HAMLET

A monologue from Act I, Scene ii

by: William Shakespeare

HAMLET: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon [1] 'gainst self slaughter. O God, God,

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 [2]. 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 [3] to a satyr, so loving to my mother

That he might not beteem [4] the winds of heaven

Visit her face too roughly. 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 followed my poor father's body

Like Niobe [5], all tears, why she, even she --

O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason [6]

Would have mourned 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 of her gallèd [7] 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.

Purchase this play!

1 divine law

2 possess it completely

3 the sun god

4 allow

5 the daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion of Thebes. She provoked Apollo and Artemis to vengeance by taunting their mother, Leto, with the number and beauty of her own children; Niobe's children were slain and Zeus turned her into stone, in which state she continued to weep over her loss.

6 that lacks understanding of propriety

7 irritated from crying