No Fear Shakespeare
Hamlet
Get this No Fear to go!
Act 4, Scene 7
Original Text | Modern Text | |
Enter CLAUDIUS and
LAERTES
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CLAUDIUS and LAERTES
enter. | |
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CLAUDIUS
Now must your conscience my acquaintance seal,
And you must put me in your heart for friend,
Sith you have heard, and with a knowing ear,
That he which hath your noble father slain
Pursued my life.
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CLAUDIUS
Now you’ve got to acknowledge my innocence and believe
I’m your friend, since you’ve heard and
understood that the man who killed your father was trying to kill
me.
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LAERTES
It well appears. But tell me
Why you proceeded not against these feats,
So criminal and so capital in nature,
As by your safety, wisdom, all things else,
You mainly were stirred up.
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LAERTES
It looks that way. But tell me why you didn’t take
immediate action against his criminal acts, when your own safety and
everything else would seem to call for it.
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CLAUDIUS
Oh, for two
special reasons,
Which may to you perhaps seem much unsinewed,
But yet to me they are strong. The queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks, and for myself—
My virtue or my plague, be it either which—
She’s so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her. The other motive
Why to a public count I might not go,
Is the great love the general gender bear him,
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces—so that my arrows,
Too slightly timbered for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aimed them.
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CLAUDIUS
Oh, for two main reasons which may seem weak to you, but strong to
me. The queen, his mother, is devoted to him. And (for better or
worse, whichever it is) she is such a part of my life and soul that
I can’t live apart from her, any more than a planet can
leave its orbit. The other reason why I couldn’t
prosecute and arrest Hamlet is that the public loves him. In their
affection they overlook all his faults. Like magic, they convert
them into virtues, so whatever I said against him would end up
hurting me, not him.
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