Cumulative Exam — Cumulative exam Answers

Take a look at this image from Jonathan Price’s adaptation of Hamlet.Take a look at this image from Sir Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Hamlet.

Read the excerpt from "Morte d'Arthur” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.So like a shatter’d column lay the King;Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest,From spur to plume a star of tournament,Shot thro’ the lists at Camelot, and chargedBefore the eyes of ladies and of kings.

Read the excerpt from Act III of Hamlet.Gertrude: O! speak to me no more; These words like daggers enter in mine ears; No more, sweet Hamlet!Hamlet: A murderer, and a villain; A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings; A cut-purse of the empire and the rule, That from a shelf the precious diadem stole, And put it in his pocket! Gertrude: No more!

Read the excerpt from Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii.Hamlet: O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew; Or that the Everlasting had not fix’dHis canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world. Fie on ’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in naturePossess it merely. That it should come to this!

Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad's but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly, Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow, but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrad's intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad's power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary. Conrad seems to me to approve of Marlow, with only minor reservations—a fact reinforced by the similarities between their two careers.