Scene: Denmark.

Hamlet

Act I

Scene I

Elsinore. A platform before the castle.

For this relief much thanks: ’tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

Well, good night.
If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.

O, farewell, honest soldier:
Who hath relieved you?

Bernardo has my place.
Give you good night. Exit.

Say,
What, is Horatio there?

Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.

Sit down awhile;
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story
What we have two nights seen.

Well, sit we down,
And let us hear Bernardo speak of this.

Last night of all,
When yond same star that’s westward from the pole
Had made his course to illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one—

What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? by heaven I charge thee, speak!

How now, Horatio! you tremble and look pale:
Is not this something more than fantasy?
What think you on’t?

Before my God, I might not this believe
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of mine own eyes.

As thou art to thyself:
Such was the very armour he had on
When he the ambitious Norway combated;
So frown’d he once, when, in an angry parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
’Tis strange.

Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour,
With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch.

In what particular thought to work I know not;
But in the gross and scope of my opinion,
This bodes some strange eruption to our state.

Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch
So nightly toils the subject of the land,
And why such daily cast of brazen cannon,
And foreign mart for implements of war;
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week;
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day:
Who is’t that can inform me?

That can I;
At least, the whisper goes so. Our last king,
Whose image even but now appear’d to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate pride,
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet—
For so this side of our known world esteem’d him—
Did slay this Fortinbras; who, by a seal’d compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror:
Against the which, a moiety competent
Was gaged by our king; which had return’d
To the inheritance of Fortinbras,
Had he been vanquisher; as, by the same covenant,
And carriage of the article design’d,
His fell to Hamlet. Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimproved mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Shark’d up a list of lawless resolutes,
For food and diet, to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in’t; which is no other—
As it doth well appear unto our state—
But to recover of us, by strong hand
And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost: and this, I take it,
Is the main motive of our preparations,
The source of this our watch and the chief head
Of this post-haste and romage in the land.

I think it be no other but e’en so:
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch; so like the king
That was and is the question of these wars.