A little month, or ere those shoes were old / With which she followed my poor father’s body / Like Niobe, all tears.—

O God! A beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourn’d longer,—married with mine uncle, / My father’s brother; but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules.

Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.

His greatness weigh’d, his will is not his own; / For he himself is subject to his birth: / He may not, as unvalu’d persons do, / Carve for himself; for on his choice depends / The sanctity and health of this whole state;

Ay, springes to catch woodcocks. I do know, / When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul / Lends the tongue vows: these blazes, daughter, / Giving more light than heat, extinct in both, / Even in their promise, as it is a-making, / You must not take for fire.

I do not set my life at a pin’s fee; / And for my soul, what can it do to that, / Being a thing immortal as itself?

What may this mean, / That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, / Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon, / Making night hideous, and we fools of nature / So horridly to shake our disposition / With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?

So oft it chances in particular men / That for some vicious mole of nature in them, / As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty, / Since nature cannot choose his origin, / By their o’ergrowth of some complexion, / Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason;

O Hamlet, what a falling off was there, / From me, whose love was of that dignity / That it went hand in hand even with the vow / I made to her in marriage; and to decline / Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor / To those of mine.

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole / With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, / And in the porches of my ears did pour / The leperous distilment,