1 My lord, upon the platform where we watch.
2 Follow her close; give her good watch, I pray you.
3 I will watch tonight; Perchance 'twill walk again.'
4 If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus, The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.
5 Thus twice before, and jump at this dead hour, With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch.
6 Why, let the strucken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play; For some must watch, while some must sleep, So runs the world away.
7 Two nights together had these gentlemen, Marcellus and Barnardo, on their watch In the dead waste and middle of the night, Been thus encounter'd.
8 And this, I take it, Is the main motive of our preparations, The source of this our watch, and the chief head Of this post-haste and rummage in the land.
9 Therefore I have entreated him along With us to watch the minutes of this night, That if again this apparition come He may approve our eyes and speak to it.
10 Break we our watch up, and by my advice, Let us impart what we have seen tonight Unto young Hamlet; for upon my life, This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.
11 I think it be no other but e'en so: Well may it sort that this portentous figure Comes armed through our watch so like the King That was and is the question of these wars.
12 This to me In dreadful secrecy impart they did, And I with them the third night kept the watch, Where, as they had deliver'd, both in time, Form of the thing, each word made true and good, The apparition comes.
13 Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch So nightly toils the subject of the land, And why such daily cast of brazen cannon And foreign mart for implements of war; Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task Does not divide the Sunday from the week.