O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, that in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit, that from her working all his visage wand, tears in his eyes, destruction in his aspect, a broken voice, and his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit, and all for nothing? For Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? What would he do, had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have? He would drown the stage with tears, and cleave the general ear with horrid speech, make mad the guilty, and appall the freak, and found the ignorant, and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, like John of Dreams, unpregnant of my cause, and can say nothing. No, not for a king, upon whose property and most dear life a damned defeat was made. Am I a coward? Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face, tweaks it by the nose, gives me the lie of the throat as deep to the lungs? Who does me this? Huh? Sloans I should take it, for it cannot be, but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make oppression bitter. For e'er this I should have fattered all the regent kites with this slave's awful bloody bawdy filth, remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain, O vengeance! What an ass am I? This is most brave, that I, the son of a dear father, murdered, prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, must, like a ***, unpack my heart with words, and fall a-cursing, like a very drab, a scully, and fire, and awful, about my brain. I have heard that guilty creatures, sitting at a play, have by the very cunning of the scene been struck so to the soul, that presently they have proclaimed their manifaction. For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ. I'll have these players play, something like the murder of my father before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks, I'll tent him to the quick, if he but blench, I know my course. The spirit that I have seen may be the devil, and the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps out of my weakness and my melancholy, as he is very potent with such spirits, abuses me, to damn me, I'll have crowns more relative than this. The play is the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.