
330 Gillies et al. (2002, 267–269)
331
Morrison (2002, 247–248); Thompson and Taylor (2006a, 109)
xlvii

finest interpreter of the role since Barrymore”. 332
Although “posterity has treated Maurice Evans less
kindly”, throughout the 1930s and 1940s he was regarded
by many as the leading interpreter of Shakespeare in the
United States and in the 1938/9 season he presented
Broadway’s first uncut Hamlet, running four and a half
hours. 333 Olivier’s 1937 performance at the Old Vic
Theatre was popular with audiences but not with critics,
with James Agate writing in a famous review in The Sunday
Times, “Mr. Olivier does not speak poetry badly. He does
not speak it at all.” 334 In 1937 Tyrone Guthrie directed
the play at Elsinore, Denmark with Laurence Olivier as
Hamlet and Vivien Leigh as Ophelia.
In 1963, Olivier directed Peter O’Toole as Hamlet in the
inaugural performance of the newly formed National
Theatre; critics found resonance between O’Toole’s Hamlet
and John Osborne’s hero, Jimmy Porter, from Look Back in
Anger. 335
Richard Burton received his third Tony Award nomination
when he played his second Hamlet, his first under John
Gielgud’s direction, in 1964 in a production that holds
the record for the longest run of the play in Broadway
history (136 performances). The performance was set on a
bare stage, conceived to appear like a dress rehearsal,
with Burton in a black v-neck sweater, and Gielgud
himself tape-recorded the voice for the Ghost (which
appeared as a looming shadow). It was immortalised both
on record and on a film that played in US theatres for a
week in 1964 as well as being the subject of books
written by cast members William Redfield and Richard L.
Sterne. Other New York portrayals of Hamlet of note
include that of Ralph Fiennes‘s in 1995 (for which he won
the Tony Award for Best Actor) – which ran, from first
preview to closing night, a total of one hundred
performances. About the Fiennes Hamlet Vincent Canby
wrote in The New York Times that it was “...not one for
literary sleuths and Shakespeare scholars. It respects
the play, but it doesn’t provide any new material for
arcane debates on what it all means. Instead it’s an
intelligent, beautifully read ...” 336 Stacy Keach played
the role with an all-star cast at Joseph Papp’s Delacorte
Theatre in the early 70’s, with Colleen Dewhurst‘s
Gertrude, James Earl Jones‘s King, Barnard Hughes’s
332 Morrison (2002, 249)
333 Morrison (2002, 249–250)
334 "Olivier" by Robert Tanitch, Abbeville Press, 1985
335 Smallwood (2002, 108); National Theatre reviews Retrieved: 4
December 2007
336 Vincent Canby, "Theatre Review: Ralph Fiennes as Mod Hamlet," The
New York Times May 3, 1995
xlviii

Polonius, Sam Waterston‘s Laertes and Raul Julia’s Osric.
Sam Waterston later played the role himself at the
Delacorte for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the
show transferred to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1975
(Stephen Lang played Bernardo and other roles). Stephen
Lang‘s Hamlet for the Roundabout Theatre Company in 1992
received positive reviews, and ran for sixty-one
performances. David Warner played the role with the Royal
Shakespeare Theatre in 1965. William Hurt (at Circle Rep
Off-Broadway, memorably performing “To Be Or Not to Be”
while lying on the floor), Jon Voight at Rutgers, and
Christopher Walken (fiercely) at Stratford CT have all
played the role, as has Diane Venora at the Public
Theatre. Off Broadway, the Riverside Shakespeare Company
mounted an uncut first folio Hamlet in 1978 at Columbia
University, with a playing time of under three hours. 337
In fact, Hamlet is the most produced Shakespeare play in
New York theatre history, with sixty-four recorded
productions on Broadway, and an untold number Off
Broadway. 338
Ian Charleson performed Hamlet from 9 October to 13
November 1989, in Richard Eyre’s production at the
Olivier Theatre, replacing Daniel Day-Lewis, who had
abandoned the production. Seriously ill from AIDS at the
time, Charleson died eight weeks after his last
performance. Fellow actor and friend, Sir Ian McKellen,
said that Charleson played Hamlet so well it was as if he
had rehearsed the role all his life; McKellen called it
“the perfect Hamlet”. 339,340 The performance garnered other
major accolades as well, some critics echoing McKellen in
calling it the definitive Hamlet performance. 341
21st century
In May 2009, Hamlet opened with Jude Law in the title
role at the Donmar Warehouse West End season at Wyndham’s
Theatre. The production officially opened on 3 June and
337 Ari Panagako, "Dandy Hamlet Bows Uptown", Heights/Inwood Press of
North Manhattan, June 14, 1978
338 According to the Internet Broadway Database "show".
http://www.ibdb.com/show; Romeo and Juliet is the second mostproduced
Shakespeare play on Broadway, with thirty-four different
productions, followed by Twelfth Night, with thirty
339 Ian McKellen, Alan Bates, Hugh Hudson, et al. For Ian Charleson: A
Tribute. London: Constable and Company, 1990. p. 124
340 Barratt, Mark. Ian McKellen: An Unofficial Biography. Virgin
Books, 2005. p. 63
341 "The Readiness Was All: Ian Charleson and Richard Eyre's Hamlet,"
by Richard Allan Davison. In Shakespeare: Text and Theater, Lois
Potter and Arthur F. Kinney, eds. Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 1999. pp. 170–182
xlix

an through 22 August 2009. 342,343 A further production of
the play ran at Elsinore Castle in Denmark from 25–30
August 2009. 344 The Jude Law Hamlet then moved to
Broadway, and ran for 12 weeks at the Broadhurst Theatre
in New York. 345,346
Screen performances
The earliest screen success for Hamlet was Sarah
Bernhardt’s five-minute film of the fencing scene, 347
produced in 1900. The film was a crude talkie, in that
music and words were recorded on phonograph records, to
be played along with the film. 348 Silent versions were
released in 1907, 1908, 1910, 1913, 1917, and 1920. In
the 1920 version, Asta Nielsen played Hamlet as a woman
who spends her life disguised as a man.
Laurence Olivier’s 1948 moody black-and-white Hamlet won
best picture and best actorOscars. His interpretation
stressed the Oedipal overtones of the play, and cast 28year-old
Eileen Herlie as Hamlet’s mother, opposite
himself, at 41, as Hamlet. 349 Shakespeare experts Sir John
Gielgud and Kenneth Branagh consider the definitive
rendition of the Bard’s tragic tale 350 to be the 1964
Russian film Gamlet (Russian: Гамлет) based on a
translation by Boris Pasternak and directed by Grigori
Kozintsev, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich. 351
Innokenty Smoktunovsky was cast in the role of Hamlet; he
was particularly praised by Sir Laurence Olivier.
John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in a Broadway
production at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in 1964–5, the
longest-running Hamlet in the U.S. to date. A live film
of the production was produced using “Electronovision”, a
method of recording a live performance with multiple
video cameras and converting the image to film. 352 Eileen
342 Mark Shenton, "Jude Law to Star in Donmar's Hamlet." The Stage. 10
Sep-tember 2007. Retrieved 19 November 2007
343 "Cook, Eyre, Lee And More Join Jude Law In Grandage's HAMLET."
broadwayworld.com. 4 February 2009. Retrieved 18 February 2009
344 "Jude Law to play Hamlet at 'home' Kronborg Castle." The Daily
Mirror. July 10, 2009. Retrieved July 14, 2009
345 "Shakespeare's Hamlet with Jude Law". Charlie Rose Show. video
53:55, 2 October 2009. Retrieved 6 October 2009
346 Dave Itzkoff, "Donmar Warehouse’s ‘Hamlet’ Coming to Broadway With
Jude Law." New York Times. June 30, 2009. Retrieved September 10,
2009
347 The Fencing Scene: Hamlet 5.2.203–387
348 Brode (2001, 117–118)
349 Davies (2000, 171)
350 "Innokenti Smoktunovsky - Biography - Movies & TV - NYTimes.com".
Movies.nytimes.com. http://movies.nytimes.com/person/66625/Innokenti-
Smoktunovsky/biography. Retrieved 2010-05-29.
351 Guntner (2000, 120–121)
352 Brode (2001, 125–127).
l

Herlie repeated her role from Olivier’s film version as
the Queen, and the voice of Gielgud was heard as the
Ghost. The Gielgud/Burton production was also recorded
complete and released on LP by Columbia Records. The
first Hamlet in color was a 1969 film directed by Tony
Richardson with Nicol Williamson as Hamlet and Marianne
Faithfull as Ophelia.
In 1990 Franco Zeffirelli, whose Shakespeare films have
been described as “sensual rather than cerebral”, 353 cast
Mel Gibson—then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon
movies—in the title role of his 1990 version, and Glenn
Close — then famous as the psychotic “other woman” in
Fatal Attraction — as Gertrude. 354 In contrast to
Zeffirelli, whose Hamlet was heavily cut, Kenneth Branagh
adapted, directed, and starred in a 1996 version
containing every word of Shakespeare’s play, combining
the material from the F1 and Q2 texts. Branagh’s Hamlet
runs for around four hours. 355 Branagh set the film with
late 19th-century costuming and furnishings; 356 and
Blenheim Palace, built in the early 18th century, became
Elsinore Castle in the external scenes. The film is
structured as an epic and makes frequent use of
flashbacks to highlight elements not made explicit in the
play: Hamlet’s sexual relationship with Kate Winslet’s
Ophelia, for example, or his childhood affection for
Yorick (played by Ken Dodd). 357
In 2000, Michael Almereyda’sHamlet set the story in
contemporary Manhattan, with Ethan Hawke playing Hamlet
as a film student. Claudius (played by Kyle MacLachlan)
became the CEO of “Denmark Corporation”, having taken
over the company by killing his brother. 358
Notable made-for-television productions of Hamlet include
those starring Christopher Plummer (1964), Richard
Chamberlain (1970; Hallmark Hall of Fame), Derek Jacobi
(1980; Royal Shakespeare Company, BBC), Kevin Kline
(1990), Campbell Scott (2000) and David Tennant (2010). 359
There have also been several films that transposed the
general storyline of Hamlet or elements thereof to other
settings. There have also been many films which included
353 From Cartmell (2000, 212), Zeffirelli says he is trying to make
Shakespeare "even more popular" in an interview quoted here given to
The South Bank Show in December 1997
354 Guntner (2000, 121–122).
355 Crowl (2000, 232)
356 Starks (1999, 272)
357 Keyishian (2000, 78–79).
358 Burnett (2000).
359 Hamlet Great Performances, PBS
li

performances of scenes from Hamlet as a play-within-afilm.
Notable Stage Pastiches
There have been various “derivative works” of Hamlet
which recast the story from the point of view of other
characters, or tranpose the story into a new setting or
act as sequels or prequels to Hamlet. This section is
limited to those written for the stage.
The best-known is Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern are Dead which retells many of the
events of the story from the point of view of the
characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as well as giving
them a backstory of their own. The play was nominated for
eight Tony Awards, and won four: Best Play, Scenic and
Costume Design, and Producer; the director and the three
leading actors were nominated but did not win. It also
won Best Play from the New York Drama Critics Circle in
1968, and Outstanding Production from the Outer Critics
Circle in 1969. Several times since 1995, the American
Shakespeare Center has mounted repertories that included
both Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with the
same actors performing the same roles in each; in their
2001 and 2009 seasons the two plays were “directed,
designed, and rehearsed together to make the most out of
the shared scenes and situations”. 360
360 Warren, Jim. "Director's Notes". American Shakespeare Center.
http://www.americanshakespearecenter.com/v.php?pg=153. Retrieved
2009-06-20.
lii

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
William Shakespeare

MEN
Dramatis Personae
CLAUDIUS, King of Denmark
MARCELLUS, Officer
HAMLET, son to the former, and nephew to the present king
POLONIUS, Lord Chamberlain
HORATIO, friend to Hamlet
LAERTES, son to Polonius
VOLTEMAND, courtier
CORNELIUS, courtier
ROSENCRANTZ, courtier
GUILDENSTERN, courtier
OSRIC, courtier
MARCELLUS, officer
BERNARDO, officer
FRANCISCO, a soldier
REYNALDO, servant to Polonius
TWO CLOWNS, gravediggers
FORTINBRAS, Prince of Norway
GHOST of Hamlet's Father
A Norwegian Captain
English Ambassadors
A Gentleman, courtier
A Priest
Players
WOMEN
GETRUDE, Queen of Denmark, mother to Hamlet
OPHELIA, daughter to Polonius
Lords, ladies, Officers, Soldiers, Sailors, Messengers,
Attendants.
Scene: Elsinore in Denmark

I.i.
Act the First
[Elsinore. A platform before the castle. Enter FRANCISCO,
who paces up and down at his post; then BERNARDO, who
approaches him
Who's there?
BERNARDO
FRANCISCO
Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
Long live the King!
Bernardo?
He.
BERNARDO
FRANCISCO
BERNARDO
FRANCISCO
You come most carefully upon your hour.
BERNARDO
'Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco.
FRANCISCO
For this relief much thanks. 'Tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.
Have you had quiet guard?
Not a mouse stirring.
BERNARDO
FRANCISCO
BERNARDO
Well, good night.
If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.
[Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS
FRANCISCO
I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who is there?
Friends to this ground.
HORATIO
1

And liegemen to the Dane.
Give you good night.
MARCELLUS
FRANCISCO
MARCELLUS
O, farewell, honest soldier.
Who hath reliev'd you?
Bernardo hath my place.
Give you good night.
[Exit
Holla, Bernardo!
Say -
What, is Horatio there?
A piece of him.
FRANCISCO
MARCELLUS
BERNARDO
HORATIO
BERNARDO
Welcome, Horatio. Welcome, good Marcellus.
MARCELLUS
What, has this thing appear'd again to-night?
I have seen nothing.
BERNARDO
MARCELLUS
Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us.
Therefore I have entreated him along,
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That, if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.
HORATIO
Tush, tush, 'twill not appear.
BERNARDO
Sit down awhile,
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story,
What we two nights have seen.
2

HORATIO
Well, sit we down,
And let us hear Bernardo speak of this.
BERNARDO
Last night of all,
When yond same star that's westward from the pole
Had made his course t' illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one -
[Enter GHOST
MARCELLUS
Peace! Break thee off! Look where it comes again!
BERNARDO
In the same figure, like the King that's dead.
MARCELLUS
Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.
BERNARDO
Looks it not like the King? Mark it, Horatio.
HORATIO
Most like. It harrows me with fear and wonder.
It would be spoke to.
Question it, Horatio.
BERNARDO
MARCELLUS
HORATIO
What art thou that usurp'st this time of night
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? By heaven I charge thee speak!
It is offended.
See, it stalks away!
MARCELLUS
BERNARDO
HORATIO
Stay! Speak, speak! I charge thee speak!
Exit Ghost.
MARCELLUS
'Tis gone and will not answer.
3

BERNARDO
How now, Horatio? You tremble and look pale.
Is not this something more than fantasy?
What think you on't?
HORATIO
Before my God, I might not this believe
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of mine own eyes.
Is it not like the King?
MARCELLUS
HORATIO
As thou art to thyself.
Such was the very armour he had on
When he th' ambitious Norway combated.
So frown'd he once when, in an angry parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
'Tis strange.
MARCELLUS
Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour,
With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch.
HORATIO
In what particular thought to work I know not;
But, in the gross and scope of my opinion,
This bodes some strange eruption to our state.
MARCELLUS
Good now, sit down, and tell me he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch
So nightly toils the subject of the land,
And why such daily cast of brazen cannon
And foreign mart for implements of war;
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week.
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day?
Who is't that can inform me?
HORATIO
That can I.
At least, the whisper goes so. Our last king,
Whose image even but now appear'd to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto prick'd on by a most emulate pride,
Dar'd to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet
(For so this side of our known world esteem'd him)
Did slay this Fortinbras; who, by a seal'd compact,
4

HORATIO (CONT)
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands
Which he stood seiz'd of, to the conqueror;
Against the which a moiety competent
Was gaged by our king; which had return'd
To the inheritance of Fortinbras,
Had he been vanquisher, as, by the same comart
And carriage of the article design'd,
His fell to Hamlet. Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimproved mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway, here and there,
Shark'd up a list of lawless resolutes,
For food and diet, to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in't; which is no other,
As it doth well appear unto our state,
But to recover of us, by strong hand
And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost; and this, I take it,
Is the main motive of our preparations,
The source of this our watch, and the chief head
Of this post-haste and romage in the land.
BERNARDO
I think it be no other but e'en so.
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch, so like the King
That was and is the question of these wars.
HORATIO
A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climature and countrymen.
[Enter GHOST again
But soft! behold! Lo, where it comes again!
I'll cross it, though it blast me. - Stay illusion!
[Spreads his arms
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
5

HORATIO (CONT)
Speak to me.
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease, and, race to me,
Speak to me.
If thou art privy to thy country's fate,
Which happily foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth
(For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death),
The cock crows.
Speak of it! Stay, and speak!- Stop it, Marcellus!
MARCELLUS
Shall I strike at it with my partisan?
Do, if it will not stand.
'Tis here!
'Tis here!
'Tis gone!
[Exit GHOST
HORATIO
BERNARDO
HORATIO
MARCELLUS
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence;
For it is as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
BERNARDO
It was about to speak, when the cock crew.
HORATIO
And then it started, like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day; and at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine; and of the truth herein
This present object made probation.
6

MARCELLUS
It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever, 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.
HORATIO
So have I heard and do in part believe it.
But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
Break we our watch up; and by my advice
Let us impart what we have seen to-night
Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life,
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.
Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it,
As needful in our loves, fitting our duty?
Let's do't, I pray; and I this morning know
Where we shall find him most conveniently.
[Exeunt
I.ii.
[Elsinore. A room of state in the castle. Flourish. Enter
CLAUDIUS, King of Denmark, GERTRUDE the Queen, HAMLET,
POLONIUS, LAERTES and his sister OPHELIA, VOLTEMAND,
CORNELIUS, and Lords Attendant
CLAUDIUS
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious, and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife; nor have we herein barr'd
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our thanks.
Now follows, that you know, young Fortinbras,
Holding a weak supposal of our worth,
7

CLAUDIUS (CONT)
Or thinking by our late dear brother's death
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,
Colleagued with this dream of his advantage,
He hath not fail'd to pester us with message
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father, with all bands of law,
To our most valiant brother.
So much for him.
Now for ourself and for this time of meeting.
Thus much the business is: we have here writ
To Norway, uncle of young Fortinbras,
Who, impotent and bedrid, scarcely hears
Of this his nephew's purpose, to suppress
His further gait herein, in that the levies,
The lists, and full proportions are all made
Out of his subject; and we here dispatch
You, good Cornelius, and you, Voltemand,
For bearers of this greeting to old Norway,
Giving to you no further personal power
To business with the King, more than the scope
Of these dilated articles allow.
[Gives a paper
Farewell, and let your haste commend your duty.
CORNELIUS and VOLTEMAND
In that, and all things, will we show our duty.
CLAUDIUS
We doubt it nothing. Heartily farewell.
[Exeunt VOLTEMAND and CORNELIUS
And now, Laertes, what's the news with you?
You told us of some suit. What is't, Laertes?
You cannot speak of reason to the Dane
And lose your voice. What wouldst thou beg, Laertes,
That shall not be my offer, not thy asking?
The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.
What wouldst thou have, Laertes?
LAERTES
My dread lord,
Your leave and favour to return to France;
From whence though willingly I came to Denmark
To show my duty in your coronation,
Yet now I must confess, that duty done,
My thoughts and wishes bend again toward France
And bow them to your gracious leave and pardon.
8

CLAUDIUS
Have you your father's leave? What says Polonius?
POLONIUS
He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave
By laboursome petition, and at last
Upon his will I seal'd my hard consent.
I do beseech you give him leave to go.
CLAUDIUS
Take thy fair hour, Laertes. Time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will!
But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son-
HAMLET
[Aside] A little more than kin, and less than kind!
CLAUDIUS
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
HAMLET
Not so, my lord. I am too much i' th' sun.
GERTRUDE
Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know'st 'tis common. All that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
Ay, madam, it is common.
HAMLET
GERTRUDE
If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?
HAMLET
Seems, madam, Nay, it is. I know not 'seems.'
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
'That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show-
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
9

CLAUDIUS
'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father;
But you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd;
For what we know must be, and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died to-day,
'This must be so.' We pray you throw to earth
This unprevailing woe, and think of us
As of a father; for let the world take note
You are the most immediate to our throne,
And with no less nobility of love
Than that which dearest father bears his son
Do I impart toward you. For your intent
In going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire;
And we beseech you, bend you to remain
Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.
GERTRUDE
Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.
I pray thee stay with us, go not to Wittenberg.
HAMLET
I shall in all my best obey you, madam.
CLAUDIUS
Why, 'tis a loving and a fair reply.
Be as ourself in Denmark. Madam, come.
This gentle and unforc'd accord of Hamlet
Sits smiling to my heart; in grace whereof,
No jocund health that Denmark drinks to-day
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,
And the King's rouse the heaven shall bruit again,
Respeaking earthly thunder. Come away.
10

[Flourish. Exeunt all but HAMLET
HAMLET
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! Ah, fie! '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 God! a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourn'd longer) married with my 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 in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue!
[Enter HORATIO, MARCELLUS, and BERNARDO
Hail to your lordship!
HORATIO
HAMLET
I am glad to see you well.
Horatio! - or I do forget myself.
HORATIO
The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.
HAMLET
Sir, my good friend - I'll change that name with you.
And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?
Marcellus?
11

My good lord!
MARCELLUS
HAMLET
I am very glad to see you. [To BERNARDO]
Good even, sir. -
But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?
HORATIO
A truant disposition, good my lord.
HAMLET
I would not hear your enemy say so,
Nor shall you do my ear that violence
To make it truster of your own report
Against yourself. I know you are no truant.
But what is your affair in Elsinore?
We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.
HORATIO
My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
HAMLET
I prithee do not mock me, fellow student.
I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
HORATIO
Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.
HAMLET
Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak'd meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio!
My father- methinks I see my father.
O, where, my lord?
HORATIO
HAMLET
In my mind's eye, Horatio.
HORATIO
I saw him once. He was a goodly king.
HAMLET
He was a man, take him for all in all.
I shall not look upon his like again.
HORATIO
My lord, I think I saw him yesternight.
12

Saw? Who?
HAMLET
HORATIO
My lord, the King your father.
The King my father?
HAMLET
HORATIO
Season your admiration for a while
With an attent ear, till I may deliver
Upon the witness of these gentlemen,
This marvel to you.
HAMLET
For God's love let me hear!
HORATIO
Two nights together had these gentlemen
(Marcellus and Bernardo) on their watch
In the dead vast and middle of the night
Been thus encount'red. A figure like your father,
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pe,
Appears before them and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them. Thrice he walk'd
By their oppress'd and fear-surprised eyes,
Within his truncheon's length; whilst they distill'd
Almost to jelly with the act of fear,
Stand dumb and speak not to him. This to me
In dreadful secrecy impart they did,
And I with them the third night kept the watch;
Where, as they had deliver'd, both in time,
Form of the thing, each word made true and good,
The apparition comes. I knew your father.
These hands are not more like.
But where was this?
HAMLET
MARCELLUS
My lord, upon the platform where we watch'd.
Did you not speak to it?
HAMLET
HORATIO
My lord, I did;
But answer made it none. Yet once methought
It lifted up it head and did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak;
13

HORATIO (CONT)
But even then the morning cock crew loud,
And at the sound it shrunk in haste away
And vanish'd from our sight.
'Tis very strange.
HAMLET
HORATIO
As I do live, my honour'd lord, 'tis true;
And we did think it writ down in our duty
To let you know of it.
HAMLET
Indeed, indeed, sirs. But this troubles me.
Hold you the watch to-night?
We do, my lord.
Arm'd, say you?
Arm'd, my lord.
From top to toe?
MARCELLUS and BERNARDO
HAMLET
MARCELLUS and BERNARDO
HAMLET
My lord, from head to foot.
MARCELLUS and BERNARDO
HAMLET
Then saw you not his face?
HORATIO
O, yes, my lord! He wore his beaver up.
HAMLET
What, look'd he frowningly.
HORATIO
A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.
Pale or red?
Nay, very pale.
HAMLET
HORATIO
HAMLET
And fix'd his eyes upon you?
14

Most constantly.
I would I had been there.
HORATIO
HAMLET
HORATIO
It would have much amaz'd you.
HAMLET
Very like, very like. Stay'd it long?
HORATIO
While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred.
Longer, longer.
Not when I saw't.
MARCELLUS and BERNARDO
HORATIO
HAMLET
His beard was grizzled - no?
HORATIO
It was, as I have seen it in his life,
A sable silver'd.
HAMLET
I will watch to-night.
Perchance 'twill walk again.
I warr'nt it will.
HORATIO
HAMLET
If it assume my noble father's person,
I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape
And bid me hold my peace. I pray you all,
If you have hitherto conceal'd this sight,
Let it be tenable in your silence still;
And whatsoever else shall hap to-night,
Give it an understanding but no tongue.
I will requite your loves. So, fare you well.
Upon the platform, 'twixt eleven and twelve,
I'll visit you.
Our duty to your honour.
ALL
HAMLET
Your loves, as mine to you. Farewell.
15

[Exeunt all but HAMLET
HAMLET (CONT)
My father's spirit - in arms? All is not well.
I doubt some foul play. Would the night were come!
Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.
[Exit
I.iii.
[Elsinore. A room in the house of Polonius. Enter LAERTES
and OPHELIA
LAERTES
My necessaries are embark'd. Farewell.
And, sister, as the winds give benefit
And convoy is assistant, do not sleep,
But let me hear from you.
Do you doubt that?
OPHELIA
LAERTES
For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion, and a toy in blood;
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent- sweet, not lasting;
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.
No more but so?
OPHELIA
LAERTES
Think it no more.
For nature crescent does not grow alone
In thews and bulk; but as this temple waxes,
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal. Perhaps he loves you now,
And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch
The virtue of his will; but you must fear,
His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own;
For he himself is subject to his birth.
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself, for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state,
And therefore must his choice be circumscrib'd
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof he is the head. Then if he says he loves you,
It fits your wisdom so far to believe it
16

LAERTES (CONT)
As he in his particular act and place
May give his saying deed; which is no further
Than the main voice of Denmark goes withal.
Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmast'red importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough
If she unmask her beauty to the moon.
Virtue itself scopes not calumnious strokes.
The canker galls the infants of the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclos'd,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear.
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
OPHELIA
I shall th' effect of this good lesson keep
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.
O, fear me not!
[Enter POLONIUS
LAERTES
I stay too long. But here my father comes.
A double blessing is a double grace;
Occasion smiles upon a second leave.
POLONIUS
Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for.
There - my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar:
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware
17

POLONIUS (CONT)
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are most select and generous, chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all - to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!
LAERTES
Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord.
POLONIUS
The time invites you. Go, your servants tend.
LAERTES
Farewell, Ophelia, and remember well
What I have said to you.
OPHELIA
'Tis in my memory lock'd,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.
Farewell.
[Exit
LAERTES
POLONIUS
What is't, Ophelia, he hath said to you?
OPHELIA
So please you, something touching the Lord Hamlet.
POLONIUS
Marry, well bethought!
'Tis told me he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you, and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous.
If it be so - as so 'tis put on me,
And that in way of caution - I must tell you
You do not understand yourself so clearly
As it behooves my daughter and your honour.
18

POLONIUS (CONT)
What is between you? Give me up the truth.
OPHELIA
He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders
Of his affection to me.
POLONIUS
Affection? Pooh! You speak like a green girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.
Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?
OPHELIA
I do not know, my lord, what I should think,
POLONIUS
Marry, I will teach you! Think yourself a baby
That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay,
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly,
Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Running it thus) you'll tender me a fool.
OPHELIA
My lord, he hath importun'd me with love
In honourable fashion.
POLONIUS
Ay, fashion you may call it. Go to, go to!
OPHELIA
And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord,
With almost all the holy vows of heaven.
POLONIUS
Ay, springes to catch woodcocks! I do know,
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows. These blazes, daughter,
Giving more light than heat, extinct in both
Even in their promise, as it is a-making,
You must not take for fire. From this time
Be something scanter of your maiden presence.
Set your entreatments at a higher rate
Than a command to parley. For Lord Hamlet,
Believe so much in him, that he is young,
And with a larger tether may he walk
Than may be given you. In few, Ophelia,
Do not believe his vows; for they are brokers,
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits,
Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds,
The better to beguile. This is for all:
19

POLONIUS (CONT)
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Look to't, I charge you. Come your ways.
I shall obey, my lord.
[Exeunt
I.iv.
OPHELIA
[Elsinore. The platform before the castle. Enter HAMLET,
HORATIO, and MARCELLUS
HAMLET
The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.
HORATIO
It is a nipping and an eager air.
What hour now?
HAMLET
HORATIO
I think it lacks of twelve.
No, it is struck.
MARCELLUS
HORATIO
Indeed? I heard it not. It then draws near the season
Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk.
A flourish of trumpets, and two pieces go off.
What does this mean, my lord?
HAMLET
The King doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swagg'ring upspring reels,
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.
Is it a custom?
HORATIO
HAMLET
Ay, marry, is't;
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour'd in the breach than the observance.
20

HAMLET (CONT)
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduc'd and tax'd of other nations;
They clip us drunkards and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though perform'd at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So oft it chances in particular men
That, for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth - wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin -
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens
The form of plausive manners, that these men
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature's livery, or fortune's star,
Their virtues else- be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo-
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of e'il
Doth all the noble substance often dout To his own
scandal.
[Enter GHOST
Look, my lord, it comes!
HORATIO
HAMLET
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com'st 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 canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again. What may this mean
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel,
Revisits 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?
Ghost beckons Hamlet.
21

HORATIO
It beckons you to go away with it,
As if it some impartment did desire
To you alone.
MARCELLUS
Look with what courteous action
It waves you to a more removed ground.
But do not go with it!
No, by no means!
HORATIO
HAMLET
It will not speak. Then will I follow it.
Do not, my lord!
HORATIO
HAMLET
Why, what should be the fear?
I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?
It waves me forth again. I'll follow it.
HORATIO
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other, horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it.
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fadoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.
It waves me still.
Go on. I'll follow thee.
HAMLET
You shall not go, my lord.
Hold off your hands!
MARCELLUS
HAMLET
HORATIO
Be rul'd. You shall not go.
22

HAMLET
My fate cries out
And makes each petty artire in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
[GHOST beckons
Still am I call'd. Unhand me, gentlemen.
By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me! -
I say, away! - Go on. I'll follow thee.
[Exeunt GHOST and HAMLET
HORATIO
He waxes desperate with imagination.
MARCELLUS
Let's follow. 'Tis not fit thus to obey him.
HORATIO
Have after. To what issue wail this come?
MARCELLUS
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Heaven will direct it.
Nay, let's follow him.
[Exeunt
I.v.
HORATIO
MARCELLUS
[Elsinore. The castle. Another part of the fortifications.
Enter GHOST and HAMLET
HAMLET
Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak! I'll go no further.
Mark me.
I will.
GHOST
HAMLET
GHOST
My hour is almost come,
When I to sulph'rous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.
23

Alas, poor ghost!
HAMLET
GHOST
Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
HAMLET
Speak. I am bound to hear.
GHOST
So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.
What?
HAMLET
GHOST
I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg'd away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love-
O God!
HAMLET
GHOST
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther.
Murther?
HAMLET
GHOST
Murther most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.
HAMLET
Haste me to know't, that I, with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge.
24

GHOST
I find thee apt;
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear.
'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abus'd. But know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.
O my prophetic soul!
My uncle?
HAMLET
GHOST
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts -
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
So to seduce! - won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.
O Hamlet, what a falling - off was there,
From me, whose love was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
I made to her in marriage, and to decline
Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor
To those of mine!
But virtue, as it never will be mov'd,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed
And prey on garbage.
But soft! methinks I scent the morning air.
Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distilment; whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilverr it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,
And with a sudden vigour it doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine;
And a most instant tetter bark'd about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust
All my smooth body.
Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand
Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch'd;
25

GHOST (CONT)
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhous'led, disappointed, unanel'd,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
HAMLET
O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!
GHOST
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once.
The glowworm shows the matin to be near
And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.
[Exit
HAMLET
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? Hold, hold, my heart!
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables! Meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
[Writes
So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word:
It is 'Adieu, adieu! Remember me.'
I have sworn't.
HORATIO
[Within] My lord, my lord!
26

[Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS
Lord Hamlet!
Heaven secure him!
So be it!
Illo, ho, ho, my lord!
MARCELLUS
HORATIO
HAMLET
MARCELLUS
HAMLET
Hillo, ho, ho, boy! Come, bird, come.
How is't, my noble lord?
What news, my lord?
O, wonderful!
Good my lord, tell it.
No, you will reveal it.
MARCELLUS
HORATIO
MARCELLUS
HORATIO
HAMLET
Not I, my lord, by heaven!
Nor I, my lord.
HORATIO
MARCELLUS
HAMLET
How say you then? Would heart of man once think it?
But you'll be secret?
Both. Ay, by heaven, my lord.
HAMLET
There's neer a villain dwelling in all Denmark
But he's an arrant knave.
HORATIO
There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave
To tell us this.
27

HAMLET
Why, right! You are in the right!
And so, without more circumstance at all,
I hold it fit that we shake hands and part;
You, as your business and desires shall point you,
For every man hath business and desire,
Such as it is; and for my own poor part,
Look you, I'll go pray.
HORATIO
These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.
HAMLET
I am sorry they offend you, heartily;
Yes, faith, heartily.
HORATIO
There's no offence, my lord.
HAMLET
Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio,
And much offence too. Touching this vision here,
It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.
For your desire to know what is between us,
O'ermaster't as you may. And now, good friends,
As you are friends, scholars, and soldiers,
Give me one poor request.
HORATIO
What is't, my lord? We will.
HAMLET
Never make known what you have seen tonight.
My lord, we will not.
Nay, but swear't.
In faith,
My lord, not I.
HORATIO and MARCELLUS
HAMLET
Nor I, my lord - in faith.
Upon my sword.
HORATIO
MARCELLUS
HAMLET
MARCELLUS
We have sworn, my lord, already.
28

HAMLET
Indeed, upon my sword, indeed.
[GHOST cries under the stage
Swear.
GHOST
HAMLET
Aha boy, say'st thou so? Art thou there, truepenny?
Come on! You hear this fellow in the cellarage.
Consent to swear.
Propose the oath, my lord.
HORATIO
HAMLET
Never to speak of this that you have seen.
Swear by my sword.
[Beneath] Swear.
GHOST
HAMLET
Hic et ubique? Then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword.
Never to speak of this that you have heard:
Swear by my sword.
GHOST
[Beneath] Swear by his sword.
HAMLET
Well said, old mole! Canst work i' th' earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.
HORATIO
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
HAMLET
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
But come!
Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself
(As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on),
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
With arms encumb'red thus, or this head-shake,
29

HAMLET (CONT)
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As Well, well, we know, or We could, an if we would,
Or If we list to speak, or There be, an if they might,
Or such ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me - this is not to do,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you,
Swear.
[Beneath] Swear.
[They swear
GHOST
HAMLET
Rest, rest, perturbèd spirit! - So, gentlemen,
With all my love I do commend me to you;
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do t' express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together;
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let's go together.
[Exeunt
30

II.i.
Act the Second
[Elsinore. A room in the house of Polonius. Enter
POLONIUS and REYNALDO
POLONIUS
Give him this money and these notes, Reynaldo.
I will, my lord.
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
You shall do marvellous wisely, good Reynaldo,
Before you visit him, to make inquire
Of his behaviour.
My lord, I did intend it.
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
Marry, well said, very well said. Look you, sir,
Enquire me first what Danskers are in Paris;
And how, and who, what means, and where they keep,
What company, at what expense; and finding
By this encompassment and drift of question
That they do know my son, come you more nearer
Than your particular demands will touch it.
Take you, as 'twere, some distant knowledge of him;
As thus, 'I know his father and his friends,
And in part him.' Do you mark this, Reynaldo?
Ay, very well, my lord.
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
'And in part him, but,' you may say, 'not well.
But if't be he I mean, he's very wild
Addicted so and so'; and there put on him
What forgeries you please; marry, none so rank
As may dishonour him- take heed of that;
But, sir, such wanton, wild, and usual slips
As are companions noted and most known
To youth and liberty.
As gaming, my lord.
REYNALDO
31

POLONIUS
Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing, quarrelling,
Drabbing. You may go so far.
REYNALDO
My lord, that would dishonour him.
POLONIUS
Faith, no, as you may season it in the charge.
You must not put another scandal on him,
That he is open to incontinency:
That's not my meaning. But breathe his faults so quaintly
That they may seem the taints of liberty,
The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind,
A savageness in unreclaimed blood,
Of general assault.
But, my good lord -
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
Wherefore should you do this?
Ay, my lord,
I would know that.
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
Marry, sir, here's my drift,
And I believe it is a fetch of warrant.
You laying these slight sullies on my son
As 'twere a thing a little soil'd i' th' working,
Mark you,
Your party in converse, him you would sound,
Having ever seen in the prenominate crimes
The youth you breathe of guilty, be assur'd
He closes with you in this consequence:
Good sir or so, or friend, or gentleman -
According to the phrase or the addition
Of man and country -
Very good, my lord.
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
And then, sir, does 'a this - 'a does - What was I about
to say? By the mass, I was about to say something! Where
did I leave?
32

REYNALDO
At closes in the consequence, at friend or so, and
gentleman.
POLONIUS
At closes in the consequence - Ay, marry!
He closes thus: 'I know the gentleman.
I saw him yesterday, or t'other day,
Or then, or then, with such or such; and, as you say,
There was 'a gaming; there o'ertook in's rouse;
There falling out at tennis'; or perchance,
'I saw him enter such a house of sale,'
Videlicet, a brothel, or so forth.
See you now -
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.
So, by my former lecture and advice,
Shall you my son. You have me, have you not
My lord, I have.
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
God b' wi' ye, fare ye well!
Good my lord!
[Going
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
Observe his inclination in yourself.
I shall, my lord.
And let him ply his music.
Well, my lord.
Farewell!
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
REYNALDO
POLONIUS
[Exit REYNALDO. Enter OPHELIA
How now, Ophelia? What's the matter?
OPHELIA
O my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted!
33

POLONIUS
With what, i' th' name of God?
OPHELIA
My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd,
No hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd,
Ungart'red, and down-gyvèd to his ankle;
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors - he comes before me.
Mad for thy love?
My lord, I do not know,
But truly I do fear it.
What said he?
POLONIUS
OPHELIA
POLONIUS
OPHELIA
He took me by the wrist and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face
As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so.
At last, a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being. That done, he lets me go,
And with his head over his shoulder turn'd
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes,
For out o' doors he went without their help
And to the last bended their light on me.
POLONIUS
Come, go with me. I will go seek the King.
This is the very ecstasy of love,
Whose violent property fordoes itself
And leads the will to desperate undertakings
As oft as any passion under heaven
That does afflict our natures. I am sorry.
What, have you given him any hard words of late?
OPHELIA
No, my good lord; but, as you did command,
I did repel his letters and denied
34

His access to me.
OPHELIA (CONT)
POLONIUS
That hath made him mad.
I am sorry that with better heed and judgment
I had not quoted him. I fear'd he did but trifle
And meant to wrack thee; but beshrew my jealousy!
By heaven, it is as proper to our age
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions
As it is common for the younger sort
To lack discretion. Come, go we to the King.
This must be known; which, being kept close, might move
More grief to hide than hate to utter love.
Come.
[Exeunt
II.ii.
[Elsinore. A room in the castle. Flourish. Enter CLAUDIUS
and GERTRUDE, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, and others
CLAUDIUS
Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Moreover that we much did long to see you,
The need we have to use you did provoke
Our hasty sending. Something have you heard
Of Hamlet's transformation. So I call it,
Sith nor th' exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was. What it should be,
More than his father's death, that thus hath put him
So much from th' understanding of himself,
I cannot dream of. I entreat you both
That, being of so young clays brought up with him,
And since so neighbour'd to his youth and haviour,
That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court
Some little time; so by your companies
To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather
So much as from occasion you may glean,
Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus
That, open'd, lies within our remedy.
GERTRUDE
Good gentlemen, he hath much talk'd of you,
And sure I am two men there are not living
To whom he more adheres. If it will please you
To show us so much gentry and good will
As to expend your time with us awhile
For the supply and profit of our hope,
Your visitation shall receive such thanks
35

As fits a king's remembrance.
GERTRUDE (CONT)
ROSENCRANTZ
Both your Majesties
Might, by the sovereign power you have of us,
Put your dread pleasures more into command
Than to entreaty.
GUILDENSTERN
But we both obey,
And here give up ourselves, in the full bent,
To lay our service freely at your feet,
To be commanded.
CLAUDIUS
Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern.
GERTRUDE
Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz.
And I beseech you instantly to visit
My too much changed son. - Go, some of you,
And bring these gentlemen where Hamlet is.
GUILDENSTERN
Heavens make our presence and our practices
Pleasant and helpful to him!
Ay, amen!
GERTRUDE
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN, with some Attendants.
Enter POLONIUS
POLONIUS
Th' ambassadors from Norway, my good lord,
Are joyfully return'd.
CLAUDIUS
Thou still hast been the father of good news.
POLONIUS
Have I, my lord? Assure you, my good liege,
I hold my duty as I hold my soul,
Both to my God and to my gracious king;
And I do think - or else this brain of mine
Hunts not the trail of policy so sure
As it hath us'd to do - that I have found
The very cause of Hamlet's lunacy.
CLAUDIUS
O, speak of that! That do I long to hear.
36

POLONIUS
Give first admittance to th' ambassadors.
My news shall be the fruit to that great feast.
CLAUDIUS
Thyself do grace to them, and bring them in.
[Exit POLONIUS
He tells me, my dear Gertrude, he hath found
The head and source of all your son's distemper.
GERTRUDE
I doubt it is no other but the main,
His father's death and our o'erhasty marriage.
Well, we shall sift him.
CLAUDIUS
[Enter POLONIUS, VOLTEMAND, and CORNELIUS
Welcome, my good friends.
Say, Voltemand, what from our brother Norway?
VOLTEMAND
Most fair return of greetings and desires.
Upon our first, he sent out to suppress
His nephew's levies; which to him appear'd
To be a preparation 'gainst the Polack,
But better look'd into, he truly found
It was against your Highness; whereat griev'd,
That so his sickness, age, and impotence
Was falsely borne in hand, sends out arrests
On Fortinbras; which he, in brief, obeys,
Receives rebuke from Norway, and, in fine,
Makes vow before his uncle never more
To give th' assay of arms against your Majesty.
Whereon old Norway, overcome with joy,
Gives him three thousand crowns in annual fee
And his commission to employ those soldiers,
So levied as before, against the Polack;
With an entreaty, herein further shown,
[Gives a paper
That it might please you to give quiet pass
Through your dominions for this enterprise,
On such regards of safety and allowance
As therein are set down.
CLAUDIUS
It likes us well;
And at our more consider'd time we'll read,
Answer, and think upon this business.
37

CLAUDIUS (CONT)
Meantime we thank you for your well-took labour.
Go to your rest; at night we'll feast together.
Most welcome home!
[Exeunt VOLTEMAND and CORNELIUS
POLONIUS
This business is well ended.
My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night is night, and time is time.
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.
GERTRUDE
More matter, with less art.
POLONIUS
Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity;
And pity 'tis 'tis true. A foolish figure!
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him then. And now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect-
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause.
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.
Perpend.
I have a daughter (have while she is mine),
Who in her duty and obedience, mark,
Hath given me this. Now gather, and surmise.
[Reads the letter
To the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified
Ophelia - That's an ill phrase, a vile phrase; beautified
is a vile phrase.But you shall hear. Thus:
[Reads
In her excellent white bosom, these, &c
GERTRUDE
Came this from Hamlet to her?
POLONIUS
Good madam, stay awhile. I will be faithful.
38

[Reads
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have not art
to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, O most
best, believe it. Adieu. Thine evermore, most dear lady,
whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet.
This, in obedience, hath my daughter shown me;
And more above, hath his solicitings,
As they fell out by time, by means, and place,
All given to mine ear.
But how hath she
Receiv'd his love?
What do you think of me?
CLAUDIUS
POLONIUS
CLAUDIUS
As of a man faithful and honourable.
POLONIUS
I would fain prove so. But what might you think,
When I had seen this hot love on the wing
(As I perceiv'd it, I must tell you that,
Before my daughter told me), what might you,
Or my dear Majesty your queen here, think,
If I had play'd the desk or table book,
Or given my heart a winking, mute and dumb,
Or look'd upon this love with idle sight?
What might you think? No, I went round to work
And my young mistress thus I did bespeak:
'Lord Hamlet is a prince, out of thy star.
This must not be.' And then I prescripts gave her,
That she should lock herself from his resort,
Admit no messengers, receive no tokens.
Which done, she took the fruits of my advice,
And he, repulsed, a short tale to make,
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
Into the madness wherein now he raves,
And all we mourn for.
Do you think 'tis this?
CLAUDIUS
39

It may be, very like.
GERTRUDE
POLONIUS
Hath there been such a time - I would fain know that -
That I have positively said 'Tis so,
When it prov'd otherwise.?
Not that I know.
CLAUDIUS
POLONIUS
[Points to his head and shoulder] Take this from this, if
this be otherwise.
If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the centre.
How may we try it further?
CLAUDIUS
POLONIUS
You know sometimes he walks four hours together
Here in the lobby.
So he does indeed.
GERTRUDE
POLONIUS
At such a time I'll loose my daughter to him.
Be you and I behind an arras then.
Mark the encounter. If he love her not,
And he not from his reason fall'n thereon
Let me be no assistant for a state,
But keep a farm and carters.
We will try it.
CLAUDIUS
[Enter HAMLET, reading on a book
GERTRUDE
But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.
POLONIUS
Away, I do beseech you, both away
I'll board him presently. O, give me leave.
[Exeunt CLAUDIUS, GERTRUDE and Attendants
How does my good Lord Hamlet?
Well, God-a-mercy.
HAMLET
40

Do you know me, my lord?
POLONIUS
HAMLET
Excellent well. You are a fishmonger.
Not I, my lord.
POLONIUS
HAMLET
Then I would you were so honest a man.
Honest, my lord?
POLONIUS
HAMLET
Ay, sir. To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one
man pick'd out of ten thousand.
That's very true, my lord.
POLONIUS
HAMLET
For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god
kissing carrion - Have you a daughter?
I have, my lord.
POLONIUS
HAMLET
Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing,
but not as your daughter may conceive. Friend, look to't.
POLONIUS
[Aside] How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter.
Yet he knew me not at first. He said I was a
fishmonger. He is far gone, far gone! And truly in my
youth I suff'red much extremity for love - very near
this. I'll speak to him again. - What do you read, my
lord?
Words, words, words.
HAMLET
POLONIUS
What is the matter, my lord?
Between who?
HAMLET
POLONIUS
I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
41

HAMLET
Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says here that old
men have grey beards; that their faces are wrinkled;
their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum; and
that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with
most weak hams. All which, sir, though I most powerfully
and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have
it thus set down; for you yourself, sir, should be old as
I am if, like a crab, you could go backward.
POLONIUS
[Aside] Though this be madness, yet there is a method
in't. - Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
Into my grave?
HAMLET
POLONIUS
Indeed, that is out o' th' air. [Aside] How pregnant
sometimes his replies are! A happiness that often madness
hits on, which reason and sanity could not so
prosperously be delivered of. I will leave him and
suddenly contrive the means of meeting between him and my
daughter. - My honourable lord, I will most humbly take
my leave of you.
HAMLET
You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more
willingly part withal - except my life, except my life,
except my life.
[Enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
Fare you well, my lord.
These tedious old fools!
POLONIUS
HAMLET
POLONIUS
You go to seek the Lord Hamlet. There he is.
ROSENCRANTZ
[To POLONIUS] God save you, sir!
[Exit POLONIUS
My honour'd lord!
My most dear lord!
GUILDENSTERN
ROSENCRANTZ
42

HAMLET
My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern?
Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do ye both?
ROSENCRANTZ
As the indifferent children of the earth.
GUILDENSTERN
Happy in that we are not over-happy.
On Fortune's cap we are not the very button.
HAMLET
Nor the soles of her shoe?
Neither, my lord.
ROSENCRANTZ
HAMLET
Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her
favours?
Faith, her privates we.
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
In the secret parts of Fortune? O! Most true! She is a
strumpet. What news?
ROSENCRANTZ
None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.
HAMLET
Then is doomsday near! But your news is not true. Let me
question more in particular. What have you, my good
friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends
you to prison hither?
Prison, my lord?
Denmark's a prison.
Then is the world one.
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
ROSENCRANTZ
HAMLET
A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards,
and dungeons, Denmark being one o' th' worst.
We think not so, my lord.
ROSENCRANTZ
43

HAMLET
Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either
good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a
prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
Why, then your ambition makes it one. 'Tis too narrow for
your mind.
HAMLET
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself
a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad
dreams.
GUILDENSTERN
Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance
of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
HAMLET
A dream itself is but a shadow.
ROSENCRANTZ
Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality
that it is but a shadow's shadow.
HAMLET
Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and
outstretch'd heroes the beggars' shadows. Shall we to th'
court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason.
We'll wait upon you.
ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
No such matter! I will not sort you with the rest of my
servants; for, to speak to you like an honest man, I am
most dreadfully attended. But in the beaten way of
friendship, what make you at Elsinore?
ROSENCRANTZ
To visit you, my lord; no other occasion.
HAMLET
Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I thank
you; and sure, dear friends, my thanks are too dear a
halfpenny. Were you not sent for? Is it your own
inclining? Is it a free visitation? Come, deal justly
with me. Come, come! Nay, speak.
What should we say, my lord?
GUILDENSTERN
44

HAMLET
Why, anything - but to th' purpose. You were sent for;
and there is a kind of confession in your looks, which
your modesties have not craft enough to colour. I know
the good King and Queen have sent for you.
To what end, my lord?
ROSENCRANTZ
HAMLET
That you must teach me. But let me conjure you by the
rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of our youth,
by the obligation of our ever-preserved love, and by what
more dear a better proposer could charge you withal, be
even and direct with me, whether you were sent for or no.
ROSENCRANTZ
[Aside to GUILDENSTERN] What say you?
HAMLET
[Aside] Nay then, I have an eye of you. - If you love me,
hold not off.
My lord, we were sent for.
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
I will tell you why. So shall my anticipation prevent
your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and Queen
moult no feather. I have of late - but wherefore I know
not - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises;
and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that
this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile
promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look
you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical
roof fretted with golden fire - why, it appeareth no
other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation
of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving how
express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In
apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the
paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this
quintessence of dust? Man delights not me - no, nor woman
neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
ROSENCRANTZ
My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.
HAMLET
Why did you laugh then, when I said Man delights not me?
45

ROSENCRANTZ
To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten
entertainment the players shall receive from you. We
coted them on the way, and hither are they coming to
offer you service.
HAMLET
He that plays the king shall be welcome - His Majesty
shall have tribute of me; the adventurous knight shall
use his foil and target; the lover shall not sigh gratis;
the humorous man shall end his part in peace; the clown
shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickle o' th'
sere; and the lady shall say her mind freely, or the
blank verse shall halt for’t. What players are they?
ROSENCRANTZ
Even those you were wont to take such delight in, the
tragedians of the city.
HAMLET
How chances it they travel? Their residence, both in
reputation and profit, was better both ways.
ROSENCRANTZ
I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late
innovation.
HAMLET
Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in
the city? Are they so follow'd?
No indeed are they not.
ROSENCRANTZ
HAMLET
How comes it? Do they grow rusty?
ROSENCRANTZ
Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace; but there
is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry
out on the top of question and are most tyrannically
clapp'd for’t. These are now the fashion, and so berattle
the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing
rapiers are afraid of goosequills and dare scarce come
thither.
HAMLET
What, are they children? Who maintains 'em? How are they
escoted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they
can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should
grow themselves to common players (as it is most like, if
46

HAMLET (CONT)
their means are no better), their writers do them wrong
to make them exclaim against their own succession.
ROSENCRANTZ
Faith, there has been much to do on both sides; and the
nation holds it no sin to tarre them to controversy.
There was, for a while, no money bid for argument unless
the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.
Is't possible?
HAMLET
GUILDENSTERN
O, there has been much throwing about of brains.
HAMLET
Do the boys carry it away?
ROSENCRANTZ
Ay, that they do, my lord - Hercules and his load too.
HAMLET
It is not very strange; for my uncle is King of Denmark,
and those that would make mows at him while my father
lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece
for his picture in little. 'Sblood, there is something in
this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.
[Flourish for the Players
There are the players.
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
Gentlemen, you are welcome to Elsinore. Your hands, come!
Th'appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony. Let
me comply with you in this garb, lest my extent to the
players (which I tell you must show fairly outwards)
should more appear like entertainment than yours. You are
welcome. But my uncle-father and aunt-mother are
deceiv'd.
In what, my dear lord?
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly
I know a hawk from a handsaw.
[Enter POLONIUS
47

POLONIUS
Well be with you, gentlemen!
HAMLET
Hark you, Guildenstern - and you too - at each ear a
hearer! That great baby you see there is not yet out of
his swaddling clouts.
ROSENCRANTZ
Happily he's the second time come to them; for they say
an old man is twice a child.
HAMLET
I will prophesy he comes to tell me of the players. Mark
it. - You say right, sir; a Monday morning; ‘twas so
indeed.
POLONIUS
My lord, I have news to tell you.
HAMLET
My lord, I have news to tell you. When Roscius was an
actor in Rome -
POLONIUS
The actors are come hither, my lord.
Buzz, buzz!
Upon my honour -
HAMLET
POLONIUS
HAMLET
Then came each actor on his ass -
POLONIUS
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy,
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical,tragical-comical-historical-pastoral;
scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be
too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and
the liberty, these are the only men.
HAMLET
O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!
POLONIUS
What treasure had he, my lord?
48

Why,
HAMLET
One fair daughter, and no more,
The which he loved passing well.
POLONIUS
[Aside] Still on my daughter.
HAMLET
Am I not i' th' right, old Jephthah?
POLONIUS
If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter that
I love passing well.
Nay, that follows not.
HAMLET
POLONIUS
What follows then, my lord?
Why,
As by lot, God wot,
And then, you know,
HAMLET
It came to pass, as most like it was.
The first row of the pious chanson will show you more;
for look where my abridgment comes.
[Enter four or five PLAYERS
You are welcome, masters; welcome, all. - I am glad to
see thee well. - Welcome, good friends. - O, my old
friend? Why, thy face is valanc'd since I saw thee last.
Com'st' 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 crack'd within the ring. - Masters, you are
all welcome. We'll e'en to't 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.
What speech, my good lord?
FIRST PLAYER
HAMLET
I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never
acted; or if it was, not above once; for the play, I
49

HAMLET (CONT)
remember, pleas'd not the million, 'twas caviary to the
general; but it was (as I receiv'd 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 indict
the author of affectation; but call'd it an honest
method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more
handsome than fine. One speech in't I chiefly lov'd.
'Twas Aeneas' 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 th' Hyrcanian beast -
'Tis not so; it begins with Pyrrhus:
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smear'd
With heraldry more dismal. Head to foot
Now is be total gules, horridly trick'd
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Bak'd and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and a damned light
To their lord's murther. Roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o'ersized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks.
So, proceed you.
POLONIUS
‘Fore God, my lord, well spoken, with good accent and
good discretion.
FIRST PLAYER
Anon he finds him,
Striking too short at Greeks. His antique sword,
Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls,
Repugnant to command. Unequal match'd,
Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide;
But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword
Th' unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium,
Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top
Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash
Takes prisoner Pyrrhus' ear. For lo! his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverend Priam, seem'd i' th' air to stick.
50

FIRST PLAYER (CONT)
So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,
And, like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.
But, as we often see, against some storm,
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death - anon the dreadful thunder
Doth rend the region; so, after Pyrrhus' pause,
Aroused vengeance sets him new awork;
And never did the Cyclops' hammers fall
On Mars's armour, forg'd for proof eterne,
With less remorse than Pyrrhus' bleeding sword
Now falls on Priam.
Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods,
In general synod take away her power;
Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends!
This is too long.
POLONIUS
HAMLET
It shall to the barber's, with your beard. - Prithee say
on. He's for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps. Say
on; come to Hecuba.
FIRST PLAYER
But who, O who, had seen the moblèd queen -
The moblèd queen?
HAMLET
POLONIUS
That's good! Moblèd queen is good.
FIRST PLAYER
Run barefoot up and down, threat'ning the flames
With bisson rheum; a clout upon that head
Where late the diadem stood, and for a robe,
About her lank and all o'erteemed loins,
A blanket, in the alarm of fear caught up-
Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep'd
'Gainst Fortune's state would treason have pronounc'd.
But if the gods themselves did see her then,
When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport
In Mincing with his sword her husband's limbs,
The instant burst of clamour that she made
(Unless things mortal move them not at all)
Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven
51

And passion in the gods.
FIRST PLAYER (CONT)
POLONIUS
Look, whe'r he has not turn'd his colour, and has tears
in's eyes. Prithee no more!
HAMLET
'Tis well. I'll have thee speak out the rest of this
soon. - Good my lord, will you see the players well
bestow'd? Do you hear? Let them be well us'd; for they
are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After
your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their
ill report while you live.
POLONIUS
My lord, I will use them according to their desert.
HAMLET
God's bodykins, man, much better! Use every man after his
desert, and who should scape whipping? Use them after
your own honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the
more merit is in your bounty. Take them in.
Come, sirs.
POLONIUS
HAMLET
Follow him, friends. We'll hear a play to-morrow.
[Exeunt POLONIUS and Players except the FIRST
Dost thou hear me, old friend? Can you play The Murder of
Gonzago?
Ay, my lord.
FIRST PLAYER
HAMLET
We'll ha't tomorrow night. You could, for a need, study a
speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set
down and insert in't, could you not?
Ay, my lord.
FIRST PLAYER
HAMLET
Very well. Follow that lord - and look you mock him not.
[Exit FIRST PLAYER
My good friends, I'll leave you till night. You are
welcome to Elsinore.
52

Good my lord!
Ay, so, God b' wi' ye!
ROSENCRANTZ
HAMLET
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
Now I am alone.
O 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 own conceit
That, from her working, all his visage wann'd,
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 damn'd 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 th' nose? Gives me the lie i' th' throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this, ha?
'Swounds, I should take it! for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal. Bloody bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must (like a whore) unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion!
Fie upon't! Foh! About, my brain! Hum, I have heard
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
53

HAMLET (CONT)
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd 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 a devil; and the devil hath power
T' 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!
[Exit
54

III.i.
Act the Third
[Elsinore. A room in the castle. Enter CLAUDIUS,
GERTRUDE, POLONIUS, OPHELIA, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN,
and Lords
CLAUDIUS
And can you by no drift of circumstance
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?
ROSENCRANTZ
He does confess he feels himself distracted,
But from what cause he will by no means speak.
GUILDENSTERN
Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,
But with a crafty madness keeps aloof
When we would bring him on to some confession
Of his true state.
Did he receive you well?
Most like a gentleman.
GERTRUDE
ROSENCRANTZ
GUILDENSTERN
But with much forcing of his disposition.
ROSENCRANTZ
Niggard of question, but of our demands
Most free in his reply.
Did you assay him
To any pastime?
GERTRUDE
ROSENCRANTZ
Madam, it so fell out that certain players
We o'erraught on the way. Of these we told him,
And there did seem in him a kind of joy
To hear of it. They are here about the court,
And, as I think, they have already order
This night to play before him.
55

POLONIUS
'Tis most true;
And he beseech'd me to entreat Your Majesties
To hear and see the matter.
CLAUDIUS
With all my heart, and it doth much content me
To hear him so inclin'd.
Good gentlemen, give him a further edge
And drive his purpose on to these delights.
We shall, my lord.
ROSENCRANTZ
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
CLAUDIUS
Sweet Gertrude, leave us too;
For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither,
That he, as 'twere by accident, may here
Affront Ophelia.
Her father and myself (lawful espials)
Will so bestow ourselves that, seeing unseen,
We may of their encounter frankly judge
And gather by him, as he is behav'd,
If't be th' affliction of his love, or no,
That thus he suffers for.
GERTRUDE
I shall obey you;
And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlet's wildness. So shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his wonted way again,
To both your honours.
Madam, I wish it may.
[Exit GERTRUDE
OPHELIA
POLONIUS
Ophelia, walk you here. - Gracious, so please you,
We will bestow ourselves. –
[To OPHELIA] Read on this book,
That show of such an exercise may colour
Your loneliness. - We are oft to blame in this,
'Tis too much prov'd, that with devotion's visage
And pious action we do sugar o'er
The Devil himself.
56

CLAUDIUS
[Aside] O, 'tis too true!
How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
O heavy burden!
POLONIUS
I hear him coming. Let's withdraw, my lord.
[Exeunt CLAUDIUS and POLONIUS. Enter HAMLET
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 heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. 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,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despisèd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death -
The undiscover'd 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 awry
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! - Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins rememb'red.
57

OPHELIA
Good my lord,
How does your honour for this many a day?
HAMLET
I humbly thank you; well, well, well.
OPHELIA
My lord, I have remembrances of yours
That I have longed long to re-deliver.
I pray you, now receive them.
No, not I!
I never gave you aught.
HAMLET
OPHELIA
My honour'd lord, you know right well you did,
And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd
As made the things more rich. Their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.
Ha, ha! Are you honest?
My lord?
Are you fair?
What means your lordship?
HAMLET
OPHELIA
HAMLET
OPHELIA
HAMLET
That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit
no discourse to your beauty.
OPHELIA
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with
honesty?
HAMLET
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
sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I
did love you once.
58

OPHELIA
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET
You should not have believ'd me; for virtue cannot so
inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I
loved you not.
I was the more deceived.
OPHELIA
HAMLET
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 earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all;
believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where's
your father?
At home, my lord.
OPHELIA
HAMLET
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool
nowhere but in's own house. Farewell.
OPHELIA
O, help him, you sweet heavens!
HAMLET
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. Go,
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.
OPHELIA
O heavenly powers, restore him!
HAMLET
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; you nickname God's
creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to,
I'll no more on't! It hath made me mad. I say, we will
have no moe marriages. Those that are married already –
59

HAMLET (CONT)
all but one - shall live; the rest shall keep as they
are. To a nunnery, go.
[Exit
OPHELIA
O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword,
Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th' observ'd of all observers - quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
[Enter CLAUDIUS and POLONIUS
CLAUDIUS
Love? his affections do not that way tend;
Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,
Was not like madness. There's something in his soul
O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger; which for to prevent,
I have in quick determination
Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England
For the demand of our neglected tribute.
Haply the seas, and countries different,
With variable objects, shall expel
This something-settled matter in his heart,
Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus
From fashion of himself. What think you on't?
POLONIUS
It shall do well. But yet do I believe
The origin and commencement of his grief
Sprung from neglected love. - How now, Ophelia?
You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said.
We heard it all. - My lord, do as you please;
But if you hold it fit, after the play
Let his queen mother all alone entreat him
To show his grief. Let her be round with him;
And I'll be plac'd so please you, in the ear
Of all their conference. If she find him not,
To England send him; or confine him where
Your wisdom best shall think.
60

CLAUDIUS
It shall be so.
Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.
[Exeunt
III.ii.
[Elsinore. A hall in the castle. Enter HAMLET and three
of the Players
HAMLET
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you,
trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of
our players do, I had as lieve 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 cars of the
groundlings, who (for the most part) are capable of
nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would
have such a fellow whipp'd for o'erdoing Termagant. It
out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.
I warrant your honour.
PLAYER
HAMLET
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'erstep
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 'twere, the mirror up to
nature; to show 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 the 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.
61

PLAYER
I hope we have reform'd that indifferently with us, sir.
HAMLET
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 villainous and shows a most pitiful
ambition in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.
[Exeunt PLAYERS. Enter POLONIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and
GUILDENSTERN
How now, my lord? Will the King hear this piece of work?
POLONIUS
And the Queen too, and that presently.
HAMLET
Bid the players make haste, [Exit POLONIUS] Will you two
help to hasten them?
We will, my lord.
[Exeunt the two
What, ho, Horatio!
[Enter HORATIO
ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
HORATIO
Here, sweet lord, at your service.
HAMLET
Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man
As e'er my conversation cop'd withal.
O, my dear lord!
HORATIO
HAMLET
Nay, do not think I flatter;
For what advancement may I hope from thee,
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be
flatter'd?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
62

HAMLET (CONT)
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath scald thee for herself. For thou hast been
As one, in suff'ring all, that suffers nothing;
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. Something too much of this I
There is a play to-night before the King.
One scene of it comes near the circumstance,
Which I have told thee, of my father's death.
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan's stithy. Give him heedful note;
For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,
And after we will both our judgments join
In censure of his seeming.
HORATIO
Well, my lord.
If he steal aught the whilst this play is playing,
And scape detecting, I will pay the theft.
[Sound a flourish. Enter Trumpets and Kettledrums. Danish
march. Enter CLAUDIUS, GERTRUDE, POLONIUS, OPHELIA,
ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, and other Lords attendant,
with the Guard carrying torches
HAMLET
They are coming to the play. I must be idle.
Get you a place.
CLAUDIUS
How fares our cousin Hamlet?
HAMLET
Excellent, i' faith; of the chameleon's dish. I eat the
air, promise-cramm'd. You cannot feed capons so.
CLAUDIUS
I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are
not mine.
63

HAMLET
No, nor mine now. [To POLONIUS] My lord, you play'd once
i' th' university, you say?
POLONIUS
That did I, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.
What did you enact?
HAMLET
POLONIUS
I did enact Julius Caesar; I was kill'd i' th' Capitol;
Brutus kill'd me.
HAMLET
It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf
there. - Be the players ready?
ROSENCRANTZ
Ay, my lord. They stay upon your patience.
GERTRUDE
Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me.
HAMLET
No, good mother:
Here's metal more attractive.
POLONIUS
[To CLAUDIUS] O, ho! Do you mark that?
HAMLET
Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
[Sits down at OPHELIA's feet
No, my lord.
OPHELIA
HAMLET
I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ay, my lord.
OPHELIA
HAMLET
Do you think I meant country matters?
I think nothing, my lord.
OPHELIA
HAMLET
That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
64

What is, my lord?
Nothing.
You are merry, my lord.
Who, I?
Ay, my lord.
OPHELIA
HAMLET
OPHELIA
HAMLET
OPHELIA
HAMLET
O God, your only jig-maker! What should a man do but be
merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and
my father died within 's two hours.
OPHELIA
Nay 'tis twice two months, my lord.
HAMLET
So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I'll
have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and
not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory
may outlive his life half a year. But, by'r Lady, he must
build churches then; or else shall he suffer not thinking
on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is For O, for O,
the hobby-horse is forgot!
[Hautboys play. The dumb show enters. Enter a KING and a
QUEEN very lovingly; the QUEEN embracing him and he her.
She kneels, and makes show of protestation unto him. He
takes her up, and declines his head upon her neck. He
lays him down upon a bank of flowers. She, seeing him
asleep, leaves him. Anon comes in a fellow, takes off his
crown, kisses it, pours poison in the sleeper's ears, and
leaves him. The QUEEN returns, finds the KING dead, and
makes passionate action. The POISONER with some three or
four Mutes, comes in again, seem to condole with her. The
dead body is carried away. The POISONER woos the QUEEN
with gifts; she seems harsh and unwilling awhile, but in
the end accepts his love. Exeunt
What means this, my lord?
OPHELIA
HAMLET
Marry, this is miching malhecho; it means mischief.
65

OPHELIA
Belike this show imports the argument of the play.
[Enter PROLOGUE
HAMLET
We shall know by this fellow. [Aside] The players cannot
keep counsel; they'll tell all.
OPHELIA
Will he tell us what this show meant?
HAMLET
Ay, or any show that you'll show him. Be not you asham'd
to show, he'll not shame to tell you what it means.
OPHELIA
You are naught, you are naught! I'll mark the play.
PROLOGUE
For us, and for our tragedy,
Here stooping to your clemency,
We beg your hearing patiently.
[Exit
HAMLET
Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?
'Tis brief, my lord.
As woman's love.
OPHELIA
HAMLET
[Enter two Players as KING and QUEEN
KING
Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round
Neptune's salt wash and Tellus' orbed ground,
And thirty dozed moons with borrowed sheen
About the world have times twelve thirties been,
Since love our hearts, and Hymen did our hands,
Unite comutual in most sacred bands.
QUEEN
So many journeys may the sun and moon
Make us again count o'er ere love be done!
But woe is me! you are so sick of late,
So far from cheer and from your former state.
That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust,
Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must;
For women's fear and love holds quantity,
66

QUEEN (CONT)
In neither aught, or in extremity.
Now what my love is, proof hath made you know;
And as my love is siz'd, my fear is so.
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.
KING
Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too;
My operant powers their functions leave to do.
And thou shalt live in this fair world behind,
Honour'd, belov'd, and haply one as kind
For husband shalt thou -
QUEEN
O, confound the rest!
Such love must needs be treason in my breast.
When second husband let me be accurst!
None wed the second but who killed the first.
HAMLET
[Aside] Wormwood, wormwood!
QUEEN
The instances that second marriage move
Are base respects of thrift, but none of love.
A second time I kill my husband dead
When second husband kisses me in bed.
KING
I do believe you think what now you speak;
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity;
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree,
But fill unshaken when they mellow be.
Most necessary 'tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy.
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark his favourite flies,
The poor advanc'd makes friends of enemies;
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend,
67

KING (CONT)
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.
But, orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
So think thou wilt no second husband wed;
But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.
QUEEN
Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light,
Sport and repose lock from me day and night,
To desperation turn my trust and hope,
An anchor's cheer in prison be my scope,
Each opposite that blanks the face of joy
Meet what I would have well, and it destroy,
Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife,
If, once a widow, ever I be wife!
HAMLET
If she should break it now!
KING
'Tis deeply sworn. Sweet, leave me here awhile.
My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile
The tedious day with sleep.
Sleep rock thy brain,
[KING sleeps
QUEEN
And never come mischance between us twain!
[Exit
HAMLET
Madam, how like you this play?
GERTRUDE
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
HAMLET
O, but she'll keep her word.
CLAUDIUS
Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in't?
HAMLET
No, no! They do but jest, poison in jest; no offence i'
th' world.
68

What do you call the play?
CLAUDIUS
HAMLET
The Mousetrap. Marry, how? Tropically. This play is the
image of a murther done in Vienna. Gonzago is the duke's
name; his wife, Baptista. You shall see anon. 'Tis a
knavish piece of work; but what o' that? Your Majesty,
and we that have free souls, it touches us not. Let the
gall'd jade winch; our withers are unwrung.
[Enter LUCIANUS
This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King.
OPHELIA
You are as good as a chorus, my lord.
HAMLET
I could interpret between you and your love, if I could
see the puppets dallying.
OPHELIA
You are keen, my lord, you are keen.
HAMLET
It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.
Still better, and worse.
OPHELIA
HAMLET
So you must take your husbands. - Begin, murtherer. Pox,
leave thy damnable faces, and begin! Come, the croaking
raven doth bellow for revenge.
LUCIANUS
Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing;
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property
On wholesome life usurp immediately.
Pours the poison in his ears.
HAMLET
He poisons him i' th' garden for's estate. His name's
Gonzago. The story is extant, and written in very choice
Italian. You shall see anon how the murderer gets the
love of Gonzago's wife.
The king rises.
OPHELIA
69

HAMLET
What, frighted with false fire?
How fares my lord?
Give o'er the play.
Give me some light! Away!
Lights, lights, lights!
GERTRUDE
POLONIUS
CLAUDIUS
ALL
[Exeunt all but HAMLET and HORATIO
HAMLET
Why, let the strucken deer go weep,
The hart ungallèd play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
Thus runs the world away.
Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers - if the
rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me - with two
provincial roses on my rais'd shoes, get me a fellowship
in a cry of players, sir?
Half a share.
A whole one I!
HORATIO
HAMLET
For thou dost know, O Damon dear,
This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself; and now reigns here
A very, very - pajock.
You might have rhymed.
HORATIO
HAMLET
O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand
pound! Didst perceive?
Very well, my lord.
HORATIO
HAMLET
Upon the talk of the poisoning?
70

I did very well note him.
HORATIO
HAMLET
Aha! - Come, some music! Come, the recorders!
Come, some music!
For if the King like not the comedy,
Why then, belike he likes it not, perdy.
[Enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
GUILDENSTERN
Good my lord, vouchsafe me a word with you.
Sir, a whole history.
The king, sir -
Ay, sir, what of him?
HAMLET
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
GUILDENSTERN
Is in his retirement, marvellous distemper'd.
With drink, sir?
HAMLET
GUILDENSTERN
No, my lord; rather with choler.
HAMLET
Your wisdom should show itself more richer to signify
this to the doctor; for me to put him to his purgation
would perhaps plunge him into far more choler.
GUILDENSTERN
Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame, and
start not so wildly from my affair.
HAMLET
I am tame, sir; pronounce.
GUILDENSTERN
The Queen, your mother, in most great affliction of
spirit hath sent me to you.
You are welcome.
HAMLET
71

GUILDENSTERN
Nay, good my lord, this courtesy is not of the right
breed. If it shall please you to make me a wholesome
answer, I will do your mother's commandment; if not, your
pardon and my return shall be the end of my business.
Sir, I cannot.
What, my lord?
HAMLET
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
Make you a wholesome answer; my wit's diseas'd. But, sir,
such answer as I can make, you shall command; or rather,
as you say, my mother. Therefore no more, but to the
matter! My mother, you say -
ROSENCRANTZ
Then thus she says: your behaviour hath struck her into
amazement and admiration.
HAMLET
O wonderful son, that can so astonish a mother! But is
there no sequel at the heels of this mother's admiration?
Impart.
ROSENCRANTZ
She desires to speak with you in her closet ere you go to
bed.
HAMLET
We shall obey, were she ten times our mother.
Have you any further trade with us?
ROSENCRANTZ
My lord, you once did love me.
HAMLET
And do still, by these pickers and stealers!
ROSENCRANTZ
Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do
surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny
your griefs to your friend.
Sir, I lack advancement.
HAMLET
ROSENCRANTZ
How can that be, when you have the voice of the King
himself for your succession in Denmark?
72

HAMLET
Ay, sir, but while the grass grows - the proverb is
something musty.
[Enter the PLAYERS with recorders
O, the recorders! Let me see one. To withdraw with you -
why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you
would drive me into a toil?
GUILDENSTERN
O my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too
unmannerly.
HAMLET
I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this
pipe?
My lord, I cannot.
I pray you.
Believe me, I cannot.
I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
GUILDENSTERN
I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET
It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your
fingers and thumbs, give it breath with your mouth, and
it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these
are the stops.
GUILDENSTERN
But these cannot I command to any utt'rance of harmony. I
have not the skill.
HAMLET
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me!
You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops;
you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would
sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass;
and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little
organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you
think I am easier to be play'd on than a pipe? Call me
what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you
cannot play upon me.
73

[Enter POLONIUS
God bless you, sir!
HAMLET (CONT)
POLONIUS
My lord, the Queen would speak with you, and presently.
HAMLET
Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a
camel?
POLONIUS
By th' mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.
HAMLET
Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS
It is back'd like a weasel.
Or like a whale.
Very like a whale.
HAMLET
POLONIUS
HAMLET
Then will I come to my mother by-and-by. - They fool me
to the top of my bent. - I will come by-and-by.
I will say so.
[Exit
POLONIUS
HAMLET
By-and-by is easily said. - Leave me, friends.
[Exeunt all but HAMLET
'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on. Soft! Now to my mother!
O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.
Let me be cruel, not unnatural;
I will speak daggers to her, but use none.
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites-
How in my words somever she be shent,
To give them seals never, my soul, consent!
74

[Exit
III.iii.
[A room in the castle. Enter CLAUDIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and
GUILDENSTERN
CLAUDIUS
I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you;
I your commission will forthwith dispatch,
And he to England shall along with you.
The terms of our estate may not endure
Hazard so near us as doth hourly grow
Out of his lunacies.
GUILDENSTERN
We will ourselves provide.
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon Your Majesty.
ROSENCRANTZ
The single and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armour of the mind
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cesse of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortis'd and adjoin'd; which when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
CLAUDIUS
Arm you, I pray you, to the speedy voyage;
For we will fetters put upon this fear,
Which now goes too free-footed.
We will haste us.
ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN. 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,
75

POLONIUS (CONT)
'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.
Thanks, dear my lord.
[Exit POLONIUS
CLAUDIUS
O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon't,
A brother's murther! 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 pardon'd 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 murther'?
That cannot be; since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murther-
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardon'd 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 compell'd,
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 engag'd! 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 HAMLET
76

HAMLET
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng'd. That would be scann'd.
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge!
He 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 reveng'd,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?
No.
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent.
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 damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays.
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.
[Exit
CLAUDIUS
[Rises] My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
[Exit
III.iv.
[The Queen's closet. Enter GERTRUDE and POLONIUS
POLONIUS
He 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 screen'd and stood between
Much heat and him. I'll silence me even here.
Pray you be round with him.
HAMLET
[Within] Mother, mother, mother!
GERTRUDE
I'll warrant you; fear me not. Withdraw; I hear him
coming.
[POLONIUS hides behind the arras. Enter HAMLET
77

HAMLET
Now, mother, what's the matter?
GERTRUDE
Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
HAMLET
Mother, you have my father much offended.
GERTRUDE
Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
HAMLET
Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
Why, how now, Hamlet?
What's the matter now?
Have you forgot me?
GERTRUDE
HAMLET
GERTRUDE
HAMLET
No, by the rood, not so!
You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife,
And (would it were not so!) you are my mother.
GERTRUDE
Nay, then I'll set those to you that can speak.
HAMLET
Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge I
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
GERTRUDE
What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murther me?
Help, help, ho!
POLONIUS
[Behind] What, ho! Help, help, help!
HAMLET
[Draws] How now? A rat! Dead for a ducat, dead!
[Makes a pass through the arras and kills POLONIUS
[Behind] O, I am slain!
POLONIUS
78

O me, what hast thou done?
GERTRUDE
HAMLET
Nay, I know not. Is it the king?
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.
As kill a king?
Ay, lady, it was my word.
GERTRUDE
HAMLET
[Lifts up the arras and sees 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 hinds. 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 braz'd it so
That it is proof and bulwark against sense.
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 tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.
GERTRUDE
Ay me, what act,
That roars so loud and thunders in the index?
79

HAMLET
Look here upon th's 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 heyday 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 ecstacy was ne'er so thrall'd
But it reserv'd 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.
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 -
80

GERTRUDE
O, speak to me no more!
These words like daggers enter in mine ears.
No more, sweet Hamlet!
HAMLET
A murtherer 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!
No more!
GERTRUDE
[Enter the GHOST in his nightgown
HAMLET
A king of shreds and patches! -
Save me and hover o'er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure?
Alas, he's mad!
GERTRUDE
HAMLET
Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, laps'd 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.
How is it with you, lady?
HAMLET
GERTRUDE
Alas, how is't with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with th' encorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep;
And, as the sleeping soldiers in th' alarm,
Your bedded hairs, like life in excrements,
81

GERTRUDE (CONT)
Start up and stand an end. O gentle son,
Upon the beat 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.
To whom do you speak this?
Do you see nothing there?
GERTRUDE
HAMLET
GERTRUDE
Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.
Nor did you nothing hear?
HAMLET
No, nothing but ourselves.
GERTRUDE
HAMLET
Why, look you there! Look how it steals away!
My father, in his habit as he liv'd!
Look where he goes even now out at the portal!
[Exit GHOST
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 utt'red. Bring me to the test,
And I the matter will reword; which madness
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul
That not your trespass but my madness speaks.
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven;
82

HAMLET (CONT)
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.
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 my uncle's bed.
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat
Of habits evil, 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 [master] the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency. 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 pleas'd 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.
What shall I do?
GERTRUDE
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
83

HAMLET (CONT)
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.
GERTRUDE
Be thou assur'd, 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?
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 enginer
Hoist with his own petar; 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 peating knave.
Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.
Good night, mother.
[Exit GERTRUDE. Then exit HAMLET, tugging in POLONIUS
84

IV.i.
Act the Fourth
[Elsinore. A room in the castle. Enter CLAUDIUS and
GERTRUDE, with ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
CLAUDIUS
There's matter in these sighs. These profound heaves
You must translate; 'tis fit we understand them.
Where is your son?
GERTRUDE
Bestow this place on us a little while.
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
Ah, mine own lord, what have I seen to-night!
CLAUDIUS
What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?
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.
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?
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.
85

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. [So haply 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.- O, come away!
My soul is full of discord and dismay.
[Exeunt
IV.ii.
[Elsinore. A passage in the castle. Enter HAMLET
Safely stow'd.
HAMLET
[Within] Hamlet! Lord Hamlet!
ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
But soft! 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.
86

Do not believe it.
Believe what?
HAMLET
ROSENCRANTZ
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 mouth'd, to be last
swallowed. When he needs what you have glean'd, 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 -
A thing, my lord?
GUILDENSTERN
HAMLET
Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after.
[Exeunt
IV.iii.
[Elsinore. A room in the castle. Enter CLAUDIUS
CLAUDIUS
I have sent to seek him and to find the body.
How dangerous is it that this man goes loose!
87

CLAUDIUS (CONT)
Yet must not we put the strong law on him.
He's lov'd of the distracted multitude,
Who like not in their judgment, but their eyes;
And where 'tis so, th' 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 reliev'd,
Or not at all.
[Enter ROSENCRANTZ
How now! O! What hath befall'n?
ROSENCRANTZ
Where the dead body is bestow'd, my lord,
We cannot get from him.
But where is he?
CLAUDIUS
ROSENCRANTZ
Without, my lord; guarded, to know your pleasure.
Bring him before us.
CLAUDIUS
ROSENCRANTZ
Ho, Guildenstern! Bring in my lord.
[Enter HAMLET and GUILDENSTERN with Attendants
CLAUDIUS
Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?
At supper.
At supper? Where?
HAMLET
CLAUDIUS
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.
Alas, alas!
CLAUDIUS
88

HAMLET
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and
eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
CLAUDIUS
What dost thou mean by this?
HAMLET
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress
through the guts of a beggar.
Where is Polonius?
CLAUDIUS
HAMLET
In heaven. Send thither to see. If your messenger find
him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself. But
indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall
nose him as you go up the stair, into the lobby.
CLAUDIUS
[To Attendants] Go seek him there.
HAMLET
He will stay till you come.
[Exeunt Attendants
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,
Th' associates tend, and everything is bent
For England.
For England?
Ay, Hamlet.
Good.
HAMLET
CLAUDIUS
HAMLET
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.
89

Thy loving father, Hamlet.
CLAUDIUS
HAMLET
My mother! Father and mother is man and wife; man and
wife is one flesh; and so, my mother.
Come, for England!
[Exit HAMLET
CLAUDIUS
Follow him at foot; tempt him with speed aboard.
Delay it not; I'll have him hence to-night.
Away! For everything is seal'd and done
That else leans on th' affair. Pray you make haste.
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN
And, England, if my love thou hold'st at aught -
As my great power thereof may give thee sense,
Since yet thy cicatrice looks raw and red
After the Danish sword, and thy free awe
Pays homage to us - thou mayst not coldly set
Our sovereign process, which imports at full,
By letters congruing to that effect,
The present death of Hamlet. Do it, England;
For like the hectic in my blood he rages,
And thou must cure me. Till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my joys were ne'er begun.
[Exit
IV.iv.
[Near Elsinore. Enter FORTINBRAS with his army over the
stage. Also a CAPTAIN
FORTINBRAS
Go, Captain, from me greet the Danish king.
Tell him that by his license Fortinbras
Craves the conveyance of a promis'd march
Over his kingdom. You know the rendezvous.
if that his Majesty would aught with us,
We shall express our duty in his eye;
And let him know so.
I will do't, my lord.
Go softly on.
CAPTAIN
FORTINBRAS
[Exeunt all but the CAPTAIN. Enter HAMLET, ROSENCRANTZ,
GUILDENSTERN, and others
90

HAMLET
Good sir, whose powers are these?
They are of Norway, sir.
CAPTAIN
HAMLET
How purpos'd, sir, I pray you?
CAPTAIN
Against some part of Poland.
Who commands them, sir?
HAMLET
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 garrison'd.
HAMLET
Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not 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.
God b' wi' you, sir.
[Exit CAPTAIN
CAPTAIN
ROSENCRANTZ
Will't please you go, my lord?
91

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 godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event -
A thought which, quarter'd, 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 puff'd,
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 klll'd, a mother stain'd,
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
IV.v.
[Elsinore. A room in the castle. Enter HORATIO, GERTRUDE,
and a GENTLEMAN
I will not speak with her.
GERTRUDE
92

GENTLEMAN
She is importunate, indeed distract.
Her mood will needs be pitied.
What would she have?
GERTRUDE
GENTLEMAN
She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There's tricks i' th' world, and hems, and beats her
heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.
HORATIO
'Twere good she were spoken with; for she may strew
Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.
Let her come in.
[Exit GENTLEMAN
GERTRUDE
[Aside] To my sick soul (as sin's true nature is)
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.
So full of artless jealousy is guilt
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.
[Enter OPHELIA distracted
OPHELIA
Where is the beauteous Majesty of Denmark?
How now, Ophelia?
[Sings]
GERTRUDE
OPHELIA
How should I your true-love know
From another one?
By his cockle bat and staff
And his sandal shoon.
GERTRUDE
Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song?
93

OPHELIA
Say you? Nay, pray you mark.
[Sings]
O, ho!
Nay, but Ophelia -
Pray you mark.
[Sings]
[Enter CLAUDIUS
He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
GERTRUDE
OPHELIA
White his shroud as the mountain snow -
Alas, look here, my lord!
[Sings]
GERTRUDE
OPHELIA
Larded all with sweet flowers;
Which bewept to the grave did not go
With true-love showers.
How do you, pretty lady?
CLAUDIUS
OPHELIA
Well, God ‘ild you! They say the owl was a baker's
daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we
may be. God be at your table!
Conceit upon her father.
CLAUDIUS
OPHELIA
Pray let's have no words of this; but when they ask, you
what it means, say you this:
[Sings]
To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning bedtime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn'd his clo'es
94

Pretty Ophelia!
OPHELIA (CONT)
And dupp'd the chamber door,
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
CLAUDIUS
OPHELIA
Indeed, la, without an oath, I'll make an end on't!
[Sings]
He answers:
By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do't if they come to't
By Cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed.'
'So would I 'a' done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.'
CLAUDIUS
How long hath she been thus?
OPHELIA
I hope all will be well. We must be patient; but I cannot
choose but weep to think they would lay him i' th' cold
ground. My brother shall know of it; and so I thank you
for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night,
ladies. Good night, sweet ladies. Good night, good night.
[Exit OPHELIA
CLAUDIUS
Follow her close; give her good watch, I pray you.
[Exit HORATIO
O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs
All from her father's death. O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies.
But in battalions! First, her father slain;
Next, Your son gone, and he most violent author
Of his own just remove; the people muddied,
Thick and and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers
For good Polonius' death, and we have done but greenly
In hugger-mugger to inter him; Poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair-judgment,
Without the which we are Pictures or mere beasts;
Last, and as such containing as all these,
95

CLAUDIUS (CONT)
Her brother is in secret come from France;
And wants not buzzers to infect his ear
Feeds on his wonder, keep, himself in clouds,
With pestilent speeches of his father's death,
Wherein necessity, of matter beggar'd,
Will nothing stick Our person to arraign
In ear and ear. O my dear Gertrude, this,
Like to a murd'ring piece, in many places
Give, me superfluous death.
[A noise within
Alack, what noise is this?
GERTRUDE
CLAUDIUS
Where are my Switzers? Let them guard the door.
[Enter a MESSENGER
What is the matter?
MESSENGER
Save yourself, my lord:
The ocean, overpeering of his list,
Eats not the flats with more impetuous haste
Than Young Laertes, in a riotous head,
O'erbears Your offices. The rabble call him lord;
And, as the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every word,
They cry 'Choose we! Laertes shall be king!'
Caps, hands, and tongues applaud it to the clouds,
'Laertes shall be king! Laertes king!'
[A noise within
GERTRUDE
How cheerfully on the false trail they cry!
O, this is counter, you false Danish dogs!
The doors are broke.
[Enter LAERTES with others
CLAUDIUS
LAERTES
Where is this king? - Sirs, staid you all without.
No, let's come in!
ALL
96

I pray you give me leave.
We will, we will!
LAERTES
ALL
LAERTES
I thank you. Keep the door.
[Exeunt his Followers
O thou vile king,
Give me my father!
Calmly, good Laertes.
GERTRUDE
LAERTES
That drop of blood that's calm proclaims me bastard;
Cries cuckold to my father; brands the harlot
Even here between the chaste unsmirched brows
Of my true mother.
CLAUDIUS
What is the cause, Laertes,
That thy rebellion looks so giantlike?
Let him go, Gertrude. Do not fear our person.
There's such divinity doth hedge a king
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will. Tell me, Laertes,
Why thou art thus incens'd. Let him go, Gertrude.
Speak, man.
Where is my father?
Dead.
But not by him!
Let him demand his fill.
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
GERTRUDE
CLAUDIUS
LAERTES
How came he dead? I'll not be juggled with:
To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation. To this point I stand,
That both the world, I give to negligence,
Let come what comes; only I'll be reveng'd
Most throughly for my father.
97

Who shall stay you?
CLAUDIUS
LAERTES
My will, not all the world!
And for my means, I'll husband them so well
They shall go far with little.
CLAUDIUS
Good Laertes,
If you desire to know the certainty
Of your dear father's death, is't writ in Your revenge
That swoopstake you will draw both friend and foe,
Winner and loser?
None but his enemies.
Will you know them then?
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
LAERTES
To his good friends thus wide I'll ope my arms
And, like the kind life-rend'ring pelican,
Repast them with my blood.
CLAUDIUS
Why, now You speak
Like a good child and a true gentleman.
That I am guiltless of your father's death,
And am most sensibly in grief for it,
It shall as level to your judgment pierce
As day does to your eye.
[A noise within: 'Let her come in.'
LAERTES
How now? What noise is that?
[Enter OPHELIA
O heat, dry up my brains! Tears seven times salt
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!
By heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight
Till our scale turn the beam. O rose of May!
Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!
O heavens! is't possible a young maid's wits
Should be as mortal as an old man's life?
Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.
98

[Sings]
OPHELIA
They bore him barefac'd on the bier
(Hey non nony, nony, hey nony)
And in his grave rain'd many a tear.
Fare you well, my dove!
LAERTES
Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge,
It could not move thus.
OPHELIA
You must sing A-down a-down, and you call him a-down-a.
O, how the wheel becomes it! It is the false steward,
that stole his master's daughter.
LAERTES
This nothing's more than matter.
OPHELIA
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love,
remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.
LAERTES
A document in madness! Thoughts and remembrance fitted.
OPHELIA
There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for
you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace
o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference!
There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they
wither'd all when my father died. They say he made a good
end.
[Sings]
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.
LAERTES
Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favour and to prettiness.
[Sings]
OPHELIA
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead;
Go to thy deathbed;
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll.
99

He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God 'a'mercy on his soul.
And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God b' wi', you.
[Exit OPHELIA
Do you see this, O God?
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
Laertes, I must commune with your grief,
Or you deny me right. Go but apart,
Make choice of whom your wisest friends you will,
And they shall hear and judge 'twixt you and me.
If by direct or by collateral hand
They find us touch'd, we will our kingdom give,
Our crown, our life, and all that we call ours,
To you in satisfaction; but if not,
Be you content to lend your patience to us,
And we shall jointly labour with your soul
To give it due content.
LAERTES
Let this be so.
His means of death, his obscure funeral-
No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o'er his bones,
No noble rite nor formal ostentation -
Cry to be heard, as 'twere from heaven to earth,
That I must call't in question.
CLAUDIUS
So you shall;
And where th' offence is let the great axe fall.
I pray you go with me.
[Exeunt
IV.vi.
[Elsinore. Another room in the castle. Enter HORATIO with
a SERVANT
HORATIO
What are they that would speak with me?
SERVANT
Seafaring men, sir. They say they have letters for you.
Let them come in.
[Exit SERVANT
HORATIO
100

I do not know from what part of the world
I should be greeted, if not from Lord Hamlet.
[Enter SAILORS
God bless you, sir.
Let him bless thee too.
SAILOR
HORATIO
SAILOR
'A shall, sir, an't please him. There's a letter for you,
sir - it comes from th' ambassador that was bound for
England – if your name be Horatio, as I am let to know it
is.
HORATIO
[Reads the letter] Horatio, when thou shalt have
overlook'd this, give these fellows some means to the
Claudius. They have letters for him. Ere we were two days
old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us
chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a
compelled valour, and in the grapple I boarded them. On
the instant they got clear of our ship; so I alone became
their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of
mercy; but they knew what they did: I am to do a good
turn for them. Let the King have the letters I have sent,
and repair thou to me with as much speed as thou wouldst
fly death. I have words to speak in thine ear will make
thee dumb; yet are they much too light for the bore of
the matter. These good fellows will bring thee where I
am. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their course for
England. Of them I have much to tell thee. Farewell. He
that thou knowest thine - Hamlet.
Come, I will give you way for these your letters,
And do't the speedier that you may direct me
To him from whom you brought them.
[Exeunt
IV.vii.
[Elsinore. Another room in the castle. Enter CLAUDIUS and
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
Now must your conscience my acquittance seal,
And you must put me in your heart for friend,
Sith you have heard, and with a knowing ear,
That he which hath your noble father slain
Pursued my life.
101

LAERTES
It well appears. But tell me
Why you proceeded not against these feats
So crimeful and so capital in nature,
As by your safety, wisdom, all things else,
You mainly were stirr'd up.
CLAUDIUS
O, for two special reasons,
Which may to you, perhaps, seem much unsinew'd,
But yet to me they are strong. The Queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks; and for myself -
My virtue or my plague, be it either which -
She's so conjunctive to my life and soul
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her. The other motive
Why to a public count I might not go
Is the great love the general gender bear him,
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gives to graces; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timber'd for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aim'd them.
LAERTES
And so have I a noble father lost;
A sister driven into desp'rate terms,
Whose worth, if praises may go back again,
Stood challenger on mount of all the age
For her perfections. But my revenge will come.
CLAUDIUS
Break not your sleeps for that. You must not think
That we are made of stuff so flat and dull
That we can let our beard be shook with danger,
And think it pastime. You shortly shall hear more.
I lov'd your father, and we love ourself,
And that, I hope, will teach you to imagine-
[Enter a MESSENGER with letters
How now? What news?
MESSENGER
Letters, my lord, from Hamlet:
This to your Majesty; this to the Queen.
CLAUDIUS
From Hamlet? Who brought them?
102

MESSENGER
Sailors, my lord, they say; I saw them not.
They were given me by Claudio; he receiv'd them
Of him that brought them.
CLAUDIUS
Laertes, you shall hear them.
Leave us.
[Exit MESSENGER
[Reads] High and Mighty - You shall know I am set naked
on your kingdom. To-morrow shall I beg leave to see your
kingly eyes; when I shall (first asking your pardon
thereunto) recount the occasion of my sudden and more
strange return. - Hamlet
What should this mean? Are all the rest come back?
Or is it some abuse, and no such thing?
Know you the hand?
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
'Tis Hamlet's character. Naked!
And in a postscript here, he says alone.
Can you advise me?
LAERTES
I am lost in it, my lord. But let him come!
It warms the very sickness in my heart
That I shall live and tell him to his teeth,
'Thus didest thou.'
CLAUDIUS
If it be so, Laertes
(As how should it be so? How otherwise?),
Will you be rul'd by me?
LAERTES
Ay my lord,
So you will not o'errule me to a peace.
CLAUDIUS
To thine own peace. If he be now return'd
As checking at his voyage, and that he means
No more to undertake it, I will work him
To exploit now ripe in my device,
Under the which he shall not choose but fall;
And for his death no wind
But even his mother shall uncharge the practice
And call it accident.
103

LAERTES
My lord, I will be rul'd;
The rather, if you could devise it so
That I might be the organ.
CLAUDIUS
It falls right.
You have been talk'd 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?
CLAUDIUS
A very riband in the cap of youth -
Yet needful too; for youth no less becomes
The light and careless livery that it wears
Thin settled age his sables and his weeds,
Importing health and graveness. Two months since
Here was a gentleman of Normandy.
I have seen myself, and serv'd against, the French,
And they can well on horseback; but this gallant
Had witchcraft in't. He grew unto his seat,
And to such wondrous doing brought his horse
As had he been incorps'd and demi-natur'd
With the brave beast. So far he topp'd my thought
That I, in forgery of shapes and tricks,
Come short of what he did.
A Norman was't?
A Norman.
Upon my life, Lamound.
The very same.
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
LAERTES
I know him well. He is the brooch indeed
And gem of all the nation.
104

CLAUDIUS
He made confession of you;
And gave you such a masterly report
For art and exercise in your defence,
And for your rapier most especially,
That he cried out 'twould be a sight indeed
If one could match you. The scrimers of their nation
He swore had neither motion, guard, nor eye,
If you oppos'd them. Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy
That he could nothing do but wish and beg
Your sudden coming o'er to play with you.
Now, out of this -
What out of this, my lord?
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
Laertes, was your father dear to you?
Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?
Why ask you this?
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
Not that I think you did not love your father;
But that I know love is begun by time,
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
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 sigh,
That hurts by easing. But to the quick o' th' ulcer!
Hamlet comes back. What would you undertake
To show yourself your father's son in deed
More than in words?
LAERTES
To cut his throat i' th' church!
CLAUDIUS
No place indeed should murder sanctuarize;
Revenge should have no bounds. But, good Laertes,
Will you do this? Keep close within your chamber.
105

CLAUDIUS (CONT)
Will return'd shall know you are come home.
We'll put on those shall praise your excellence
And set a double varnish on the fame
The Frenchman gave you; bring you in fine together
And wager on your heads. He, being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils; so that with ease,
Or with a little shuffling, you may choose
A sword unbated, and, in a pass of practice,
Requite him for your father.
LAERTES
I will do't!
And for that purpose I'll anoint my sword.
I bought an unction of a mountebank,
So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
This is but scratch'd withal. I'll touch my point
With this contagion, that, if I gall him slightly,
It may be death.
CLAUDIUS
Let's further think of this,
Weigh what convenience both of time and means
May fit us to our shape. If this should fall,
And that our drift look through our bad performance.
'Twere better not assay'd. Therefore this project
Should have a back or second, that might hold
If this did blast in proof. Soft! let me see.
We'll make a solemn wager on your cunnings-
I ha't!
When in your motion you are hot and dry-
As make your bouts more violent to that end-
And that he calls for drink, I'll have prepar'd him
A chalice for the nonce; whereon but sipping,
If he by chance escape your venom'd stuck,
Our purpose may hold there.- But stay, what noise,
[Enter GERTRUDE
How now, sweet queen?
GERTRUDE
One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes.
Drown'd! O, where?
LAERTES
106

GERTRUDE
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Alas, then she is drown'd?
Drown'd, drown'd.
LAERTES
GERTRUDE
LAERTES
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears; but yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will. When these are gone,
The woman will be out. Adieu, my lord.
I have a speech of fire, that fain would blaze
But that this folly douts it.
[Exit
CLAUDIUS
Let's follow, Gertrude.
How much I had to do to calm his rage I
Now fear I this will give it start again;
Therefore let's follow.
[Exeunt
107

V.i.
Act the Fifth
[Elsinore. A churchyard. Enter two GRAVEDIGGERS, with
spades and pickaxes
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Is she to be buried in Christian burial when she wilfully
seeks her own salvation?
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
I tell thee she is; therefore make her grave straight.
The crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian
burial.
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
How can that be, unless she drown'd herself in her own
defence?
Why, 'tis found so.
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
It must be se offendendo; it cannot be else. For here
lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an
act; and an act hath three branches - it is to act, to
do, and to perform; argal, she drown'd herself wittingly.
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
Nay, but hear you, Goodman Delver!
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Give me leave. Here lies the water; good. Here stands the
man; good. If the man go to this water and drown himself,
it is, will he nill he, he goes - mark you that. But if
the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not
himself. Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death
shortens not his own life.
But is this law?
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Ay, marry, is't - crowner's quest law.
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
Will you ha' the truth an't? If this had not been a
gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o' Christian
burial.
108

FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Why, there thou say'st! And the more pity that great folk
should have countenance in this world to drown or hang
themselves more than their even-Christen. Come, my spade!
There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers,
and grave-makers. They hold up Adam's profession.
Was he a gentleman?
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
'A was the first that ever bore arms.
Why, he had none.
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the
Scripture? The Scripture says Adam digg'd. Could he dig
without arms? I'll put another question to thee. If thou
answerest me not to the purpose, confess thyself -
Go to!
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
What is he that builds stronger than either the mason,
the shipwright, or the carpenter?
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand
tenants.
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
I like thy wit well, in good faith. The gallows does
well. But how does it well? It does well to those that do
ill. Now, thou dost ill to say the gallows is built
stronger than the church. Argal, the gallows may do well
to thee. To't again, come!
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
Who builds stronger than a mason, a shipwright, or a
carpenter?
Ay, tell me that, and unyoke.
Marry, now I can tell!
To't.
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
109

Mass, I cannot tell.
SECOND GRAVEDIGGER
[Enter HAMLET and HORATIO afar off
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull ass
will not mend his pace with beating; and when you are
ask'd this question next, say 'a grave-maker.' The houses
he makes lasts till doomsday. Go, get thee to Yaughan;
fetch me a stoup of liquor.
[Exit SECOND GRAVEDIGGER. FIRST GRAVEDIGGER digs and
sings
In youth when I did love, did love,
Methought it was very sweet;
To contract – O - the time for – a - my behove,
O, methought there – a - was nothing – a - meet.
HAMLET
Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings
at grave-making?
HORATIO
Custom hath made it in him a Property of easiness.
HAMLET
'Tis e'en so. The hand of little employment hath the
daintier sense.
[Sings]
[Throws up a skull
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
But age with his stealing steps
Hath clawed me in his clutch,
And hath shipped me intil the land,
As if I had never been such.
HAMLET
That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How
the knave jowls it to the ground, as if 'twere Cain's
jawbone, that did the first murder! This might be the
pate of a politician, which this ass now o'erreaches; one
that would circumvent God, might it not?
It might, my lord.
HORATIO
HAMLET
Or of a courtier, which could say 'Good morrow, sweet
lord! How dost thou, good lord?' This might be my Lord
110

HAMLET (CONT)
Such-a-one, that prais'd my Lord Such-a-one's horse when
he meant to beg it – might it not?
Ay, my lord.
HORATIO
HAMLET
Why, e'en so! And now my Lady Worm's - chapless, and
knock'd about the mazzard with a sexton's spade. Here's
fine revolution, and we had the trick to see't. Did these
bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets
with 'em? Mine ache to think on't.
[Sings]
[Throws up another skull
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
A pickaxe and a spade, a spade,
For and a shrouding sheet;
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet.
HAMLET
There's another. Why may not that be the skull of a
lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his
cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer
this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a
dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of
battery? Hum! This fellow might be in's time a great
buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his
fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the
fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to
have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers
vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too,
than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The
very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this
box; and must th' inheritor himself have no more, ha?
Not a jot more, my lord.
HORATIO
HAMLET
Is not parchment made of sheepskins?
HORATIO
Ay, my lord, And of calveskins too.
111

HAMLET
They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in
that. I will speak to this fellow. - Whose grave's this,
sirrah?
Mine, sir.
[Sings]
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet.
HAMLET
I think it be thine indeed, for thou liest in't.
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
You lie out on't, sir, and therefore 'tis not yours. For
my part, I do not lie in't, yet it is mine.
HAMLET
Thou dost lie in't, to be in't and say it is thine. 'Tis
for the dead, not for the quick; therefore thou liest.
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
'Tis a quick lie, sir; 'twill away again from me to you.
HAMLET
What man dost thou dig it for?
For no man, sir.
What woman then?
For none neither.
Who is to be buried in't?
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul, she's
dead.
HAMLET
[Aside to HORATIO] How absolute the knave is! We must
speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. By the
Lord, Horatio, this three years I have taken note of it,
the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant
comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe.
- How long hast thou been a grave-maker?
112

FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Of all the days i' th' year, I came to't that day that
our last king Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
How long is that since?
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was
the very day that young Hamlet was born - he that is mad,
and sent into England.
HAMLET
Ay, marry, why was be sent into England?
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Why, because 'a was mad. 'A shall recover his wits there;
or, if 'a do not, 'tis no great matter there.
Why?
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
'Twill not he seen in him there. There the men are as mad
as he.
How came he mad?
Very strangely, they say.
How strangely?
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Faith, e'en with losing his wits.
Upon what ground?
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Why, here in Denmark. I have been sexton here, man and
boy thirty years.
HAMLET
How long will a man lie i' th' earth ere he rot?
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Faith, if 'a be not rotten before 'a die (as we have many
pocky corses now-a-days that will scarce hold the laying
113

FIRST GRAVEDIGGER (CONT)
in) I will last you some eight year or nine year. A
tanner will last you nine year.
Why he more than another?
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
Why, sir, his hide is so tann'd with his trade that 'a
will keep out water a great while; and your water is a
sore decayer of your whoreson dead body. Here's a skull
now. This skull hath lien you i' th' earth three-andtwenty
years.
Whose was it?
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
A whoreson, mad fellow's it was. Whose do you think it
was?
Nay, I know not.
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! 'A pour'd a flagon
of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was
Yorick's skull, the King's jester.
This?
E'en that.
HAMLET
FIRST GRAVEDIGGER
HAMLET
Let me see. [Takes the skull] Alas, poor Yorick! I knew
him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand
tunes. And now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My
gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have
kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your
gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were
wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock
your own grinning? Quite chap-fall'n? Now get you to my
lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch
thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at
that. Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
What's that, my lord?
HORATIO
114

HAMLET
Dost thou think Alexander look'd o' this fashion i' th'
earth?
E'en so.
And smelt so? Pah!
[Puts down the skull
E'en so, my lord.
HORATIO
HAMLET
HORATIO
HAMLET
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not
imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he
find it stopping a bunghole?
HORATIO
'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
HAMLET
No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with
modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it; as thus:
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth
into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and
why of that loam (whereto he was converted) might they
not stop a beer barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away
O, that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t' expel the winter's flaw -
But soft! but soft! aside! Here comes the King -
[Enter PRIESTS with a coffin in funeral procession,
CLAUDIUS, GERTRUDE, LAERTES, with Lords Attendant the
Queen, and courtiers
Who is this they follow?
And with such maimed rites? This doth betoken
The corse they follow did with desp'rate hand
Fordo it own life. 'Twas of some estate.
Couch we awhile, and mark.
[Retires with HORATIO
What ceremony else?
LAERTES
115

That is Laertes,
A very noble youth. Mark.
What ceremony else?
HAMLET
LAERTES
PRIEST
Her obsequies have been as far enlarg'd
As we have warranty. Her death was doubtful;
And, but that great command o'ersways the order,
She should in ground unsanctified have lodg'd
Till the last trumpet. For charitable prayers,
Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her.
Yet here she is allow'd her virgin crants,
Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home
Of bell and burial.
LAERTES
Must there no more be done?
PRIEST
No more be done!
We should profane the service of the dead
To sing a requiem and such rest to her
As to peace-parted souls.
LAERTES
Lay her i' th' earth;
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A minist'ring angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling.
What, the fair Ophelia?
HAMLET
GERTRUDE
Sweets to the sweet! Farewell.
[Scatters flowers
I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife;
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid,
And not have strew'd thy grave.
LAERTES
O, treble woe
Fall ten times treble on that cursed head
Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Depriv'd thee of! Hold off the earth awhile,
Till I have caught her once more in mine arms.
116

[Leaps in the grave
Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead
Till of this flat a mountain you have made
T' o'ertop old Pelion or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.
HAMLET
[Comes forward] What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wand'ring stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
[Leaps in after LAERTES
The devil take thy soul!
[Grapples with him
LAERTES
HAMLET
Thou pray'st not well.
I prithee take thy fingers from my throat;
For, though I am not splenitive and rash,
Yet have I in me something dangerous,
Which let thy wisdom fear. Hold off thy hand!
Pluck thein asunder.
Hamlet, Hamlet!
Gentlemen!
Good my lord, be quiet.
CLAUDIUS
GERTRUDE
ALL
HORATIO
[The Attendants part them, and they come out of the grave
HAMLET
Why, I will fight with him upon this theme
Until my eyelids will no longer wag.
O my son, what theme?
GERTRUDE
HAMLET
I lov'd Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not (with all their quantity of love)
Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?
117

O, he is mad, Laertes.
CLAUDIUS
GERTRUDE
For love of God, forbear him!
HAMLET
'Swounds, show me what thou't do.
Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself?
Woo't drink up esill? eat a crocodile?
I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I.
And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou.
GERTRUDE
This is mere madness;
And thus a while the fit will work on him.
Anon, as patient as the female dove
When that her golden couplets are disclos'd,
His silence will sit drooping.
HAMLET
Hear you, sir!
What is the reason that you use me thus?
I lov'd you ever. But it is no matter.
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.
[Exit
CLAUDIUS
I pray thee, good Horatio, wait upon him.
[Exit HORATIO
[To LAERTES] Strengthen your patience in our last night's
speech.
We'll put the matter to the present push. -
Good Gertrude, set some watch over your son. -
This grave shall have a living monument.
An hour of quiet shortly shall we see;
Till then in patience our proceeding be.
[Exeunt
118

V.ii.
[Elsinore. A hall in the castle. Enter HAMLET and HORATIO
HAMLET
So much for this, sir; now shall you see the other.
You do remember all the circumstance?
Remember it, my lord!
HORATIO
HAMLET
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutinies in the bilboes. Rashly -
And prais'd be rashness for it; let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will -
That is most certain.
HORATIO
HAMLET
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark
Grop'd I to find out them; had my desire,
Finger'd their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again; making so bold
(My fears forgetting manners) to unseal
Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio
(O royal knavery!), an exact command,
Larded with many several sorts of reasons,
Importing Denmark's health, and England's too,
With, hoo! Such bugs and goblins in my life -
That, on the supervise, no leisure bated,
No, not to stay the finding of the axe,
My head should be struck off.
Is't possible?
HORATIO
HAMLET
Here's the commission; read it at more leisure.
But wilt thou hear me how I did proceed?
I beseech you.
HORATIO
119

HAMLET
Being thus benetted round with villainies,
Ere I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play. I sat me down;
Devis'd a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service. Wilt thou know
Th' effect of what I wrote?
Ay, good my lord.
HORATIO
HAMLET
An earnest conjuration from the King,
As England was his faithful tributary,
As love between them like the palm might flourish,
As peace should still her wheaten garland wear
And stand a comma 'tween their amities,
And many such-like as's of great charge,
That, on the view and knowing of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
Not shriving time allow'd.
How was this seal'd?
HORATIO
HAMLET
Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.
I had my father's signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal;
Folded the writ up in the form of th' other,
Subscrib'd it, gave't th' impression, plac'd it safely,
The changeling never known. Now, the next day
Was our sea-fight; and what to this was sequent
Thou know'st already.
HORATIO
So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't.
HAMLET
Why, man, they did make love to this employment!
They are not near my conscience; their defeat
Does by their own insinuation grow.
'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.
120

Why, what a king is this!
HORATIO
HAMLET
Does it not, thinks't thee, stand me now upon-
He that hath kill'd my king, and whored my mother;
Popp'd in between th' election and my hopes;
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such coz'nage - is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damn'd
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
HORATIO
It must be shortly known to him from England
What is the issue of the business there.
HAMLET
It will be short; the interim is mine,
And a man's life is no more than to say 'one.'
But I am very sorry, good Horatio,
That to Laertes I forgot myself,
For by the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his. I'll court his favours.
But sure the bravery of his grief did put me
Into a tow'ring passion.
Peace! Who comes here?
HORATIO
[Enter young OSRIC, a courtier
OSRIC
Your lordship is right welcome back to Denmark.
HAMLET
I humbly thank you, sir. [Aside to HORATIO] Dost know
this waterfly?
HORATIO
[Aside to HAMLET] No, my good lord.
HAMLET
[Aside to HORATIO] Thy state is the more gracious; for
'tis a vice to know him. He hath much land, and fertile.
Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand
at the king's messenger. 'Tis a chough; but, as I say,
spacious in the possession of dirt.
OSRIC
Sweet lord, if your lordship were at leisure, I should
impart a thing to you from his Majesty.
121

HAMLET
I will receive it, sir, with all diligence of spirit. Put
your bonnet to his right use. 'Tis for the head.
OSRIC
I thank your lordship, it is very hot.
HAMLET
No, believe me, 'tis very cold; the wind is northerly.
OSRIC
It is indifferent cold, my lord, indeed.
HAMLET
But yet methinks it is very sultry and hot for my
complexion.
OSRIC
Exceedingly, my lord; it is very sultry, as 'twere- I
cannot tell how. But, my lord, his Majesty bade me
signify to you that he has laid a great wager on your
head. Sir, this is the matter -
I beseech you remember.
HAMLET
[HAMLET moves him to put on his hat
OSRIC
Nay, good my lord; for mine ease, in good faith. Sir,
here 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 dozy 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.
122

HAMLET
The concernancy, sir? Why do we wrap the gentleman in our
more rawer breath
Sir?
OSRIC
HORATIO
[Aside to HAMLET] Is't not possible to understand in
another tongue? You will do't, sir, really.
HAMLET
What imports the nomination of this gentleman?
Of Laertes?
OSRIC
HORATIO
[Aside] His purse is empty already. All's golden words
are spent.
Of him, sir.
HAMLET
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.
What's his weapon?
Rapier and dagger.
HAMLET
OSRIC
HAMLET
That's two of his weapons - but well.
123

OSRIC
The King, sir, hath wager'd with him six Barbary horses;
against the which he has imponed, as I take it, six
French rapiers and poniards, with their assigns, as
girdle, hangers, and so. Three of the carriages, in
faith, are very dear to fancy, very responsive to the
hilts, most delicate carriages, and of very liberal
conceit.
HAMLET
What call you the carriages?
HORATIO
[Aside to HAMLET] I knew you must be edified by the
margent ere you had done.
OSRIC
The carriages, sir, are the hangers.
HAMLET
The phrase would be more germane to the matter if we
could carry cannon by our sides. I would it might be
hangers till then. But on! Six Barbary horses against six
French swords, their assigns, and three liberal-conceited
carriages: that's the French bet against the Danish. Why
is this all imponed, as you call it?
OSRIC
The king, sir, hath laid that, in a dozen passes between
yourself and him, he shall not exceed you three hits; he
hath laid on twelve for nine, and it would come to
immediate trial if your lordship would vouchsafe the
answer.
How if I answer no?
HAMLET
OSRIC
I mean, my lord, the opposition of your person in trial.
HAMLET
Sir, I will walk here in the hall. If it please his
Majesty, it is the breathing time of day with me. Let the
foils be brought, the gentleman willing, and the King
hold his purpose, I will win for him if I can; if not, I
will gain nothing but my shame and the odd hits.
OSRIC
Shall I redeliver you e'en so?
124

HAMLET
To this effect, sir, after what flourish your nature
will.
OSRIC
I commend my duty to your lordship.
HAMLET
Yours, yours. [Exit OSRIC] He does well to commend it
himself; there are no tongues else for's turn.
HORATIO
This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head.
HAMLET
He did comply with his dug before he suck'd it. Thus has
he, and many more of the same bevy that I know the drossy
age dotes on, only got the tune of the time and outward
habit of encounter - a kind of yesty collection, which
carries them through and through the most fann'd and
winnowed opinions; and do but blow them to their trialthe
bubbles are out,
[Enter a LORD
LORD
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.
In happy time.
HAMLET
LORD
The queen desires you to use some gentle entertainment to
Laertes before you fall to play.
She well instructs me.
[Exit LORD
HAMLET
HORATIO
You will lose this wager, my lord.
125

HAMLET
I do not think so. Since he went into France I have been
in continual practice. I shall win at the odds. But thou
wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart. But
it is no matter.
Nay, good my lord -
HORATIO
HAMLET
It is but foolery; but it is such a kind of gaingiving as
would perhaps trouble a woman.
HORATIO
If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall
their repair hither and say you are not fit.
HAMLET
Not a whit, we defy augury; there's a special providence
in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come,
if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now,
yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man
knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave
betimes? Let be.
[Enter CLAUDIUS, GERTRUDE, LAERTES, OSRIC, and Lords,
with other Attendants with foils and gauntlets. A table
and flagons of wine on it
CLAUDIUS
Come, Hamlet, come, and take this hand from me.
[Puts LAERTES' hand into HAMLET's
HAMLET
Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong;
But pardon't, as you are a gentleman.
This presence knows,
And you must needs have heard, how I am punish'd
With sore distraction. What I have done
That might your nature, honour, and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be taken away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness. If't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.
Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purpos'd evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts
126

HAMLET (CONT)
That I have shot my arrow o'er the house
And hurt my brother.
LAERTES
I am satisfied in nature,
Whose motive in this case should stir me most
To my revenge. But in my terms of honour
I stand aloof, and will no reconcilement
Till by some elder masters of known honour
I have a voice and precedent of peace
To keep my name ungor'd. But till that time
I do receive your offer'd love like love,
And will not wrong it.
HAMLET
I embrace it freely,
And will this brother's wager frankly play.
Give us the foils. Come on.
Come, one for me.
LAERTES
HAMLET
I'll be your foil, Laertes. In mine ignorance
Your skill shall, like a star i' th' darkest night,
Stick fiery off indeed.
You mock me, sir.
No, by this bad.
LAERTES
HAMLET
CLAUDIUS
Give them the foils, young Osric. Cousin Hamlet,
You know the wager?
HAMLET
Very well, my lord.
Your Grace has laid the odds o' th' weaker side.
CLAUDIUS
I do not fear it, I have seen you both;
But since he is better'd, we have therefore odds.
LAERTES
This is too heavy; let me see another.
HAMLET
This likes me well. These foils have all a length?
Prepare to play.
127

Ay, my good lord.
OSRIC
CLAUDIUS
Set me the stoups of wine upon that table.
If Hamlet give the first or second hit,
Or quit in answer of the third exchange,
Let all the battlements their ordnance fire;
The King shall drink to Hamlet's better breath,
And in the cup an union shall he throw
Richer than that which four successive kings
In Denmark's crown have worn. Give me the cups;
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth,
'Now the King drinks to Hamlet.' Come, begin.
And you the judges, bear a wary eye.
Come on, sir.
Come, my lord.
[They play
One.
No.
Judgment!
HAMLET
LAERTES
HAMLET
LAERTES
HAMLET
OSRIC
A hit, a very palpable hit.
Well, again!
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
Stay, give me drink. Hamlet, this pearl is thine;
Here's to thy health.
[Drum; trumpets sound; a piece goes off within
Give him the cup.
HAMLET
I'll play this bout first; set it by awhile.
Come. [They play] Another hit. What say you?
128

LAERTES
A touch, a touch; I do confess't.
Our son shall win.
CLAUDIUS
GERTRUDE
He's fat, and scant of breath.
Here, Hamlet, take my napkin, rub thy brows.
The Queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet.
Good madam!
Gertrude, do not drink.
HAMLET
CLAUDIUS
GERTRUDE
I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me.
[Drinks
CLAUDIUS
[Aside] It is the poison'd cup; it is too late.
HAMLET
I dare not drink yet, madam; by-and-by.
GERTRUDE
Come, let me wipe thy face.
My lord, I'll hit him now.
I do not think't.
LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
LAERTES
[Aside] And yet it is almost against my conscience.
HAMLET
Come for the third, Laertes! You but dally. Pray you
Pass with your best violence;
I am afeard you make a wanton of me.
Say you so? Come on.
[Play
Nothing neither way.
LAERTES
OSRIC
129

Have at you now!
LAERTES
[LAERTES wounds HAMLET; then in scuffling, they change
rapiers, and HAMLET wounds LAERTES
CLAUDIUS
Part them! They are incens'd.
Nay come! Again!
[GERTRUDE falls
HAMLET
OSRIC
Look to the Queen there, ho!
HORATIO
They bleed on both sides. How is it, my lord?
How is't, Laertes?
OSRIC
LAERTES
Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric.
I am justly kill'd with mine own treachery.
How does the Queen?
HAMLET
CLAUDIUS
She sounds to see them bleed.
GERTRUDE
No, no! the drink, the drink! O my dear Hamlet!
The drink, the drink! I am poison'd.
[Dies
HAMLET
O villany! Ho! Let the door be lock'd.
Treachery! Seek it out.
[LAERTES falls
LAERTES
It is here, Hamlet. Hamlet, thou art slain;
No medicine in the world can do thee good.
In thee there is not half an hour of life.
The treacherous instrument is in thy hand,
Unbated and envenom'd. The foul practice
Hath turn'd itself on me. Lo, here I lie,
Never to rise again. Thy mother's poison'd.
I can no more. The King, the King's to blame.
130

The point envenom'd too?
Then, venom, to thy work.
[Hurts CLAUDIUS
Treason! treason!
HAMLET
ALL
CLAUDIUS
O, yet defend me, friends! I am but hurt.
HAMLET
Here, thou incestuous, murd'rous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion! Is thy union here?
Follow my mother.
[CLAUDIUS dies
LAERTES
He is justly serv'd.
It is a poison temper'd by himself.
Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet.
Mine and my father's death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me!
[Dies
HAMLET
Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee.
I am dead, Horatio. Wretched queen, adieu!
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest) O, I could tell you-
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead;
Thou liv'st; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
HORATIO
Never believe it.
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.
Here's yet some liquor left.
HAMLET
As th'art a man,
Give me the cup. Let go! By heaven, I'll ha't.
O good Horatio, what a wounded name
(Things standing thus unknown) shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
131

[March afar off, and shot within
What warlike noise is this?
HAMLET (CONT)
OSRIC
Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland,
To the ambassadors of England gives
This warlike volley.
HAMLET
O, I die, Horatio!
The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit.
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th' election lights
On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th' occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited - the rest is silence.
[Dies
HORATIO
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
[March within
Why does the drum come hither?
[Enter FORTINBRAS and English AMBASSADORS, with drum,
colours, and Attendants
Where is this sight?
FORTINBRAS
HORATIO
What is it you will see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.
FORTINBRAS
This quarry cries on havoc. O proud Death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck.
AMBASSADOR
The sight is dismal;
And our affairs from England come too late.
The ears are senseless that should give us bearing
To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Where should we have our thanks?
132

HORATIO
Not from his mouth,
Had it th' ability of life to thank you.
He never gave commandment for their death.
But since, so jump upon this bloody question,
You from the Polack wars, and you from England,
Are here arriv'd, give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view;
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts;
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause;
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
FORTINBRAS
Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience.
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune.
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom
Which now, to claim my vantage doth invite me.
HORATIO
Of that I shall have also cause to speak,
And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more.
But let this same be presently perform'd,
Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.
FORTINBRAS
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov'd most royally; and for his passage
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.
[Exeunt marching; after the which a peal of ordnance is
shot off
133

134

Jacobethan Downloads
The Plays of William Shakespeare
Ian Mandleberg
There is widespread agreement among both academics and thespians
that Shakespeare was the greatest dramatist England ever produced:
it is probable that one or another of his plays is staged by
professionals or amateurs somewhere in the English-speaking world
every day of the year – well, possibly excluding some Sundays! His
popularity extends to Germany, Russia, Poland, Italy and even Latin
America.
Shakespeare was highly regarded, moreover, in his own time as well.
In 1598 the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a
group of contemporary playwrights as being “the most excellent” in
both comedy and tragedy, and Shakespeare’s plays were frequently
perfomed at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I. But because they
were regarded – incredibly! - more as templates for dramatic
performance rather than as works of literary merit, they were
published only in pamphlet form during Shakespeare’s own lifetime. It
remained for two of his colleagues with the King’s Men (John
Heminges and Henry Condell) to prepare, in a labour of love, the
substantial First Folio of 36 Shakespearean plays in 1623. This surely
served to reinforce Ben Jonson’s encomium that Shakespeare “was
not of an age but for all time.”
That he deserved such praise is contested, however, by some critics
who find it impossible to imagine that a mere glover’s son from
Stratford-upon-Avon, who left school with “little Latine and less
Greek”, could have been so accomplished a poet and so astute an
observer and chronicler of human foibles and frailties. Several more
learned injdividuals have therefore been proposed instead as the
authors of the First Folio plays, including Francis Bacon and Edward
de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. For his own part, the editor of this
series is happy to accept that Shakespeare does indeed deserve credit
for the plays attributed to him – or, if not, that they were by another
person who bore the same name!
This series, under the general editorship of Ian Mandleberg, aims to
provide reasonably priced acting/rehearsal editions not only of the
Shakespearean canon but also the extant works of most of his
precursors, contemporaries and immediate successors. The plays are
presented in A4 script format – much as though they had just landed
on the desk of a modern literary agent or theatre director. Occasional
footnotes, besides occasionally identifying points of interest, also
provide “translations” of both unfamiliar Elizabethan/Jacobean words
and familiar ones used with unfamiliar connotations.
General Editor Ian Mandleberg