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Craven, cowardly; apostate; recreant. recreant c1330–1781. Designating a person who admits to having been defeated or overcome; that yields or surrenders; in a…. In predicative use, usually following a….
Hamlet. , 4.4.40-41: "some craven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on the event". The "event" is the outcome of an action, and Hamlet is saying that he's a coward for thinking too much about what will happen to him if he kills King Claudius, as the ghost told him to do.
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Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep—while, to my shame, I see. The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame. Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot. Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent.
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple. He says this about himself because he is trying to goad himself into action. Shakespeare also uses metaphor in this passage. A metaphor compares two...
4 Over his kingdom. You know the rendezvous. 4. the rendezvous: i.e., the place where we will rendezvous. 5 If that his majesty would aught with us, 5. would aught: i.e., has anything to discuss. 6 We shall express our duty in his eye; 6. in his eye: personally, in his presence. 7 And let him know so.
"Craven" means cowardly, defeated, or abject. A craven "scruple," or reason to worry, is cowardly hesitation born of too much thinking. Hamlet contrasts his scruples with a "bestial oblivion," or an animal-like ignorance with no capacity to reason.
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple: 40 : Of thinking too precisely on the event, A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom : And ever three parts coward, I do not know : Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;' Sith I have cause and will and strength and means : To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
