Hamlet
Scene #4 · Act II, Scene 2
Hamlet warmly greets his old school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, calling them "excellent good friends" and engaging in witty banter about Fortune and Denmark as a prison. However, Hamlet quickly grows suspicious and directly confronts them, conjuring them "by the rights of our fellowship" to admit whether they were sent for by the King and Queen. After Guildenstern confesses they were summoned, Hamlet launches into his famous speech about losing his mirth and how the earth seems a "sterile promontory" to him. When the traveling players arrive, Hamlet's mood shifts to genuine enthusiasm as he welcomes them effusively, greeting an old friend among them, joking with a young boy actor, and immediately requesting a passionate speech about Pyrrhus and Priam's slaughter.
This moment reveals Hamlet's acute perceptiveness and his ability to see through deception, as he immediately detects his friends' duplicity despite their protests. His melancholy speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern articulates his profound depression and disillusionment with existence, yet his sudden animation upon the players' arrival demonstrates that theater and performance still engage him, foreshadowing how he will use a play to test Claudius's guilt. The contrast between Hamlet's distrust of his supposed friends and his warm reception of the actors establishes the players as more honest and useful allies in his quest for truth.
Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Act II, Scene 2 · Hamlet
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
Act II, Scene 2 · Hamlet
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, / Black as his purpose, did the night resemble / When he lay couched in the ominous horse, / Hath now this dread and black complexion smear’d / With heraldry more dismal.
Act II, Scene 2
God's bodikin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity.
Act II, Scene 2 · Hamlet
O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!
Act II, Scene 2 · Hamlet