With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It is not, nor it cannot come to good.

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.

[I, v, 92–112] Conjured by his father’s ghost to ‘Remember’, Hamlet swears by every power imaginable never to forget:

O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?

And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart.

And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,

But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

In this distracted globe. Remember thee?

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past

That youth and observation copied there,

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain,

Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!

O most pernicious woman!

O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!

My tables – meet it is I set it down

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.

(He writes)

So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word:

It is ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me’.

I have sworn’t.

[II, ii, 547–603] An actor’s performance having brought humiliatingly home to him his own inability to take real-life action in avenging his father, Hamlet nevertheless sees an opportunity to use the theatre as a means to advance his own personal plot:

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

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? Who does me this?

Ha, ’swounds, I should take it. For it cannot be

But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall

To make oppression bitter, or ere this

I should ha’ fatted all the region kites

With this slave’s offal. Bloody bawdy villain!