Rightly to be greatIs not to stir without great argument,But greatly to find quarrel in a strawWhen honor’s at the stake. How stand I then,That have a father killed, a mother stained,Excitements of my reason and my blood,And let all sleep—while, to my shame, I seeThe imminent death of twenty thousand men,That for a fantasy and trick of fameGo to their graves like beds, fight for a plotWhereon the numbers cannot try the cause,Which is not tomb enough and continentTo hide the slain? Oh, from this time forth,My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!