William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition (311 page)

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Authors: William Shakespeare

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‘if’. I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an ‘if’, as ‘If you said so, then I said so’, and they shook hands and swore brothers. Your ‘if’ is the only peacemaker; much virtue in ‘if’.

JAQUES
(to the Duke
) Is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He’s as good at anything, and yet a fool.

DUKE SENIOR He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit.

⌈
Still music
⌉
Enter Hymen with Rosalind and Celia as themselves

HYMEN Then is there mirth in heaven

When earthly things made even
Atone together.
Good Duke, receive thy daughter;
Hymen from heaven brought her,
Yea, brought her hither,
That thou mightst join her hand with his
Whose heart within his bosom is.

ROSALIND (
to the Duke)

To you I give myself, for I am yours.
(
To Orlando)
To you I give myself, for I am yours.

DUKE SENIOR

If there be truth in sight, you are my daughter.

ORLANDO

If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind.

PHOEBE

If sight and shape be true,
Why then, my love adieu!

ROSALIND (to the Duke)

I’ll have no father if you be not he.
(
To Orlando
) I’ll have no husband if you be not he,
(To Phoebe) Nor ne’er wed woman if you be not she.

HYMEN Peace, ho, I bar confusion.

‘Tis I must make conclusion
Of these most strange events.
Here’s eight that must take hands
To join in Hymen’s bands,
If truth holds true contents.

(
To Orlando and Rosalind
)

You and you no cross shall part.

(To Oliver and Celia)

You and you are heart in heart.

(To Phoebe)

You to his love must accord,
Or have a woman to your lord.

(To Touchstone and Audrey)

You and you are sure together
As the winter to foul weather.—
Whiles a wedlock hymn we sing,
Feed yourselves with questioning,
That reason wonder may diminish
How thus we met, and these things finish.
Song
Wedding is great Juno’s crown,
O blessèd bond of board and bed.
‘Tis Hymen peoples every town.
High wedlock then be honoured.
Honour, high honour and renown
To Hymen, god of every town.

DUKE SENIOR (
to Celia)

O my dear niece, welcome thou art to me,
Even daughter; welcome in no less degree.

PHOEBE (
to Silvius
.)

I will not eat my word. Now thou art mine,
Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine.

Enter Jaques de Bois, the second brother

JAQUES DE BOIS

Let me have audience for a word or two.
I am the second son of old Sir Rowland,
That bring these tidings to this fair assembly.
Duke Frederick, hearing how that every day
Men of great worth resorted to this forest,
Addressed a mighty power, which were on foot,
In his own conduct, purposely to take
His brother here, and put him to the sword.
And to the skirts of this wild wood he came
Where, meeting with an old religious man,
After some question with him was converted
Both from his enterprise and from the world,
His crown bequeathing to his banished brother,
And all their lands restored to them again
That were with him exiled. This to be true
I do engage my life.

DUKE SENIOR

Welcome, young man.

Thou offer’st fairly to thy brothers’ wedding:
To one his lands withheld, and to the other
A land itself at large, a potent dukedom.
First, in this forest let us do those ends
That here were well begun, and well begot.
And after, every of this happy number
That have endured shrewd days and nights with us
Shall share the good of our returned fortune
According to the measure of their states.
Meantime, forget this new-fallen dignity
And fall into our rustic revelry.
Play, music, and you brides and bridegrooms all,
With measure heaped in joy to th’ measures fall.

JAQUES

Sir, by your patience. (
To Jaques de Bois
) If I heard you
rightly
The Duke hath put on a religious life
And thrown into neglect the pompous court.

JAQUES DE BOIS He hath.

JAQUES

To him will I. Out of these convertites
There is much matter to be heard and learned.
(To the Duke)
You to your former honour I bequeath;
Your patience and your virtue well deserves it.
(To Orlando)
You to a love that your true faith doth merit;
(To Oliver)
You to your land, and love, and great allies;
(To Silvius)
You to a long and well-deserved bed;
(To Touchstone)
And you to wrangling, for thy loving voyage
Is but for two months victualled.—So, to your
pleasures;
I am for other than for dancing measures.

DUKE SENIOR Stay, Jaques, stay.

JAQUES

To see no pastime, I. What you would have
I’ll stay to know at your abandoned cave. Exit

DUKE SENIOR

Proceed, proceed. We’ll so begin these rites
As we do trust they’ll end, in true delights.
⌈
They dance; then
⌉
exeunt all but Rosalind

Epilogue

ROSALIND (
to the audience
) It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you; and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them—that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

Exit

HAMLET

SEVERAL references from 1589 onwards witness the existence of a play about Hamlet, but Francis Meres did not attribute a play with this title to Shakespeare in 1598. The first clear reference to Shakespeare’s play is its entry in the Stationers’ Register on 26 July 1602 as
The Revenge of Hamlet Prince
[
of
]
Denmark,
when it was said to have been ‘lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servants’. It survives in three versions; their relationship is a matter of dispute on which views about when Shakespeare wrote his play, and in what form, depend. In 1603 appeared an inferior text apparently assembled from actors’ memories; it has only about 2,200 lines. In the following year, as if to put the record straight, James Roberts (to whom the play had been entered in 1602) published it as ‘newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy’. At about 3,800 lines, this is the longest version. The 1623 Folio offers a still different text, some 230 lines shorter than the 1604 version, differing verbally from that at many points, and including about 70 additional lines. It is our belief that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet about 1600, and revised it later; that the 1604 edition was printed from his original papers; that the Folio represents the revised version; and that the 1603 edition represents a very imperfect report of an abridged version of the revision. So our text is based on the Folio; passages present in the 1604 quarto but absent from the Folio are printed as Additional Passages because we believe that, however fine they may be in themselves, Shakespeare decided that the play as a whole would be better without them.

The plot of
Hamlet
originates in a Scandinavian folk-tale told in the twelfth-century
Danish History
written in Latin by the Danish Saxo Grammaticus. François de Belleforest retold it in the fifth volume (1570) of his
Histoires Tragiques,
not translated into English until 1608. Saxo, through Belleforest, provided the basic story of a Prince of Denmark committed to revenge his father’s murder by his own brother (Claudius) who has married the dead man’s widow (Gertrude). As in Shakespeare, Hamlet pretends to be mad, kills his uncle’s counsellor (Polonius) while he is eavesdropping, rebukes his mother, is sent to England under the escort of two retainers (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) who bear orders that he be put to death on arrival, finds the letter containing the orders and alters it so that it is the retainers who are executed, returns to Denmark, and kills the King.

Belleforest’s story differs at some points from Shakespeare’s, and Shakespeare elaborates it, adding, for example, the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, the coming of the actors to Elsinore, the performance of the play through which Hamlet tests his uncle’s guilt, Ophelia’s madness and death, Laertes’ plot to revenge his father’s death, the grave-digger, Ophelia’s funeral, and the characters of Osric and Fortinbras. How much he owed to the lost Hamlet play we cannot tell; what is certain is that Shakespeare used his mastery of a wide range of diverse styles in both verse and prose, and his genius for dramatic effect, to create from these and other sources the most complex, varied, and exciting drama that had ever been seen on the English stage. Its popularity was instant and enduring. The play has had a profound influence on Western culture, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet has himself entered the world of myth.

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY