[Exit.]
Ros.
Will’t please you go, my lord?
Ham.
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 the 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 egg-shell. 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 kill’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.]
Scene V. Elsinore. A room in the Castle.
[Enter Queen and Horatio.]
Queen.
I will not speak with her.
Gent.
She is importunate; indeed distract:
Her mood will needs be pitied.
Queen.
What would she have?
Gent.
She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There’s tricks i’ the 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.
’Twere good she were spoken with; for she may
strew
Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.
Queen.
Let her come in.
[Exit Horatio.]
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.