And, like the kind life-rendering pelican, / Repast them with my blood.
Act IV, Scene 5 · Laertes
Context
Laertes tells Claudius he will welcome his father's true friends and nourish them with his own blood, using a simile drawn from medieval bestiaries.
Analysis
The pelican image invokes a Christian emblem of self-sacrifice (the bird was believed to feed its young with its own blood), but Laertes applies it to a revenge mission, creating a jarring mismatch. This yoking of sacrificial love to violent vengeance exposes the moral confusion in Laertes's rhetoric—he cannot tell devotion from destruction.
Essay Tip
Use this to argue that Laertes's language reveals the play's concern with how revenge distorts virtue—he reaches for an image of Christlike love but deploys it in service of murder, showing how the rhetoric of honor can disguise moral incoherence.