Page 270 - Shakespeare - Vol. 3

1ST PLAY.

Ay, my lord.

HAMLET
Very well. [To all the Players] Follow that lord, and look you mock him not.
Exeunt Polonius and Players.
[To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern] My good friends, [540] I’ll leave you till

night. You are welcome to Elsinore.

ROSENCRANTZ
Good my lord.
Exeunt [Rosencrantz and Guildenstern].

HAMLET
Ay, so, God buy to you. Now I am alone.
O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

Is it not monstrous that this player here, [545]
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting [550]
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion [555]
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,

And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. [560]

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing − no, not for a king,

Upon whose property and most dear life [565]
A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?