Hamlet, Part 5: Characteristics of Elizabethan Drama Answers

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: O God, your only jig-maker. What should a man do but be merry? for, look you, how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours.Ophelia: Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.Hamlet: So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year; but, by ’r lady, he must build churches then, or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is, ‘For, O! for, O! the hobby-horse is forgot.’

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

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.Rosencrantz:Never alone Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.Claudius:Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy voyage; For we will fetters put upon this fear, Which now goes too free-footed.Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:We will haste us.

Read the excerpt from Act III of Hamlet.Polonius:My lord, he’s going to his mother’s closet: Behind the arras I’ll convey myself To hear the process; I’ll warrant she’ll tax him home; And, as you said, and wisely was it said, ’Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, Since nature makes them partial, should o’er-hear The speech, of vantage. Fare you well, my liege: I’ll call upon you ere you go to bed And tell you what I know.

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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.

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 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.