HAMLET         Ha! Ha! Are you honest? OPHELIA        My lord? HAMLET         Are you fair? OPHELIA        What means your lordship? HAMLET         That if you be honest and fair you 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 […]

OPHELIA        My honoured lord, you know right well you did, And with them words of so sweet breath composed As made these 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.          (3.1.96-101) Ophelia has to plough on, she’s started this painful thing, the only way is through. And she can be angry—stop […]

HAMLET                     Soft you now, The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered. OPHELIA                    Good my lord, How does your honour for this many a day? HAMLET         I humbly thank you, well. OPHELIA        My lord, I have remembrances of yours That I have longed long to redeliver. I pray you now receive them. HAMLET         No, not I. I never gave you aught.    […]

CW: suicidal ideation HAMLET         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 pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.            (3.1.82-87) Thus conscience does make cowards of us all: so that’s that. We’re paralysed by our fears and by our scruples, lacking […]

CW: suicidal ideation HAMLET         Who would fardels bear To grunt and sweat under a weary life But that the dread of something after death (The undiscovered 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.      (3.1.75-81) Who would fardels bear—carry a burden, a […]

CW: suicidal ideation HAMLET         For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised 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.   (3.1.69-75) A catalogue of slights, wounds, scars, and deep aches: for who would bear the […]

CW suicidal ideation HAMLET                     … 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.             (3.1.63-68) To die: to sleep—the yearning, so, […]

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 […]

CLAUDIUS                              O, ’tis too true. [aside] How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! The harlot’s cheek beautied with plastering 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 – withdraw, my lord. [King and Polonius hide behind an arras]    (3.1.48-54) O, ’tis too […]

POLONIUS      Ophelia, walk you here. (Gracious, so please you, We will bestow ourselves.) Read on this book That show of such an exercise may colour Your loneliness. We are oft too blame in this – ’Tis too much proved that with devotion’s visage And pious action we do sugar o’er The devil himself.      (3.1.42-48) Ophelia, walk you here: it’s notable that Polonius doesn’t wait for her to […]