Hamlet's soliloquy

• Lord Polonius:   I hear him coming: let's withdraw, my lord.
• Exeunt King Claudius and Polonius
• Enter Hamlet
• Hamlet:   To be, or not to be: that is the question:
• Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
• The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
• Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
• And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
• No more; and by a sleep to say we end
• The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
• That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
• Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
• To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
• For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
• When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
• Must give us pause: there's the respect
• That makes calamity of so long life;
• For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
• The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
• The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
• The insolence of office and the spurns
• That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
• When he himself might his quietus make
• With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
• To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
• But that the dread of something after death,
• The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
• No traveller returns, puzzles the will
• And makes us rather bear those ills we have
• Than fly to others that we know not of?
• Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
• And thus the native hue of resolution
• Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
• And enterprises of great pith and moment
• With this regard their currents turn awry,
• And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
• The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
• Be all my sins remember'd.
• Ophelia:   Good my lord,
• How does your honour for this many a day?
• Hamlet:   I humbly thank you; well, well, well.
• Ophelia:   My lord, I have remembrances of yours,