Go
softly on.
-Fortinbras
Hamlet Act IV, scene
iv, line 8
What a nice line. Go softly on.
The speaker, our friend Fortinbras, is the answer to the trivia question
‘who has the last line in the play Hamlet’.
This, of course, is not that last line. This is the part in the play where
Fortinbras is leading his army through Denmark on his way to a fight in Poland.
He’s telling his captain to go and tell the Danish King that he’s just passing
through, and he sends the captain off with the phrase Go softly on.
Hamlet is a bystander in this scene, and this leads into one of his soliloquies when he sees
that Fortinbras is taking a couple thousand men to a fight to the death over a
meaningless patch of land. Even for an eggshell, he says. That is the How all occasions do inform
against me soliloquy. But before we can get to that, we go through the
brief part of the act where Fortinbras says Go softly on.
So I’ll just say to you, have a good day, and go softly on.
Well, you can't see it too well, but those guys on the right side of the picture are playing some kind of bocce. This is the Arenes de Lutece in Paris. It's almost 2,000 years old, built by the Romans. I thought the picture was a good representation of Go softly on. A slow game of lawn bowling in a two centuries old arena. Yeah, these guys are going softly on. Or maybe the arena is going softly on.
Either way, Go softly on.
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