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Hamlet:
We shall know by this fellow: the players cannot keep counsel; they’ll tell all.
Ophelia:
Will they tell us what this show meant?
Hamlet:
Ay, or any show that you’ll show him. Be not you ashamed to show, he’ll not shame to tell you what it means.
Ophelia:
You are naught, you are naught: I’ll mark the play.
Prologue:
For us, and for our tragedy,
Here stooping to your clemency,
We beg your hearing patiently.
Hamlet:
Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?
Ophelia:
’Tis brief, my lord.
Hamlet:
As woman’s love.
Enter a King and a Queen.
Player King:
Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone round
Neptune’s salt wash and Tellus’ orbed ground,
And thirty dozen moons with borrow’d sheen
About the world have times twelve thirties been,
Since love our hearts, and Hymen did our hands
Unite commutual in most sacred bands.
Player Queen:
So many journeys may the sun and moon
Make us again count o’er ere love be done.
But, woe is me, you are so sick of late,
So far from cheer and from your former state,
That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust,
Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must:
For women’s fear and love holds quantity,
In neither aught, or in extremity.
Now what my love is, proof hath made you know,
And as my love is siz’d, my fear is so.
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.
Player King:
Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too:
My operant powers their functions leave to do:
And thou shalt live in this fair world behind,
Honour’d, belov’d, and haply one as kind
For husband shalt thou—
Player Queen:
O confound the rest.
Such love must needs be treason in my breast.
In second husband let me be accurst!
None wed the second but who kill’d the first.
Hamlet:
(Aside.) Wormwood, wormwood.
Player Queen:
The instances that second marriage move
Are base respects of thrift, but none of love.
A second time I kill my husband dead,
When second husband kisses me in bed.