Hamlet, Part 5: Characteristics of Elizabethan Drama Answers

Read the excerpt from Act III of Hamlet.Ophelia:What means this, my lord?Hamlet:Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.Ophelia:Belike this show imports the argument of the play.Enter Prologue.Hamlet:We shall know by this fellow: the players cannot keep counsel; they’ll tell all.Ophelia:Will he tell us what this show meant?Hamlet:Ay, or any show that you’ll show him; be not you ashamed to show, he’ll not shame to tell you what it means.Ophelia:You are naught, you are naught. I’ll mark the play.

Read the excerpt from Act III of Hamlet.Hamlet:Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent;When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed, At gaming, swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in ’t; Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, And that his soul may be as damn’d and black As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays: This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

Read the excerpt from Act III of Hamlet.Hamlet: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and—as I may say—whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. O! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’er-doing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

Which statement best describes why Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a complex character?

What line from Act III of Hamlet supports the conclusion that Claudius fears his own fate?

Read the excerpt from Act III of Hamlet.Hamlet: [L]et your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O! there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

What line from Act III of Hamlet supports the conclusion that Shakespeare is critical of actors?

Read the excerpt from the play within a play in Act III of Hamlet.Player Queen:O! confound the rest; Such love must needs be treason in my breast: In second husband let me be accurst; None wed the second but who kill’d the first.Hamlet:[Aside.] Wormwood, wormwood.Player Queen:The instances that second marriage move, Are base respects of thrift, but none of love; A second time I kill my husband dead, When second husband kisses me in bed.

How are Shakespeare’s characters examples of Elizabethan drama? Select two answers.They are variations on familiar Biblical figures.They grow and change throughout the play.They display a wide range of human emotion.They represent a single allegorical concept.They express their reverence for Christian saints.

Read the excerpt from Act III of Hamlet.Rosencrantz:The cease of majesty Dies not alone, but, like a gulf doth draw What’s near it with it; it is a massy wheel, Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis’d and adjoin’d; which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.