But let it be. Horatio, I am dead;
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
Never believe it:
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane:
Here’s yet some liquor left.
As thou’rt a man,
Give me the cup: let go; by heaven, I’ll have’t.
O good Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. March afar off, and shot within. What warlike noise is this?
Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland,
To the ambassadors of England gives
This warlike volley.
O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence. Dies.
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
Why does the drum come hither? March within.
What is it ye would see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.
This quarry cries on havoc. O proud death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
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 fulfill’d,
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead:
Where should we have our thanks?
Not from his mouth,
Had it the 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 the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ heads: all this can I
Truly deliver.
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.
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 perform’d,
Even while men’s minds are wild; lest more mischance,
On plots and errors, happen.
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 bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot. A dead march. Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.
Endnotes
-
In an effort to create a complete form of Hamlet, William George Clark and William Aldis Wright combined parts of Hamlet from both the Second Quarto and First Folio. This portion of dialogue originates from the Second Quarto but the verse line is missing a word. The printing of the Second Quarto skips a word making the line read “And either the devil, or throw him out.” Shakespeare’s original intent has been lost, and modern scholars have a variety of theories on what it might have been. Scholars have proposed “master” as a possible emendation. Other guesses made by scholars include “curb,” “lodge,” “reign,” and “seize.” —Emma Sweeney ↩
-
Here we encounter another complication due to combining two versions of Hamlet. In the First Folio, the text is missing almost four lines of verse. These lines have been restored from the Second Quarto but the print was not perfect: a portion of a verse line was not completed. Scholars have proposed “So haply slander—” as a possible emendation. Another guess made by scholars is “So dreaded slander—.” —Emma Sweeney ↩
Colophon
Hamlet
was published in 1600 by
William Shakespeare.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Emma Sweeney,
and is based on a transcription produced in 1993 by
Jeremy Hylton
for the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and on digital scans available at the
HathiTrust Digital Library.
Emendations to the text are provided by
Open Source Shakespeare.
The cover page is adapted from
Ophelia,
a painting completed in 1851 by
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