Which statement best describes why King Claudius is a complex character in Act III of Hamlet?
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.
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.’
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