以下的对白是哈姆雷特与情人Ophelia的交谈: OPHELIA: Good my lord,How does your honour for this many a day? HAMLET: I humbly1 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 honoured lord, you know right well you did;And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed.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 discourse2 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 likeness3: this was sometime a paradox4, 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 virtue5 cannot so inoculate6 our old stock but we shall relish7 of it: I loved you not. OPHELIA: I was the more deceived. HAMLET: Get you to a nunnery: why wouldn't you 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 arrant8knaves9, all; believe none of us. Go your 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 no where but in his own house. Farewell. OPHELIA: Oh, help him, you sweet heavens!