“
Hamlet. What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?
Guildenstern. Prison, my lord?
Hamlet. Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz. Then is the world one.
Hamlet. A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.
Rosencrantz. We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet. Why, then ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
Rosencrantz. Why then your ambition makes it one. ’Tis too narrow for your mind.
Hamlet. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and
count myself a king of infinite space, were it not
that I have bad dreams.
Guildenstern. Which dreams indeed are ambition, for
the very substance of the ambitious is merely the
shadow of a dream.
Hamlet. A dream itself is but a shadow.
Rosencrantz. Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
Hamlet. Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows.
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