quote:

Ham. To be, or not to be, I there's the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
From whence no passenger euer retur'nd,
The vndiscouered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.
But for this, the ioyfull hope of this,
Whol'd beare the scornes and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?
The widow being oppressd, the orphan wrong'd;
The taste of hunger, or a tirants raigne,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweate vnder this weary life,
When that he may his full Quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this indure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which pusles the braine, and doth confound the sence,
Which makes vs rather beare those euilles we haue,
Than flie to others that we know not of.
I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of vs all,
Lady in thy orizons, be all my sinnes remembred.

Hamlet To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

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Originally posted by shufitz:
But Goofy has linked us to page-images from 1476, which show "And tho were bent and blak as any slo." (4th line of page)

quote:

Occasionally I observed that some of Caxton's terms were misunderstood and wrongly rendered, but on the whole, W. de Worde's text is superior to Caxton's, both in exactness and correctness: I can hardly call to mind a misprint. If we take into consideration that in those days philology did not exist, and that no one cared to reproduce a text with scrupulous exactness, the variations are rather improvements upon Caxton's text, for many errors are corrected, words, and even whole passages, often added, which, to conclude from the sense, Caxton's compositors evidently omitted. Prom the point of view of the modern critic it is, however, apparent that owing to these changes Caxton's text had already in 1529 lost its most characteristic peculiarities. The difference of orthography in both texts is so considerable, that to quote all variations in this respect would be almost equal to reproducing the whole of W. de Worde's second edition. But as W. de Worde's orthography is consistent, and all passages quoted are rendered exactly, one can easily form an opinion about his spelling.

[From H Oskar Sommer's Le Morte Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory: The Original Edition of William Caxton (1890)]

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His design was to make a collection of tales which he had previously written, to write more new tales to go with these, and to unite them all into a series by means of connecting links, which should account for the change from one narrator to the next in order. In doing this, he did not work continuously, but inserted the connecting links as they occurred to him, being probably well aware that this was the best way of avoiding an appearance of artificiality. The result is that some links are perfectly supplied, and others not written at all, thus affording a series of fragments or Groups, complete in themselves, but having gaps between them. A full account of these Groups, showing which tales are inseparably linked together, and which are not joined at all, is given in Dr. Furnivall's Temporary Preface to the Six-text Edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, published for the Chaucer Society in 1868. The resulting groups are nine.(p. 375)