With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
—Hamlet, Act iii., Sc. 1.
The following lines are delivered by Hamlet when he appreciates the fact that while his father’s blood cries out for vengeance he stands idle, beset by doubts and fears. The speech is a soliloquy, but it would be rendered in a moderately high pitch owing to the mental tension of the speaker:
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous, that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit,
That from her working all his visage wann’d;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in ’s aspect,