HAMLET My excellent good friends! How dost thou,
Guildenstern? O, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do ye both?
ROSENCRANTZ As the indifferent233 children of the earth.
GUILDENSTERN Happy234, in that we are not over-happy:
On fortune's cap we are not the very button235.
HAMLET Nor the soles of her shoe?
ROSENCRANTZ Neither, my lord.
HAMLET Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of
her favours239?
GUILDENSTERN Faith, her privates240 we.
HAMLET In the secret parts of fortune? O, most true: she is a
strumpet242. What's the news?
ROSENCRANTZ None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.
HAMLET Then is doomsday near. But your news is not true.
Let me question more in particular245: 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 confines251,
wards252 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