1 Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
2 Thy state is the more gracious; for 'tis a vice to know him.'
3 But, woe is me, you are so sick of late, So far from cheer and from your former state, That I distrust you.
4 If he love her not, And be not from his reason fall'n thereon, Let me be no assistant for a state, But keep a farm and carters.
5 In what particular thought to work I know not; But in the gross and scope of my opinion, This bodes some strange eruption to our state.
6 Nor do we find him forward to be sounded, But with a crafty madness keeps aloof When we would bring him on to some confession Of his true state.
7 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.
8 Now follows, that you know young Fortinbras, Holding a weak supposal of our worth, Or thinking by our late dear brother's death Our state to be disjoint and out of frame, Colleagued with this dream of his advantage, He hath not fail'd to pester us with message, Importing the surrender of those lands Lost by his father, with all bonds of law, To our most valiant brother.
9 Now, sir, young Fortinbras, Of unimproved mettle, hot and full, Hath in the skirts of Norway, here and there, Shark'd up a list of lawless resolutes, For food and diet, to some enterprise That hath a stomach in't; which is no other, As it doth well appear unto our state, But to recover of us by strong hand And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands So by his father lost.
10 Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, Th'imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy, With one auspicious and one dropping eye, With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole, Taken to wife; nor have we herein barr'd Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone With this affair along.'