This scene provides a crucial foil between Hamlet and Fortinbras that drives the play's central tension between action vs. inaction. Both princes have lost fathers and seek to restore family honor, but their approaches could not be more different. Fortinbras acts decisively, leading twenty thousand men to their deaths for a worthless patch of ground, while Hamlet continues to delay his revenge despite having "cause and will and strength and means."Hamlet's final soliloquy represents the culmination of his self-analysis throughout the play. The speech reveals his acute awareness of his own procrastination and his inability to understand why he remains inactive. The metaphor of mankind's "god-like reason" going unused ("To fust in us unused") suggests that Hamlet sees his overthinking as a corruption of human nature's highest faculty. His question "What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed?" echoes themes of human dignity and purpose that run throughout the play.The dramatic irony is profound: while Hamlet admires Fortinbras's willingness to fight "even for an egg-shell," the audience recognizes that such mindless action may be as problematic as Hamlet's excessive contemplation. Shakespeare presents both extremes—rash action and paralytic...
Scene Summary
Fortinbras leads his army across Denmark toward Poland, having received permission from Claudius. When Hamlet encounters the army, he questions a captain about their mission and learns they are going to fight for a worthless piece of land in Poland. The captain explains that the territory is so insignificant that he wouldn't pay five ducats to farm it, yet twenty thousand men will die fighting over it.
This encounter triggers Hamlet's final and most self-critical soliloquy. Seeing Fortinbras leading thousands of men into battle for nothing more than honor, Hamlet berates himself for his continued inaction despite having far greater cause for revenge. He resolves that from now on, his thoughts must be "bloody, or be nothing worth," finally committing himself to decisive action against Claudius.
"How all occasions do inform against me, / And spur my dull revenge!" — Hamlet (4.4.32-33)
"What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more." — Hamlet (4.4.33-35)
"Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after, gave us not / That capability and god-like reason / To fust in us unused." — Hamlet (4.4.36-39)
"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." — Hamlet (4.4.43-46)
"Witness this army of such mass and charge / Led by a delicate and tender prince" — Hamlet (4.4.47-48)
"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." — Hamlet (4.4.53-56)
"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?" — Hamlet (4.4.56-59)
"O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" — Hamlet (4.4.65-66)
"We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name." — Captain (4.4.18-19)
"Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats / Will not debate the question of this straw" — Hamlet (4.4.25-26)
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