Fortinbras's army; "how all occasions"

A plain in Denmark, on Hamlet's way to the harbor under guard. The Norwegian army of Fortinbras, prince of Norway, is crossing the country on its way to Poland — Claudius, in an earlier scene, granted the army passage. Hamlet questions one of Fortinbras's captains. What is the army marching toward? A small, useless patch of Polish ground. The captain admits the plot of ground is worth nothing in itself; "we go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name."

The captain leaves. Hamlet, alone, delivers the fourth and most-quoted of his soliloquies: "How all occasions do inform against me, and spur my dull revenge." Twenty thousand men, he says, are marching to die for a name. He, with "a father killed, a mother stained, excitements of my reason and my blood, and let all sleep" — has done nothing. He knows he has cause; he sees the cause; and he has not acted on it. The speech is the play's clearest statement of what Hamlet thinks of himself in his delay.

He resolves: from this time forth, his thoughts will be bloody, or nothing. He is escorted onto the ship. The audience knows what he does not yet — that he is sailing to be killed, that the resolve has come too late to be acted on as Hamlet intends. The next time we see him will be at his sister-in-law's funeral, after a sea voyage that has changed him in ways the play will never quite name.