My excellent good friends! How dost thou

Hamlet
My excellent good friends! How dost thou,
Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do
you both?

Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing
either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Rosencrantz
As the indifferent children of the earth.
Guildenstern
Happy in that we are not overhappy.
On Fortune’s cap, we are not the very button.
Hamlet
Nor the soles of her shoe?
Rosencrantz
Neither, my lord.
Hamlet
Then you live about her waist, or in the
middle of her favors?
Guildenstern
Faith, her privates we.
Hamlet
In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true!
She is a strumpet. What 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 particular. 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.
Shall we to th’ court? For, by my fay, I cannot reason.
Rosencrantz/Guildenstern
We’ll wait upon you.
Hamlet
No such matter. I will not sort you with the
rest of my servants, for, to speak to you like an
honest man, I am most dreadfully attended. But,
in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at
Elsinore?
Rosencrantz
To visit you, my lord, no other occasion.
Hamlet
Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks;
but I thank you, and sure, dear friends, my thanks
are too dear a halfpenny. Were you not sent for?
Is it your own inclining? Is it a free visitation?
Come, come, deal justly with me. Come, come; nay, speak.
Guildenstern
What should we say, my lord?
Hamlet
Anything but to th’ purpose. You were sent
for, and there is a kind of confession in your looks
which your modesties have not craft enough to
color. I know the good king and queen have sent for you.
Rosencrantz
To what end, my lord?
Hamlet
That you must teach me. But let me conjure
you by the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy
of our youth, by the obligation of our ever-preserved
love, and by what more dear a better
proposer can charge you withal: be even and direct
with me whether you were sent for or no.
Rosencrantz, to Guildenstern
What say you?
Hamlet, aside
Nay, then, I have an eye of you.—If
you love me, hold not off.
Guildenstern
My lord, we were sent for.