1 But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood.
2 Then what I have to do Will want true colour; tears perchance for blood.
3 Do it, England; For like the hectic in my blood he rages, And thou must cure me.
4 Now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on.
5 To his good friends thus wide I'll ope my arms; And, like the kind life-rendering pelican, Repast them with my blood.
6 And bles'd are those Whose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please.
7 That drop of blood that's calm proclaims me bastard; Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot Even here between the chaste unsmirched brow Of my true mother.
8 Head to foot Now is he total gules, horridly trick'd With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, Bak'd and impasted with the parching streets, That lend a tyrannous and a damned light To their vile murders.
9 For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour, Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood; A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting; The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.
10 I do know, When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows: these blazes, daughter, Giving more light than heat, extinct in both, Even in their promise, as it is a-making, You must not take for fire.
11 I bought an unction of a mountebank So mortal that, but dip a knife in it, Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare, Collected from all simples that have virtue Under the moon, can save the thing from death This is but scratch'd withal.
12 You must not put another scandal on him, That he is open to incontinency; That's not my meaning: but breathe his faults so quaintly That they may seem the taints of liberty; The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind, A savageness in unreclaimed blood, Of general assault.
13 But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.
14 In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets; As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun; and the moist star, Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands, Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.