Response to Act IV soliloquy

Here is an example of a response to the soliloquy we discussed in class today. Please note that this is one possible response. There are probably thousands of ways to respond to this particular passage. Though I'm not expecting you to necessarily respond in the way I have, I believe there are several points in this response that may be helpful to you in shaping your own. 1) The response discusses most of the lines in the passage; 2) the response selects several metaphors and discusses them; 3) the response links aspects of the passage to other elements of the play as a whole; 4) the response is written in as clear a way as possible. 

In the opening lines of the soliloquy (IV, 4), Hamlet says that every event pushes him to revenge but also shows how off-base his reluctance to act is. He then goes on to philosophize (which he often does) by asking what is the purpose of a human being. He sets up the contrast, which he has repeatedly made earlier in the play regarding his uncle and the queen, between the beast like and godlike nature of humans. This is a central metaphor of the play.

He next, however, applies this thinking to himself, and asked in lines 40 to 41, whether it’s his bestial side or his tendency to think too much (his godlike side) that is keeping him from acting against the king. In lines 44 to 45, he frankly says he doesn’t know why he has failed to act, endowed as he is with every necessary motive and quality to get the job done.

From there, he reasons how the example of Fortinbras shows an almost opposite tendency to act that reveals Hamlet’s own lack of character. This argument is drawn out over the rest of the soliloquy, in which Hamlet shows how Fortinbras’s willingness to attack Poland is a willingness to risk all over an “eggshell” (line 53) — a metaphor that compares the Polish field of battle to an eggshell, that is, to something of no great substance, value, or use. He then relates how he himself will “let all sleep” (line 59), despite the far greater damages to honor and moral right that he has sustained in the murder of his father. This metaphor is extended when he goes on to say that Fortinbras’s soldiers will go to their “graves like beds” and fight over a plot of land that doesn’t even have room to bury all the dead (line 64). 

All of this may be linked back to the "to be or not to be" soliloquy in which Hamlet develops the metaphor of death as sleep. Yet Hamlet is doomed to sleep (as in action) while the soldiers go to actual death for nothing. The soliloquy ends quite oddly with Hamlet saying “my thoughts be bloody” — thus even in telling himself he will act, he is locked in his thoughts (he does not say “my deeds be bloody” — and anyway he is leaving Denmark, presumably further still from his revenge.