Andrew Williams - Textausgabe + Lektüreschlüssel. William Shakespeare - Hamlet

POLONIUS. My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET. God’s bodkin, man, much better! Use every man after his desert, and who shall ’scape whipping? 22Use them after your own honour and dignity – the less they deserve the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in.

POLONIUS. Come, sirs.

[Goes to the door.]

HAMLET. Follow him, friends, we’ll hear a play to-morrow.

[As they start to follow Polonius, Hamlet takes the First Player aside.]

Dost thou hear me, old friend, can you play (The Murder of Gonzago)?

FIRST PLAYER. Ay, my lord.

[90] HAMLET. We’ll ha’t to-morrow night. You could for a need study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and insert in’t, 23could you not?

FIRST PLAYER. Ay, my lord.

HAMLET. Very well. Follow that lord, and look you mock him not.

Exeunt Polonius and Players.

[To Rosencrantz and Guildenstern] My good friends, I’ll leave you till night. You are welcome to Elsinore.

ROSENCRANTZ. Good my lord …

HAMLET. Ay, so, God bye to you.

Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Now I am alone.

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his own conceit

That from her working all his visage wanned,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

With forms to his conceit; and all for nothing!

For Hecuba!

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

That he should weep for her? What would he do,

Had he the motive and the cue for passion

That I have? He would drown the stage with tears

[91] And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,

Make mad the guilty and appal the free,

Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed

The very faculties of eyes and ears.

Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak

Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,

And can say nothing – no, not for a king,

Upon whose property and most dear life

A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?

Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,

Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,

Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’th’ throat

As deep as to the lungs? 24who does me this?

Ha, ’swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be

But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall 25

To make oppression bitter, or ere this

[92] I should ha’ fatted all the region kites

With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

Why, what an ass am I. This is most brave,

That I, the son of a dear father murdered,

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

Must like a whore unpack my heart with words

And fall a-cursing like a very drab,

A stallion. Fie upon’t! foh!

About, my brains: hum … I have heard

That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaimed their malefactions:

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak

With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players

Play something like the murder of my father

Before mine uncle, I’ll observe his looks,

I’ll tent him to the quick, if ’a do blench

I know my course … The spirit that I have seen

May be a devil, and the devil hath power

[93] T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps

Out of my weakness and my melancholy –

As he is very potent with such spirits –

Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds

More relative than this: the play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

Exit.

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