Read the dialogue from Act III of Hamlet.Hamlet: Now, mother, what’s the matter?Gertrude: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.Hamlet: Mother, you have my father much offended.
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Read the excerpt from Act IV of Hamlet.Rosencrantz: Take you me for a sponge, my lord?Hamlet: Ay, sir, that soaks up the king’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the king best service in the end: he keeps them, like an ape, in the corner of his jaw; first mouthed, to be last swallowed: when he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again.
Read the excerpt from Hamlet, Act III, scene iv.Gertrude: Why, how now, Hamlet!Hamlet: What’s the matter now?Gertrude: Have you forgot me?Hamlet: No, by the rood, not so: You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife; And,—would it were not so!—you are my mother.
Formalist criticism focuses upon a text’s
Patriarchy is the name for a
Which fact about Hamlet would be most important to a student analyzing the play through a historical lens?
A student makes an observation about Hamlet.The focus on succession to the throne in Hamlet would have been interesting to an Elizabethan audience because their own queen had no heir.
Read the words of King Claudius in Act IV of Hamlet.Come, Gertrude, we’ll call up our wisest friends; And let them know both what we mean to do, And what’s untimely done: so, haply, slander, Whose whisper o’er the world’s diameter, As level as the cannon to his blank Transports his poison’d shot, may miss our name, And hit the woundless air. O! come away;
Which line would most likely be written by a reader analyzing Hamlet through a formalist lens?
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