Page 277 - Shakespeare - Vol. 3

your beauty.

OPHELIA
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? [110]

HAMLET
Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it
is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness.
This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you

once. [115]

OPHELIA
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock
but we shall relish of it. I loved you not.

OPHELIA
I was the more deceived. [120]

HAMLET
Get thee to a nunnery. Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am

myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful,
ambitious, with more offences at [125] my beck than I have thoughts to put
them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should

such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant
knaves all, believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. [130] Where’s your
father?

OPHELIA
At home, my lord.

HAMLET
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s

own house. Farewell.