Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, / Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, / Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, / With one auspicious and one dropping eye, / With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole, / Taken to wife;

Do not as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; / Whilst like a puff’d and reckless libertine / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, / And recks not his own rede.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;

For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour, / Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood; / A violet in the youth of primy nature, / Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting; / The perfume and suppliance of a minute; / No more.

I am thy father’s spirit, / Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confin’d to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away.

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’d; / No reckoning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head.

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood, / Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, / Thy knotted and combined locks to part, / And each particular hair to stand on end / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d, / Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on garbage.

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven, / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, / To prick and sting her.