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Mark Twain's Shakespearean travesty
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain has two con men practising
to play actors and delivering "Hamlet's soliloquy, you know, the most
celebrated thing in Shakespeare". Here's their rendition:
To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity
of so long life:
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood
do come to Dunsinane.
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than
fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give
us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's
wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus
which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the
night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black.
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller
returns
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the
native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is
sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered
o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn
awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation
devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope
not thy ponderous and marble jaws.
But get thee to a nunnery
— go!
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