hamlet test

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt (solid/sullied: text uncertainty)
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!

1

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; 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 beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly.

1

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't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she--

1

O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd 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
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, 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.

1

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! 560
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit conceit=imagination
That from her working all his visage wanned, wanned=paled
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, 565
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do, 570
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, cleave=cut in two
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,         appall the free=make the innocent feel guilty
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed 575
The very faculties of eyes and ears

2

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, muddy-mettled=weak spirited
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,         peak/Like John-a-dreams=mope like a dreamer
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life 580
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across? pate=head
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? who does me this? 585
Ha!
'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be Swounds=by his (Christ’s) wounds (an oath)
But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall pigeon-livered=gentle like a pigeon
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites 590 region kites=scavenger birds
With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain! offal=guts / bawdy=indecent (sexual)
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,drab=prostitute
A scullion! Fie upon't! foh! About, my brain!scullion=low-ranking kitchen servant
Hum.

2

I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions; malefactions=sins/crimes
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak 605
With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench, blench=flinch
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen 610
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds 615
More relative than this: the play 's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

2

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; 60
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.

3

To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; 65 rub= impediment
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,           mortal coil=turmoil; body
Must give us pause: there's the respect respect=consideration
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 70
The 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 the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make 75 quietus=completion
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, bodkin=dagger; fardels=burdens
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

3

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn bourn=region
No travelers returns, puzzles the will 80
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Then fly to others that we know not of?
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, 85
And enterprises of great pitch and moment pitch=height
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--

3

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 market=profit
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. 35
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,             discourse=understanding
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be fust=grow moldy

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple40     craven scruple=cowardly hesitation
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 means45
To do't.

4

Examples gross as earth exhort me: gross=large; obvious
Witness this army of such mass and charge charge=expense
Led by a delicate and tender prince, delicate and tender=young and untried
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
Makes mouths at the invisible event, 50 full line=scorns the unknown outcome
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 55
When honour's at the stake.

4

How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood, excitements=incentives
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men, 60

That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,     fantasy..fame=illusion & trifle of  reputation
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent continent=container (grave)
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth, 65
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

4