How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my bitter binge! What is a man,
If his chief good and passing of his time
Be but to cry and feed? A wreck, no more.
Sure, during this godly feast I gorged
Myself to slumber, and forgot
That capability and god-like reason;
They rust in me unused. Now, whether it be
Blissful oblivion, or some drunken stupor
I’ll not think too precisely of the past.
A jumbled memory has but one part wisdom
And ever three parts sorrow. I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This life was good,’
Why I have cause and will and strength and means
To live it. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Recall this romance of such resonance
Led by our beauty and our sharpened wit.
Her spirit with corrupt ambition puffed
Locks mouths at the far-away event,
Exposing what is brittle and unsure
In my own tender, shy and bitter brain,
Cracked like an egg-shell. Rightly to be mad
But impotent, without great argument,
I should have stooped to quarrel like a man
When honor’s at the stake. Now stand I grim,
I’ve had emotion spurned, my manhood stained,
Excitements of my reason gone for good,
And yet I eat? While to my shame, I see
The imminent death of my own reason and my mind,
That, in a coping method, out of pride,
Go to their graves like beds, while I become
The savage being which I must avoid.
Which is more shameful a non-sequitur
To drown the pain? O, from that time forth,
I ate while drunken, and was nothing worth!
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. John Smethwicke, 1611.