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 god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the 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 egg-shell. 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!"(Act 4, Scene IV)
Everything is pointing to revenge! I stand here and have not killed my uncle, who murdered my father, took mis throne, and defiled my mother! I have so many reasons to have killed him already, along with the proper motivation, but I cannot bring myself to do it. Fortinbras marches with twenty thousand men to fight over a piece of land that is not even big enough to bury them all, yet I cannot kill my father's murderer. All of my thoughts from now on must be violent, or I shall not consider them at all.
Here, I am holding the skull of a jester that I knew when I was just a boy. He was close to my father and always entertained me. I realize now that all men eventually return to the dust from which all men originally came from.
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