Ophelia tries to return Hamlet’s gifts, and he turns their meeting into an interrogation about love, honesty and her father.
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Playing age 20-35
Wants: Find out whether Ophelia is speaking freely and force her to stop pretending.
Up against: He wants to believe her while suspecting the court is using her.
Playing age 17-25
Wants: Return the gifts and get a truthful response from the man she knew.
Up against: Her father has arranged the encounter, and Hamlet keeps changing the terms.
INT. ELSINORE - ROOM IN THE CASTLE - DAY
Enter Hamlet.
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 That I have longed long to re-deliver. I pray you, now receive them.
Hamlet
No, not I. I never gave you aught.
Ophelia
My honour’d lord, you know right well you did, And with them words of so sweet breath compos’d As made the things more rich; their perfume lost, Take these again; for to the noble mind Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. There, my lord.
Hamlet
Ha, ha! Are you honest?
Ophelia
My lord?
Hamlet
Are you fair?
Ophelia
What means your lordship?
Hamlet
That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
Ophelia
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
Hamlet
Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.
Ophelia
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
Hamlet
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not.
Ophelia
I was the more deceived.
Hamlet
Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father?
Ophelia
At home, my lord.
Hamlet
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house. Farewell.
Ophelia
O help him, you sweet heavens!
Hamlet
If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go: farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go; and quickly too. Farewell.
Ophelia
O heavenly powers, restore him!
Hamlet
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t, it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages. Those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go.
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