Hamlet — Act 4, Scene 4

original text and modern English, side by side

A plain in Denmark · Fortinbras, Captain, Hamlet, Rosencrantz

Fortinbras marches his army across Denmark on the way to fight Poland, and Hamlet, being escorted to the ship for England, stops the Norwegian captain and learns that twenty thousand men are about to die over a worthless patch of land. Left alone, he delivers his last soliloquy, "How all occasions do inform against me," measuring his own inaction against their pointless courage. He ends by swearing that from now on his thoughts will be bloody or worth nothing — and then leaves Denmark without having acted at all.

Enter Fortinbras and Forces marching.

Fortinbras

Go, Captain, from me greet the Danish king.

Captain, go and give the Danish king my greetings.

Tell him that by his license, Fortinbras

Craves the conveyance of a promis’d march

Over his kingdom.

Tell him that Fortinbras asks his permission for the safe passage he promised us across his kingdom.

You know the rendezvous.

You know where we're meeting.

If that his Majesty would aught with us,

We shall express our duty in his eye;

If his Majesty wants anything from us, we'll come and pay our respects in person

And let him know so.

— tell him that too.

Captain

I will do’t, my lord.

I'll see to it, my lord.

Fortinbras

Go softly on.

Move out slowly.

Exeunt all but the Captain.

Enter Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern &c.

Hamlet

Good sir, whose powers are these?

Excuse me, sir — whose troops are these?

Captain

They are of Norway, sir.

Norway's, sir.

Hamlet

How purpos’d, sir, I pray you?

And what's their objective, if I may ask?

Captain

Against some part of Poland.

Some part of Poland.

Hamlet

Who commands them, sir?

Who's in command?

Captain

The nephew to old Norway, Fortinbras.

Old Norway's nephew, Fortinbras.

Hamlet

Goes it against the main of Poland, sir,

Or for some frontier?

Are they going against the heart of Poland, sir, or just some border territory?

Captain

Truly to speak, and with no addition,

We go to gain a little patch of ground

That hath in it no profit but the name.

To be honest, without any exaggeration: we're going to take a little scrap of land that's worth nothing except the name of it.

To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;

I wouldn't rent it for five ducats — five —

Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole

A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.

and if it were sold outright it wouldn't bring Norway or Poland a penny more.

Hamlet

Why, then the Polack never will defend it.

Then the Poles will never bother defending it.

Captain

Yes, it is already garrison’d.

They already have. There's a garrison on it.

Hamlet

Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats

Will not debate the question of this straw!

Two thousand lives and twenty thousand ducats won't settle an argument over this worthless straw.

This is th’imposthume of much wealth and peace,

That inward breaks, and shows no cause without

Why the man dies.

This is what too much wealth and too much peace produce — an abscess that bursts inside a man and kills him with nothing showing on the outside.

I humbly thank you, sir.

Thank you very much, sir.

Captain

God b’ wi’ you, sir.

God be with you, sir.

Exit.

Rosencrantz

Will’t please you go, my lord?

Shall we go, my lord?

Hamlet

I’ll be with you straight.

I'll catch up with you.

Go a little before.

Go on ahead.

Exeunt all but Hamlet.

Hamlet

How all occasions do inform against me,

And spur my dull revenge.

Everything that happens accuses me and prods my sluggish revenge along.

What is a man

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed?

What is a man, if the best use he makes of his time is sleeping and eating?

A beast, no more.

An animal, nothing 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.

Surely whoever made us with such a wide-ranging mind, able to look backward and forward, didn't give us that power and that godlike reasoning to let it rot inside us unused.

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.

Now, whether it's animal forgetfulness or some cowardly hesitation that comes from analysing the outcome too finely — a thought that, if you cut it in four, is one part wisdom and three parts fear — I don't know why I'm still alive saying "this has to be done," when I have the reason, the will, the strength and the means to do it.

Examples gross as earth exhort me,

Examples as huge and obvious as the earth push me on.

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.

Look at this army — enormous, expensive, led by a refined young prince whose spirit is so swollen with heaven-sent ambition that he makes faces at the outcome he can't see, staking everything mortal and uncertain against luck, death and danger, and all 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.

Real greatness isn't refusing to move without a great cause; it's finding a cause worth fighting over in a straw, when honour is on the line.

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?

So where does that leave me, with a murdered father and a defiled mother, reasons to fire up both my mind and my blood, and I let it all sleep — while to my shame I watch twenty thousand men march to their deaths for a fantasy and a scrap of reputation, going to their graves as if they were beds, fighting for a piece of ground too small to hold the armies contesting it, too small even to be a big enough grave to bury the dead in?

O, from this time forth,

My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.

From now on, my thoughts had better be bloody, or they're worth nothing.

Exit.

Hamlet Act 4, Scene 4 summary

Who appears in this scene

Fortinbras, Captain, Hamlet, Rosencrantz — A plain in Denmark.

Famous lines in Hamlet Act 4, Scene 4, explained

“We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name.” (line 19): The captain is unusually blunt with a stranger: the land his army is about to die for is worthless, and everyone in the ranks knows it. This flat piece of information is what sets off Hamlet's soliloquy, and it matters that it comes from a working soldier rather than a commander — nobody is selling the war. Shakespeare gives the audience the truth about Fortinbras's campaign before Hamlet starts admiring it.
“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.” (line 34): "Inform against" is a legal phrase — to give evidence against someone — so Hamlet imagines every event in the play testifying that he has failed to act. His argument is that reason is what separates a person from an animal, and that reason unused is worse than no reason at all. This is his fourth and last soliloquy, and it is the one where he stops asking whether to act and starts accusing himself of not having.
“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.” (line 55): Hamlet redefines greatness as the willingness to fight over something trivial once your honour is involved — the exact opposite of his own habit of demanding certainty before he moves. It is a genuinely dangerous idea, and Shakespeare has just undercut it: the captain told us the land is worthless, and Hamlet himself called the whole campaign a hidden abscess killing a country from the inside. So the speech shows a man arguing himself into a code he had accurately diagnosed as a disease ten lines earlier.
“O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.” (line 67): Hamlet's conclusion is a vow: from now on he will think about nothing but killing Claudius, or his thinking is worthless. It is deliberately not a plan — he swears to change his mind, not his behaviour, and he swears it while being marched onto a boat to England, where he has no access to Claudius at all. The irony is structural: this is his most decisive-sounding line, it ends his last soliloquy, and he immediately exits the play for two acts. When he does finally kill Claudius, it is a reaction to being poisoned, not the product of anything he resolves here — which is why readers should treat the speech as self-persuasion rather than a turning point, and why the admiration of Fortinbras is not the play's own view.

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About this translation: the original text follows the public-domain Project Gutenberg Globe edition; the modern English translation was written in-house for Polytranslator and is reviewed on an ongoing basis (last revised August 2026). Free to print and photocopy for classroom use. Cite as: “Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 4. Polytranslator side-by-side translation, polytranslator.com/shakespeare/hamlet/act-4-scene-4.”

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