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No Fear Translations of Shakespeare’s plays (along with audio!) and other classic works
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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 godlike reason
To fust in us unused.
As he prepares to embark for England, Hamlet is told that the Norwegians and Poles are expending lives and great fortunes in a territorial dispute over “a little patch of land / That hath in it no profit but the name.” Hamlet—who is consistently harder on himself than anyone else is in the play—contrasts the efforts of the warring parties with his own inability to kill Claudius—a task that he thinks is far more important and should take far less effort than the Norwegian-Polish territorial dispute. Then, with this quote, Hamlet reasons that humans were not put on earth to be sedentary. His words basically mean that a human who only eats and sleeps is nothing more than a beast and that God didn’t create us with our enormous power of thought and capacity for reason for us to ignore those divine gifts and not employ them.
