"Hamlet's First Soliloquy"
            
             Hamlet. O! that this too solid flesh would melt,
             Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
             His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
             How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
             Seem to me all the uses of this world.
             Fie on't! Ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
             That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
             Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
             But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
             So excellent a king; that was, to this,
             Hyperion to satyr; so loving to my mother
             That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
             Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
             Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
             As if increase of appetite had grown
             By what it fed on; and yet, within a month,
             Let me not think on't: Frailty, thy name is woman!
             A little month; or ere those shoes were old
             With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
             Like Niobe, all tears; why she, even she, -
             O God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
             Would have mourn'd longer, - married with mine uncle,
             My father's brother but no more like my father
             Than I to Hercules: within a month,
             Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
             Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
             She married. O! most wicked speed, to post
             With such dexterity to incestuous sheets.
             It is not nor it cannot come to good;
             But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!
            
             (Act II, Scene II, lines 129-159)
             Hamlet was written during the first part of the seventeenth century (probably in 1600 or 1601), and was probably first performed in July 1602. It was first published in printed form in 1603 and appeared in an enlarged edition in 1604. Shakespeare borrowed for his plays ideas and stories from earlier literary works, this was common practice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hamlet is the story of a Danish prince whose uncle murders the prince's fat...