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Hamlet:
I humbly thank you; well, well, well.
Ophelia:
My lord, I have remembrances of yours
That I have longed long to re-deliver.
I pray you, now receive them.
Hamlet:
No, not I.
I never gave you aught.
Ophelia:
My honour’d lord, you know right well you did,
And with them words of so sweet breath compos’d
As made the things more rich; their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.
Hamlet:
Ha, ha! Are you honest?
Ophelia:
My lord?
Hamlet:
Are you fair?
Ophelia:
What means your lordship?
Hamlet:
That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
Ophelia:
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
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.
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.
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 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. 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.
Ophelia:
O help him, you sweet heavens!