Read To Me Tuesday: an excerpt from Hamlet, Act II, scene II.
Ham. My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! good lads, how do ye both?
Ros. As the indifferent children of the earth.
Guil. Happy in that we are not overhappy; On fortune’s cap we are not the very button.
Ham. Nor the soles of her shoe?
Ros. Neither, my lord.
Ham. Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?
Guil. Faith, her privates we.
Ham. In the secret parts of fortune? O, most true; she is a strumpet. What’s the news?
Ros. None, my lord, but that the world’s grown honest.
Ham. Then is doomsday near: but your news is not true. Let me question more in particular: what have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
Guil. Prison, my lord!
Ham. Denmark is a prison.
Ros. Then is the world one.
Ham. A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
Ros. We think it not so, my lord.
Ham. Why, then, ‘tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so; to me it is a prison.
Ros. Why, then, your ambition makes it one; ‘tis too narrow for your mind.
Ham. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Guil. Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Ham. A dream itself is but a shadow.
Ros. Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
Ham. Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarch and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows? Shall we to the court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason.
Why do a Lady Gaga-themed RTMT when I can just let Christopher Walken do it for me?
Read to Me Tuesday (variations on a theme):
Lady Gaga - Christmas Tree
RTMT: Lady Gaga - Vanity
Wow.
cartoonpenis: I want to see
I really like the song Paparazzi.
Read To Me Tuesday, Lady Gaga Edition: Eh Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)
All. I. Could. Do. To. Keep. From. Laughing.
bravo, sir!
Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1980: 34.
