Will want true colour—tears perchance for blood.

QUEEN GERTRUDE

To whom do you speak this?

HAMLET Do you see nothing there?

QUEEN GERTRUDE

Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.

HAMLET

Nor did you nothing hear?

QUEEN GERTRUDE No, nothing but ourselves.

HAMLET

Why, look you there. Look how it steals away.

My father, in his habit as he lived.

Look where he goes even now out at the portal.

Exit the Ghost

QUEEN 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 uttered. Bring me to the test,

And I the matter will reword, which madness

Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace

Lay not a flattering unction to your soul

That not your trespass but my madness speaks.

It will but skin and film the ulcerous place

Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,

Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven;

Repent what’s past, avoid what is to come,

And do not spread the compost o’er the weeds

To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue,

For in the fatness of these pursy times

Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg,

Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good.

QUEEN GERTRUDE

O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!

HAMLET

O, throw away the worser part of it,

And live the purer with the other half!

Good night—but go not to mine uncle’s bed.

Assume a virtue if you have it not.

Refrain tonight,

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence. 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 pleased it so

To punish me with this, and this with me,

That I must be their scourge and minister.

I will bestow him, and will answer well

The death I gave him. So, again, good night.

I must be cruel only to be kind.

Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.

QUEEN GERTRUDE What shall I do?

HAMLET

Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:

Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed,

Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse,

And let him for a pair of reechy kisses,

Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,

Make you to ravel all this matter out,

That I essentially am not in madness,

But mad in craft. ’Twere good you let him know,

For who that’s but a queen, fair, sober, wise,

Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib,

Such dear concernings hide? Who would do so?

No, in despite of sense and secrecy,

Unpeg the basket on the house’s top,

Let the birds fly, and, like the famous ape,

To try conclusions in the basket creep,

And break your own neck down.

QUEEN GERTRUDE

Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,

And breath of life, I have no life to breathe

What thou hast said to me.

HAMLET

I must to England.

You know that?

QUEEN GERTRUDE

Alack, I had forgot.

’Tis so concluded on.

HAMLET

This man shall set me packing.

I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.

Mother, good night indeed. This counsellor

Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,

Who was in life a foolish prating knave.—

Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.—

Good night, mother. Exit, tugging in Polonius

4.1 Enter King Claudius to Queen Gertrude

KING CLAUDIUS

There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves;

You must translate. ’Tis fit we understand them.

Where is your son?

QUEEN GERTRUDE

Ah, my good lord, what have I seen tonight!

KING CLAUDIUS What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?

QUEEN GERTRUDE

Mad as the sea and wind when both contend

Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit,

Behind the arras hearing something stir,

He whips his rapier out and cries ‘A rat, a ratl’,

And in his brainish apprehension kills

The unseen good old man.

KING CLAUDIUS

O heavy deed!

It had been so with us had we been there.

His liberty is full of threats to all—

To you yourself, to us, to everyone.

Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?

It will be laid to us, whose providence

Should have kept short, restrained, and out of haunt

This mad young man. But so much was our love,

We would not understand what was most fit,

But, like the owner of a foul disease,

To keep it from divulging, let it feed

Even on the pith of life. Where is he gone?

QUEEN GERTRUDE

To draw apart the body he hath killed,

O’er whom—his very madness, like some ore

Among a mineral of metals base,

Shows itself pure—a weeps for what is done.

KING CLAUDIUS

O Gertrude, come away!

The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch