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 hearing

To tell him his commandment is fulfilled,

That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

Where should we have our thanks?

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 arrived, give order that these bodies

High on a stage be placed to the view;

And let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world

How these things came about. So shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forced 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 performed,

Even whiles 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 proved most royally; and for his passage,

The soldiers’ music and the rites of war

Speak loudly for him.

Take up the body. Such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

Exeunt, marching, with the bodies; after the which, a peal of ordnance are shot off

ADDITIONAL PASSAGES

A. Just before the second entrance of the Ghost in 1.1 (l. 106.1), Q2 has these additional lines:

BARNARDO

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

At 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 feared 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.

B. Just before the entrance of the Ghost in 1.4 (l. 18.1),

Q2 has these additional lines continuing Hamlet’s speech:

This heavy-headed revel east and west

Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations.

They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase

Soil our addition; and indeed it takes

From our achievements, though performed at height,

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,

His 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 evil

Doth all the noble substance over-daub

To his own scandal.

C. After 1.4.55, Q2 has these additional lines continuing Horatio’s speech:

The very place puts toys of desperation,

Without more motive, into every brain

That looks so many fathoms to the sea

And hears it roar beneath.

D. After 3.2.163, Q2 has this additional couplet concluding the Player Queen’s speech:

Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;

Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.

E. After 3.2.208, Q2 has this additional couplet in the middle of the Player Queen’s speech:

To desperation turn my trust and hope;

An anchor’s cheer in prison be my scope.

F. After ‘this?’ in 3.4.70, Q2 has this more expansive version of Hamlet’s lines of which F retains only ‘what devil . . . blind’:

Sense sure you have,

Else could you not have motion; but sure that sense