Hamlet in the Golden Vale

Witness this army

of such mass and charge

led by a delicate and tender prince,

whose spirit with divine ambition puffed

makes mouths at the invisible event,

exposing what is mortal and unsure

to all that fortune, death, and danger dare,

even for an egg shell.

- Stand ho. Who's there?

- Friends to this ground and liegemen to the Dane.

Give you good night.

Who hath relieved you?

Bernardo hath my place.

Give you good night.

Holla, Bernardo.

- Say, what, and is Horatio there?

A piece of him.

Welcome, Horatio.

Welcome, good Marcellus.

- What, has this thing appeared again tonight?

- I have seen nothing.

- 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 comes,

he may approve our eyes and speak to it.

'Twill not appear.

- Sit down a while and let us once again

assail your ears that are so fortified against our story

what we have two nights seen.

Peace, break thee off.

Look where it comes again.

in the same figure of the king what's dead.

- I'll cross it though it blast me.

Stay, illusion.

If thou hast any sound or use of voice, speak to me.

If there be any good thing to be done

that may to thee do ease and grace to me,

speak to me.

If thou art privy to thy country's fate

which happily foreknowing may avoid.

'Tis here.

'Tis here.

'Tis gone.

- 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,

the 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 barred your better wisdoms,

which have freely gone with this affair along.

For all, our thanks,

so much for him,

and now Laertes.

What's the news with you?

You told us of some suit.

What wouldst thou beg, Laertes,

that shall not be my offer, not thy asking?

- My dread lord, your leave and favor to return to France,

from whence though willingly I came

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.

- Have you your father's leave?

What says Polonius?

Hath, my lord, rung from me

my slow leave by labors and petition,

and at last, upon his will, I sealed my hard consent.

I do beseech you give him leave to go.

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--

- A little more than kin and less than kind.

- How is it the clouds still hang on you?

Not so, my lord.

I am too much in the sun.

Good Hamlet,

do not forever with thy veiled lids

seek for thy noble father in the dust.

Thou knowest 'tis common.

All that lives must die,

passing through nature to eternity.

Aye, madam.

It is common.

- If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?

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 forced 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 passes show,

these but the trappings and the suits of woe.

'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 persevere in obstinate condolement

is a course of impious stubbornness.

'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 corpse till he that died today,

"This must be so."

We pray you, throw to earth this unprevailing woe

and think of us as of a father,

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.

- Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.

I pray thee, stay with us.

Go not to Wittenberg.

- I shall in all my best obey you, madam.

Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,

thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

or that the everlasting had not fixed

his canon against self-slaughter.

Oh, God.

God.

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

seem to me all the uses of this world.

Fie on it.

Fie.

'Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed.

All 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 between 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 it.

Frailty, thy name is woman.

A little month, or ere those shoes were old

with which you followed my poor father's body,

like Niobe, all tears,

why she, even she,

oh God, a beast that wants discourse of reason

would have mourned 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

have left the flushing in her galled eyes,

she married.

- You don't want veggies (mumbling)?

- Oh 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.