Hamlet: Act IV, Scene iv
Hamlet Act 4, Scene 4. Hamlet
(This text is featured in our interviews with Eric Tucker and David Carl)
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- How all occasions do inform against me
- And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
- If his chief good and market of his time
- Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
- Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
- Looking before and after, gave us not
- That capability and godlike reason
- To fust in us unus’d. Now, whether it be
- Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
- Of thinking too precisely on th’ event,
- A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
- And ever three parts coward,- I do not know
- Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’
- Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
- To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me.
- Witness this army of such mass and charge,
- Led by a delicate and tender prince,
- Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff’d,
- Makes mouths at the invisible event,
- Exposing what is mortal and unsure
- To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
- Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
- Is not to stir without great argument,
- But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
- When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
- That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
- Excitements of my reason and my blood,
- And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
- The imminent death of twenty thousand men
- That for a fantasy and trick of fame
- Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
- Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
- Which is not tomb enough and continent
- To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
- My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
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