All Chapters of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Enter King, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.KING. I like him not, nor stands it safe with us To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you, I your commission will forthwith dispatch, And he to England shall along with you. The terms of our estate may not endure Hazard so near us as doth hourly grow Out of his lunacies.GUILDENSTERN. We will ourselves provide. Most holy and religious fear it is To keep those many many bodies safe That live and feed upon your Majesty.ROSENCRANTZ. The single and peculiar life is bound With all the strength and armour of the mind, To keep itself from ’noyance; but much more That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest The lives of many. The cease of majesty Dies not alone; but like a gulf doth draw What’s near it with it. It is a massy wheel Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis’d and adjoin’d; which when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boist’rous ruin. Never a

Enter King, Queen, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.KING. There’s matter in these sighs. These profound heaves You must translate. ’tis fit we understand them. Where is your son?QUEEN. Bestow this place on us a little while.[To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who go out.]Ah, my good lord, what have I seen tonight!KING. What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?QUEEN. Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit Behind the arras hearing something stir, Whips out his rapier, cries ‘A rat, a rat!’ And in this brainish apprehension kills The unseen good old man.KING. O heavy deed! It had been so with us, had we been there. His liberty is full of threats to all; To you yourself, to us, to everyone. Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answer’d? It will be laid to us, whose providence Should have kept short, restrain’d, and out of haunt This mad young man. But so much was our love We would not understand what was most fit, But like the owner of a foul dis

Enter King, attended.KING. I have sent to seek him and to find the body. How dangerous is it that this man goes loose! Yet must not we put the strong law on him: He’s lov’d of the distracted multitude, Who like not in their judgment, but their eyes; And where ’tis so, th’offender’s scourge is weigh’d, But never the offence. To bear all smooth and even, This sudden sending him away must seem Deliberate pause. Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are reliev’d, Or not at all.Enter Rosencrantz.How now? What hath befall’n?ROSENCRANTZ. Where the dead body is bestow’d, my lord, We cannot get from him.KING. But where is he?ROSENCRANTZ. Without, my lord, guarded, to know your pleasure.KING. Bring him before us.ROSENCRANTZ. Ho, Guildenstern! Bring in my lord.Enter Hamlet and Guildenstern.KING. Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?HAMLET. At supper.KING. At supper? Where?HAMLET. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en

Enter Queen, Horatio and a Gentleman.QUEEN. I will not speak with her.GENTLEMAN. She is importunate, indeed distract. Her mood will needs be pitied.QUEEN. What would she have?GENTLEMAN. She speaks much of her father; says she hears There’s tricks i’ th’ world, and hems, and beats her heart, Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt, That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing, Yet the unshaped use of it doth move The hearers to collection; they aim at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts, Which, as her winks, and nods, and gestures yield them, Indeed would make one think there might be thought, Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily. ’Twere good she were spoken with, for she may strew Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.QUEEN. Let her come in.[Exit Gentleman.]To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss. So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.Enter Ophe

Enter King and Laertes.KING. Now must your conscience my acquittance seal, And you must put me in your heart for friend, Sith you have heard, and with a knowing ear, That he which hath your noble father slain Pursu’d my life.LAERTES. It well appears. But tell me Why you proceeded not against these feats, So crimeful and so capital in nature, As by your safety, wisdom, all things else, You mainly were stirr’d up.KING. O, for two special reasons, Which may to you, perhaps, seem much unsinew’d, But yet to me they are strong. The Queen his mother Lives almost by his looks; and for myself,— My virtue or my plague, be it either which,— She’s so conjunctive to my life and soul, That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her. The other motive, Why to a public count I might not go, Is the great love the general gender bear him, Who, dipping all his faults in their affection, Would like the spring that turneth wood to stone, Convert his gyves to graces; so that my ar