Hamlet's speech in act IV, scene IV shows Shakespeare’s view on the clear difference between living in action and living in inaction. Hamlet delivers his thirty-line soliloquy overlooking Fortinbras' impressive army, which is on its way through Denmark to fight for a plot of Polish land. In the speech Hamlet bemoans himself for his lack of action in his plot of revenge for his father’s murder. He compares men who live in action to Gods who openly defy ideas of mortality. Others like him who perpetrate their empty, dull existences through their inaction he sees as no more than animals. Shakespeare describes inaction and action as the clear difference between life lived as beast and conscious man. Hamlet asks the central question "what is a man/if the chief good and market of his time/be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more" (4.4.33-35). He sees the lives of most men as waking, eating, working, and returning to sleep without any thought of running themselves off the easy path. To him, this kind of person is easily comparable to the life of an unconscious animal, a life of inaction. He mocks this lifestyle as one that turns humans into nothing more than beasts, no more than animals facing inevitable death. Living ambitiously and actively then is presented as the antithesis; as a way of life that casts …show more content…
Hamlet observes that the army’s “spirit with divine ambition puff’d” (4.4.49). They, in their refusal to slow even for something so insignificant, are made equal to God. Simply by living in action they are given the attribute of divinity and made more than beasts. In fighting, these soldiers willingly “go to their graves like beds” (4.4.62). Fortinbras and the men of his army ignore death. They turn the thought of it into nothing. It is ignored by those who live in constant action in what they do. While at the same time to a man of inaction, a beast, it is always the main