Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy –

Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips

To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue –

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife

Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;

Blood and destruction shall be so in use,

And dreadful objects so familiar,

That mothers shall but smile when they behold

Their infants quartered with the hands of war,

All pity choked with custom of fell deeds;

And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,

With Ate by his side come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial.

As You Like It

[III, ii, 1–10] Orlando, inspired by love, determines to deck every tree in the forest with his beloved’s name:

Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love,

And thou, thrice-crownèd queen of night, survey

With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,

Thy huntress’ name that my full life doth sway.

O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books

And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character

That every eye which in this forest looks

Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.

Run, run, Orlando; carve on every tree

The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.

Hamlet

[I, ii, 129–59] His father murdered, his mother remarried within weeks, Prince Hamlet rages helplessly against a life which for him holds nothing but disappointment:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on’t! ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. That it should come to this –

But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two!

So excellent a king, that was to this

Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother

That he might not beteem the winds of heaven

Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth,

Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him

As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on. And yet, within a month –

Let me not think on’t. Frailty, thy name is woman.

A little month, or e’er those shoes were old

With which she followed my poor father’s body

Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she –

O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason

Would have mourned longer – married with my uncle,

My father’s brother, but no more like my father

Than I to Hercules. Within a month,

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears

Had left the flushing in her gallèd eyes,

She married. O, most wicked speed, to post