ap lit essay on hamlet

AP English Literature and Composition

Put words under a magnifier.

Announcement- Holiday Assignments

1. Read three articles of literary criticism on Hamlet from the anthology I created for the class. Read one on Hamlet, one on Gertrude and one on Ophelia.

2. Watch youtube or PBS video clips on the following scenes-

• Ophelia and Hamlet ( Ophelia was sent to spy on Hamlet)
• Hamlet in Gertrude’s chamber
• Hamlet’s dueling with Laertes
• Be sure to observe the details in each scene.

3. Complete the AP Exam and turn it in the complete exam( including the three essays) on Jan. 6, 2014.

4. We’ll study Hamlet’s final two soliloquy on Thursday. Be prepared.

Hamlet E-Text

Hamlet Audio 

Reading Quiz

Reading Quiz on Hamlet (Acts I & II)

Acts III, IV, and V

Pre-Reading Lessons

Objectives: Students will answer the question: why do we still read Hamlet? How relevant is the character to our life?

Aim; Why is Hamlet still relevant?

Materials: the Video Clip from PBS Shakespeare uncovered

Assessment: Quick Write: How do we see ourselves in the character of Hamlet?

• Watch the video
• Students use their notes to share their perceptions on Hamlet
• Respond to the Quick Write

Learning Sequence

• Why Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Based on our reading about the play, why do you think are we still drawn to this tragedy? Do Think-Pair-Share activity.
• Watch the video clip and listen to David Tennant’s interviews and narration about why he is fascinated by the role. Take notes when necessary.
• Discuss our notes.

Quick Write: How do we see ourselves in the character of Hamlet?

Homework: Visit the site about  Elizabethan England . Read about the Elizabethan time and have a true understanding of Shakespearean period’s audience. Be ready to share your notes in class for the next lesson.

Lesson 1-4 Based on Act I

Lesson 1 Act 1 Scene 1

Objectives:Students will identify the elements in the beginning scene of the play and discuss the effect of them.

Aim: What is the mood of the opening scene? What are the implications and complications set in motion by the ghost scene?

• Folger Edition Hamlet
• Hamlet with David Tennant
• Full Video of Hamlet by Shakespeare Royal Theater
• Death and Dying in Hamlet and Macbeth
• Timeline of Shakespeare’s Plays

Which Shakespeare character are you? Take a survey.

What are some of the effects of setting a play in motion by having a ghost appear? How would an audience be affected today? How might Elizabethan audiences have been stirred? Why?

Visit the site about  Elizabethan England . Read about the Elizabethan time and have a true understanding of Shakespearean period’s audience.

Procedures:

• Listen to  Act I, Scene 1.  See Folgers’ text of Hamlet
• How does Shakespeare set a mood, explain to the reader what has gone before, build suspense, and also foreshadow things to come?
• As the play opens, what is Bernardo’s state of mind when he asks ,”Who is there?” What are we told immediately about the time, place, and atmosphere of scene 1?
• Who is Horatio? How does the encounter with the Ghost help to characterize Horatio?
• Describe the appearance, identity, and actions of the Ghost.
• What background information do we learn from Horatio?
• Upon the Ghost’s second appearance, what three possibilities does Horatio suggest for the appearance of spirits? Why does the Ghost disappear? What do we learn here about the superstitious beliefs of the times?
• What future events in the play are foreshadowed at the end of the scene?

Homework Assignment #1

1.Answer questions 4-8 in the lesson. Provide textual evidence for your responses.

2.In the 1 st  scene of a play a playwright often tries to:

• Set the mood of the play
• Fill in the past for the reader or audience
• Introduce the main themes
• Create interest by building suspense.
• Introduce the main characters
• Foreshadow future events.

How well has Shakespeare fulfilled these tasks in the 1 st  scene of  Hamlet ? To what extent would you agree that the 1 st  scene is the “embryo” of the play’s later development?

Lesson 2 Act I Scene 2 See  Folgers’ text of Hamlet

Objectives: Students will identify Hamlet’s character based on the his attitude toward his mother, Gertrude’s remarriage.

Aim: How does the event of Gertrude’s remarriage shed light on the character of Hamlet?

Do Now: Journal #2

What reactions would the American people have had if Jacqueline Kennedy had remarried soon after the death of President Kennedy in 1963? What is considered ” a decent period of mourning” in your culture? And in America today?

I. Review: From the opening scene, what predictions can we make about the future events ?

II. Listen to Act 1 scene 2 . Did you come across any situation in scene1&2 that could cause problems for Prince Hamlet?

III. Discuss the following questions:

• How does Claudius’ initial speech reveal his character?
• use of royal “we”
• Antithesis-the balancing of two contrasting ideas, words, phrases, or sentences in parallel  grammatical form, i.e.”with mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage”. What feelings do these juxtapositions evoke?
• Choice of words : why does Claudius remember old Hamlet with “wisest sorrow” rather than “deep sorrow”?
• Order of ideas he presents: Although Hamlet’s mourning is of major concern to Claudius., why does he justify his marriage to Gertrude, deal with Norway’s impending invasion, and respond to Laertes’ petition before he address Hamlet?

2.. Addressing the court, Claudius uses the expression, “With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage”, what does this line of contrasts mean beyond his own situation?

3. Why was Claudius not Hamlet made king after the death of Old King Hamlet? Where had Hamlet been at the time of his father’s death?

4. What is meant by the word  incest ? How has the connotation of the word changed?

5. In his first formal address, how does Claudius justify his present situation? When he turns to affairs of state, how competent an executive does he prove himself to be?

6. Who is Laertes?

7. Explain the two puns made by Hamlet. What do they show about Hamlet’s state of mind.

• What is the double meaning in Hamlet’s response to his mother,”Ay, madam, it is common?” Why does Hamlet scornfully list all of the usual signs of mourning ? What comfort does Claudius offer Hamlet for the death of his father? Is it natural for men to be as objective as Claudius would have us act?
• What is Claudius’ answer to Hamlet’s request to return to Wittenburg? Why does Gertrude intercede? How is Hamlet’s rude reply accepted by Claudius? Why?
• When Hamlet is left alone after the departure of the rest of the court, how must he feel?
• Read Hamlet’s 1 st  soliloquy. What action is Hamlet contemplating? Why? What does this show about his character? What holds him back from acting out his desire? How does Hamlet explain Gertrude’s great ” sin and crime”? What does he mean by “Frailty, thy name is women”? Why must he hold his tongue?
• Find lines in the soliloquy that show feelings of despair, grief, bitterness, anger, and resignation; or any word that gives clues to Hamlet’s innermost thoughts.
• Why does Hamlet insist on knowing the details of the Ghost’s appearance and actions?
• Where does Hamlet show determination?
• Characterize the young Hamlet. How has his mood changed throughout his part of the scene? Could such a prince make a successful sovereign? Explain.

IV. Visualize the soliloquy. Discuss “what is really bothering Hamlet?”

Homework Assignment #2

1. Analyze Claudius ‘ speech by considering the following-

2. Write a micro essay on Hamlet’s 1st soliloquy. How does Shakespeare use diction, figures of speech and tone to reveal Hamlet’s state of mind.

Lesson 3 Act I Scene 3 See  Folgers’ text of Hamlet

Objectives: Students will examine the child-parent relationship describes in this scene within Polonius’s family based on the textual evidence.

Aim: What is the child-parent relationship describes in this scene within Polonius’s family?

Do now: Journal #3

The complaint is often voiced today that the younger generation is out of control and that is the parents who are to blame. How true is the statement? Should love or obedience to parents’ wishes prevail when a conflict between the two develops? Comment on it.

• At the end of Scene 2, what do you expect to happen next in the play? Why does Shakespeare shift the attention to the development of minor characters?
• What are the feelings that exist between Hamlet and Ophelia?
• What advice does the departing Laertes give to his sister about Hamlet? What does this advice reveal about Hamlet, and Laertes himself? Why does he not trust Hamlet?
• How does Ophelia receive her brother’s advice?
• In your opinion, how worthy of serious consideration are the words of Polonius to his son? How do you interpret the three lines beginning, “This above all…”? What ideas are especially meaningful for our time? Which precept has great values for adolescents? Why?
• How do you react to the suggestion that these lines “are not at all idealistic but merely practical considerations for worldly success”?
• How do you react to the suggestion that these line are “empty, pompous words delivered by a bumbling old man”?
• How appropriate is Polonius’s supervision of his children? How might the apparent absence of a mother for his children alter his role?
• Paraphrase the language of Polonius’ advice in colloquial English and make up a paralle situation in which the words make sense.
• What can we infer about Polonius from his choice of words? What do Polonius’ words reveal about his belief, philosophy, and values?
• How does the suspicious nature of Polonius show itself soon after Laertes leaves?
• By modern standards, how wise is Polonius in his advice to his daughter?
• When Ophelia says to her father: “I shall obey.” Should we expect her to keep her word? What is your understanding of a dutiful child of current time?
• Characterize Ophelia from what you have observed in this scene.
• What is the relationship like in Polonius’ family? What does each of the family members want?

Homework Assignment #3

Write a micro essay on how Shakespeare uses diction and structure to reveal Polonious character as a father.

Lesson 4  The Time is Out of Joint (Act I,  scene 4  &  scene 5 ) See  Folgers’ text of Hamlet

Objectives: Students will analyze Hamlet’s character through his initial reaction to the ghost’s tale.

Aim: What decision should Hamlet make in facing such a revelation by the ghost? What’s more added to Hamlet’s problem?

Do now: Journal Writing:

Who is or might be a tragic hero in this play based on your knowledge of a tragic hero. Do inner or outer forces work to make the tragedy? Can an intellectual-like Hamlet- be a tragic hero?

• Read scene 4 & 5
• Before you come to any conclusions about Hamlet’s reactions to the Ghost, read this document  of “Ghosts and Spirits”.  It is an extract from  Of Ghosts and Spirits Walking by Night , translated into English in 1572. Note, though, that it presents a Protestant view of the subject, while Hamlet’s Denmark is Catholic.
• Discuss the following questions after finishing reading the two scenes.
• How does Shakespeare repeat his device for surprising the audience at the entrance of the Ghost?
• Some critics have seen Hamlet’s speech about drinking as a restatement of Aristotle’s idea of the importance of the  hamartia , or tragic flaw, in drama. In which lines does Hamlet express the Aristotelian concept of tragic flaw?
• How does Hamlet’s first speech to the Ghost show the doubts that exist in his mind about the nature of his apparition?
• How does Hamlet respond to the attempts of Horatio to stop him from following the Ghost? How do these actions deny the idea that Hamlet is little more than a dreamer?
• The Ghost is evidently in purgatory. What does this mean?
• What does Hamlet say “O my prophetic soul”?
• What further shocking disclosure does he Ghost make to Hamlet?
• Why does Shakespeare have the Ghost go into such detail about the murder itself?
• What demand does the Ghost make upon Hamlet about Claudius? About Gertrude? What effect does the Ghost’s revelation have on Hamlet?
• Why does not Hamlet immediately tell all to Horatio? How can you explain Hamlet’s odd, almost farcical, behavior towards the end of the scene?
• Examine Hamlet’s language after he sees the Ghost and during his conversation with Horatio and Marcellus. What assumptions can we make about Hamlet’s state of mind from the words he uses and the way he speaks to his companions at this point of the play? Speculate on why Hamlet decides to put on an “antic disposition”.

Quick Write: What’s your first impression of Hamlet’s character through his initial reaction to the ghost’s tale?

Homework Assignment #4:

Hamlet concludes the scene with the rhyme tag:  The time is out of the joint. O cursed spite/ That ever I was born to see it right.  What feelings are expressed in these lines? Why is the task before Hamlet not an easy one? How well is Hamlet suited by his temperament and character to fulfilling the Ghost’s wish? What do you expect him to do next? Do you think Hamlet will take revenge? Before you make any decision, read  Francis Bacon’s short essay  that provides a marvelous insight into the attitudes of intellectuals during Shakespeare’s time towards revenge. The essay is slightly cut here. What is particularly interesting is the attitude it takes towards natural feelings, which strongly contrast the ghost’s.

Lesson 5  “What A Rogue, Peasant Slave am I” Soliloquy Act 2 Scene 2

Objectives: Students will examine Hamlet’s self-perception by analyzing the diction, figures of speech and syntax of the soliloquy.

Aim:  How does Hamlet perceive himself?  How does Shakespeare use language to reveal it?

Materials:  a hard copy of the soliloquy; online dictionary access; an Analysis Tool; audio recording of Hamlet Act 2 Scene 2 ( http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/94/hamlet/1673/act-2-scene-2/ )

Assessment:  Students will write a micro essay  to analyze Hamlet’s self-perception  through diction, imagery and syntax.

Do Now : Journal writing- From the first two acts we have read, what is your impression of Hamlet’s character? Write for about 4 minutes to describe Hamlet’s character.

Learning Sequence:

• We’ll use Think-Pair-Share activity to share our understanding of the speech- Read around in pairs line by line of the soliloquy. Read around by the period or exclamation marks, or question marks.
• Think to yourself after reading. Use the annotations you have made. What is Hamlet talking about? What words or phrase or lines stand out the most or show hamlet’s feelings or thoughts? Why?  Write freely in your notebook your initial understanding of the speech.
• Share with a partner your writing. Talk to each other about the speech using ideas from your free writing. Jot down new ideas you have gained from the pair –share.
• We’ll unpack the meaning by discussing the following Text-Based Questions-
• What examples of diction paint a vivid picture of Hamlet?
• Who is Priam? Hecuba? What book is Aeneid? What’s it about?
• How does Hamlet comment on the player’s acting of  the speech from Aeneid?
• How does the player express Hecuba’s feelings and reactions to her husband, Priam’s murder?
• How, according to Hamlet, will the player act like if the player knows Hamlet’s feelings towards his father’s murder?
• Make a list of names that he called himself in the soliloquy.
• Quick Write: How does Hamlet characterize himself at this point
• How accurate a description is it of his character (second section)? Find lines and phrases that explain why Hamlet thinks himself a coward. Do you think he is a coward, or is he acting by looking for external evidence to prove Claudius’ guilt?
• At what line does Hamlet’s self-castigation reach its peak?
• Why is “O vengeance!” a line by itself? How does this line deflate Hamlet’s pent-up emotions?
• What plan does Hamlet reveal to the audience at the end of this soliloquy.

Assessment: write a micro essay  to analyze Hamlet’s self-perception  through diction, imagery and syntax.

Homework Assignment: Finish the micro essay to analyze Hamlet’s self-perception through diction, imagery and syntax.

Analysis Tool

Lesson 6 Hamlet and Ophelia  Act III, scene 1

• To study and understand Hamlet’s desperate feelings as expressed in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy
• To experience the heartbreak of renunciation scene in terms of Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s expression of their feelings and attitudes

Aim: How does Shakespeare use language to show Hamlet’s question about his existence?

Materials: copies of Soliloquy, master reading of “To Be or Not To Be” ( http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/94/hamlet/1674/act-3-scene-1/ ), analysis tool

• Listen to the recording ( http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/94/hamlet/1674/act-3-scene-1/ ). Annotate while listening.
• Hamlet on Hamlet: Introspective Action(To be or not to be soliloquy) Convert the Soliloquy to an argument: Select two students with contrasting voices and ask them to read the selected “to be or not to be script”. HAMLET

Reader1: To be, or not to be: that is the question: Reader 2: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Read 1: Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? Reader 2: To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, Reader 1: ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. Reader 2: To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: Reader 1:there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; Reader 2: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Reader 1:The oppressor’s wrong, Reader2: the proud man’s contumely, Reader 1: The pangs of despised love, Reader 2: the law’s delay, Reader 1:The insolence of office Reader2: and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Reader 1: who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, Reader 2: But that the dread of something after death, Reader 1: The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, Reader 2: puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Reader 1: Than fly to others that we know not of? Reader 1 and 2 : Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.–Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d.

• Had Hamlet revealed such desperate feelings that he thought of suicide? When? (refer to the1st soliloquy)
• How has Hamlet reason to be more despondent than he was earlier?
• Some critics view this speech as a general philosophical discussion. Can you justify this point of view?
• What view of death does Hamlet have in this speech? How does it compare with his view of life in the same speech?
• What are some of the things that he says make a long life calamity?
• How personal does he intend these slings and arrows to be? What would a modern life’s ills include?
• Why does Hamlet reject the idea of suicide at last?
• How reasonable is his implication that to live is cowardly, to die courageous? What unfinished business may play a part in Hamlet’s decision to live?
• When Ophelia appears, why does Hamlet say,” Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered’?

Part B: Hamlet and Ophelia

• How much Ophelia feel, knowing that she is performing for an audience and the King? How genuine are the emotions she expresses?
• What beautiful poetic lines can you find in Ophelia’s utterances?
• What’s the double meaning of Hamlet’s word  honest ? In what respects has Ophelia been honest with him?
• Why does Hamlet tell her to enter a nunnery? Is his self characterization in this speech a valid one? Discuss.
• Argue:  Hamlet knows from the very beginning of the scene that Polonius and Claudius are watching him ; Hamlet does not know until later in the scene that he is being watched; Hamlet is unaware that he is being watched throughout the nunnery scene.
•  For each interpretation, what is Hamlet’s objective? What specific gestures, inflections, movements, or pause could an actor use to show this objective? How does the objective affect the subtext?
• What is the “calumny” to which Hamlet refers? Explain Hamlet’s strange use of the word  monstrous .
• When Hamlet castigates Ophelia for the falseness and deceitfulness of women, is he thinking of her, of his mother, or of women in general?
• In her final speech, what picture does Ophelia paint of the Hamlet that once was? How deep was her love for him? How much love still remains?

10. Assessment: Quick Write – In this scene, Hamlet’s actions are viewed from several angles. Is he acting from a grand plan? Yes? No? Why? What reasons must Hamlet have had in his renunciation of Ophelia ? How might he have been trying to protect her?

11. What are the full implications in Claudius’ closing line: “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go”? Does Claudius actually believe that Hamlet is mad?

Homework Assignment: Use the Analysis Tool to help you read closely of “To Be or Not To Be” Soliloquy. Write a micro essay to discuss Hamlet’s state of mind through diction, figures of speech and syntax.

The Queen’s Closet Act III Scene 4

Objectives 1. Students will analyze how Shakespeare uses diction, tone and extended metaphor to reveal Hamlet’s relationship to his mother. 2. To explore a possible basis for understanding Hamlet’s action in this scene

Aim: How does Shakespeare uses diction, tone and extended metaphor to reveal Hamlet’s relationship to his mother? What’s  the possible  basis for Hamlet’s action?

• “ Introductory Lecture on Shakespeare’s Hamlet “
• Ernest Jones’s  Hamlet and Oedipus ( http://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/jones/ )
• Text ( The Queen’s Closet Act III Scene 4 )
• Norman Holland and Psychoanalysis 

Do Now  : Journal Writing Some critics interpret use the  “Oedipus complex” theory to interpret Hamlet’s actions throughout the play. “Oedipus complex” is a subconscious sexual attachment to his mother, remaining from his earlier childhood. Critics usually cite the words of Act III, scene 4 as evidence for this interpretation. What is your reaction to a psychoanalytical interpretation of a work of literature that was written hundreds of years before Freud outlined his theories of human behavior?

Activities Part 1 Before the Killing of Polonius 1. Polonius has decided once more to resort to spying as a method of gaining information. When has he done so before? 2. How does Gertrude interpret Hamlet’s state of extreme agitation? 3. How important is Hamlet’s behavior toward his mother in the beginning of this scene? 4. When Hamlet hears Polonius call out from behind the arras, he immediately stabs through the arras and kills him. Why was this act so uncharacteristic of Hamlet? How do you explain his sudden rashness of spirit? 5. What lines show us that Hamlet thought that he was stabbing the king? 6. How do you explain Hamlet’s lack of remorse over the death of Polonius?

Part II After the Killing of Polonius 1. What accusations does Hamlet make against his mother? How does she react at first? 2. What evidence is there that Gertrude had no knowledge of the murder of King Hamlet? 3. How does Hamlet compare his father and his uncle? 4. How does he explain his mother’s actions in marrying Claudius? 5. What finally touches the conscience of the Queen? What word “enter like daggers” into her ears? 6. Where does Hamlet once again show that he considers Claudius a usurper? 7. Why does the Ghost appear at this point?How is his appearance different from his earlier appearance? 8. How do you explain that this time only Hamlet sees the Ghost when all who were present saw him on his other appearances? 9. How does Gertrude explain Hamlet’s conversation with the Ghost? To what extent does she seem to accept Hamlet’s denial of madness? 10. How do you explain Hamlet’s insistence that Gertrude “go not to my uncle’s bed”? 11. Hamlet says “Good night” to his mother four times before he finally leaves. Why does he linger each time? 12.What danger does Hamlet anticipate in England? What foreshadowing of his own plans does he provide us with? 13. The scene ends with a serious of puns after a coarse remark about “lugging the guts” out of the room. How can you explain this mixture of humor with the horror of the scene? 14. Both mother and son have ambivalent feelings about each other. Show how this is true for each. Hamlet said he is being cruel only to be kind. How much kindness is there in his treatment of his mother?

Homework  Assignment: 1. Write a micro essay on how Shakespeare uses diction, tone and extended metaphor to reveal Hamlet’s relationship to his mother.

2. Read “ Introductory Lecture on Shakespeare’s Hamlet ” and find different interpretations of Hamlet’s problems. Keep a “Doubting and Believing ” journal to criticize the lecture.

3.Read excerpts from  Ernest Jones’s  Hamlet and Oedipus  ( http://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/jones/ )

4.  Read Norman Holland’s Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis ( page 59)  http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00002277/00001/67j

• To become aware of a changed Hamlet in decline, being acted upon rather than acting
• To analyze Hamlet as a personality in contrast to Fortinbras

Do now: Journal Writing-Sometimes we see a color more clearly when it is contrasted with another color.  Why can we often see our own situation more clearly when we compare it with some other person’s?  Can you illustrate this from you own experience?

New Concept-Fortinbras may be seen as a contrast to Hamlet.  In drama we often call such a person a  “foil “(read about the origin of  foil  ).  Although his problems are some what similar, his manner of dealing with them is much different.  Notice how Hamlet himself sees the parallel between himself and Fortinbras

HAMLET VIS-A-VIS FORTINBRAS

•  Fortinbras, until this point only talked about, finally appears on the scene in this act.  What kind of man is he?  What is the meaning of his name?
•    How does Fortinbras happen to be traveling through Denmark at this time? (Check out  the map of Denmark )(Also check out  the map of Norway ).
•  What is the Captain’s attitude towards the battle he is about to engage in?  Does Shakespeare expect us to look upon the expedition of Fortinbras with admiration or with irony?  How might he have looked upon it had this incident occured early in Act I?
•  Before the reading of the soliloquy, ask:  What part of this speech presents the theme or underlying idea?  Which part points up the startling contrast between Hamlet and Fortinbras?
•  How is Hamlet’s soliloquy’s, beginning on line 34, similar to the soliloquy delivered after he heard the First Player recite the lines about Hecuba?  What triggered each train of thought?  How does Hamlet compare himself with another in each of these speeches?  How does each conclude?
•  Where does Hamlet once again hint that he is coward?  What is Hamlet’s attitude towards Fortinbras’s expedition?  What would a modern opinion be of such a war?  Under what conditions is “honor” worth the loss of life?

HW. Analyze Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act IV Scene 4( the turning point of Hamlet’s character”). How does Shakespeare use imagery, tone and diction to reveal the dramatic changes in Hamlet.

Lesson 9 Ophelia’s Madness  Act IV, scenes  5 .  6 .  7 .

• To understand possible reasons for Ophelia’s madness and death
• To compare the character of Laertes with that of Hamlet

Journal response- Formative Assessment

a. How would you define true madness? How does it differ from Hamlet’s feigned insanity? b. What severe strains has Ophelia been subjected to that might explain her loss of reality? What kind of person might she be originally? What evidence can we find from the play to show that she might very well be susceptible to a mental breakdown?

Learning Activities:

Ophelia’s Madness

1. How do the two verses sung by Ophelia at first give an explanation of her breakdown? How do you explain Ophelia’s singing of a song like “Tommorrow is St. Valentine’s Day”?

2. How appropriate is Laertes’s epithet “Rose of May” to Ophelia?

3. When Ophelia distributes flowers to the King, Queen, and Laertes, each flower is meant to have symbolic meaning. What does each flower represent, and who should be given each flower?

Suggested Answer:

B. Laertes, Mad or Revenge

1. According to the King’s speech (lines 75-98), what have the people been whispering about the death of Polonius? What does this show about the kind of reputation Claudius must have had in and around Elsinore?

2.What is Laertes’s reason for bursting in on the King at the head of a mob? How does the King act in this dangerous situation? How is the situation of Laertes now similar to that of Fortinbras and that of Hamlet? Which of the two does Laertes most resemble in his actions? How does the King manage to calm Laertes’s rage?

3.What does the King seem to have in mind when he says to Laertes, ” Where the offense is let the great axe fall”?

4.In scene 7, what two reasons does Claudius give to Laertes for his relatively gentle treatment of Hamlet? How, at this point, might Laertes expect to have his revenge?

5.How does Claudius use flattery in preparing Laertes for his scheme against Hamlet? When Laertes shows a willingness to “cut his throat in the church,” how are we reminded of an earlier scene in the play? How does Laertes compare to Hamlet in this respect?

6.What plot does Claudius propose to Laertes? How does Laertes add some refinements of his own?

Quick Write: Why do you think Claudius responds as he does to Laretes?

Homework Assignment:

Were you surprised by the turn of events in this act( Claudius turned the table from being passive to plotting to kill Hamlet; Hamlet’s interactions with other characters) ?Describe your reactions.

Hamlet’s Return

a. What is the dramatic necessity of having the action-packed events of scene 6 described in a letter from Hamlet? How might a movie version of the play give added life to this scene?

b. Point out examples of disrespect and of threat in Hamlet’s brief letter to Claudius (scene 7).

Lesson 10 : Ophelia’s Death

The Queen’s description of the death of Ophelia is almost lyric. What is the effect of such a description? As it is described here, was the death of Ophelia accidental or was it a suicide?

Objectives: Students will be able to analyze the impact of Ophelia’s death and how it helps advance the plot and further reveals Hamlet’s character.

Aim: How does Ophelia’s death help advance the plot and further reveals Hamlet’s character?

Reading quiz- At her death, how does Ophelia appear to the audience? Are there any strength to compensate for her apparent weakness?

Activities/Lesson Development-

• When Ophelia dies, how villainous does the character of Laertes appear to be? Why?
• At Ophelia’s death, and Hamlet’s return, what state of mind is Claudius in? Why?
• Discuss Claudius’s lines in term of the three sons in Hamlet (Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras):

…what would you undertake

To show yourself your father’s son in deed

More than a words? Homework: 1. In this act, both Fortibras and Laertes are foils to Hamlet. What important aspects of Hamlet’s character are revealed by means of the contract between Hamlet and these two foil characters? Enrichment 2. Read J. Paris’s “Three Sons in Hamlet” in  The Atlantic , June 1959, to compare the ways the three sons reacted to the burdens placed upon them as a result of their father’s deaths. 3. Read  Mack, Maynard. “The World of Hamlet.”

The Graveyard Scene   Act V ,  scene 1

To enjoy and understand comic relief in Act V as a device to heighten drama

To contrast the grief of Hamlet with that of Laertes and that of the Queen

All of us have burst into “nervous” laughter in very tragic moments. (Discuss a situation or two from students’ own lives.) What purpose does such comic action serve? When has Shakespeare used it successfully in another tragedy?  Learning Activities

• Read aloud  of the entire scene .
• What questions are the gravediggers debating at the beginning of the scene? ( You should not be misled by the designation clown, which is merely a Shakespearean convention.) What sense of  class-consciousness  do the gravediggers reveal? (It should be noted that these clowns are Elizabethan, not Danish, types.)
• What kind of humor did Elizabethans engage in? (Quibbling, puns, and riddle-asking.) Find examples in this scene.
• What is Hamlet’s immediate reaction to the singing of the gravediggers when he comes on the scene? Journal Write an entry to interpret Hamlet’s proverb: ” The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.” What examples of satirical criticism can you find in Hamlet’s remarks to the gravedigger?
• Show how the gravedigger outwits Hamlet in their bantering conversation. Journal  How is the age of Hamlet fixed in this dialog? Must we believe that Hamlet is thirty years old (according to some critics) after reading this passage? Has Hamlet acted like a thirty-year-old man throughout the play? Why or why not? Discuss.

Medial Summary

What is the significance of Hamlet’s speech while he is holding the skull of Yorick? How have the Hamlet’s ideas about life and death changed? (Why not, at this point, have the class learn correctly the often misquoted line, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio”?) Why does Shakespeare have the conversation take a serious, almost morbid, turn at this point?

Comic relief is to relieve audiences from the tragic tension. Do you agree? Explain.” What  other examples  in literature use such “comic relief”?(Read an example in  Twelfth Night  ) How does the Rainbow scene in  Silas Marner  or any other scene that heightens drama in a piece of literature? What does Shakespeare hope to accomplish by introducing two clown grave diggers in a graveyard? (To heighten the tragic grief of Hamlet, Laertes, and Gertrude.)

• Explain the debate between Laertes and the Priest. What emotional tone should Laertes exhibit? The Priest? Why/ At what point does Hamlet realize that the funeral is for Ophelia? How must he feel upon learning this? How sincerely had he loved the fair Ophelia?
• Is the wrestling match and ranting argument between Laertes and Hamlet in Ophelia’s grave too melodramatic, or can the audience accept it as realistic? Discuss. Why were such scenes included in Elizabethan plays? Which of the two really loves Ophelia more?

9.How does Gertrude feel about the death of Ophelia? Does Claudius show any grief at all?

1.Stage directors and film produces have had to face several major problems in presenting this scene. What are these problems? Hoe would you, as a director or producer, solve them?

2.How does this scene, so skillfully placed in the play at this point, help Claudius? Work against Hamlet? If you were a member of an Elizabethan audience, would you (or would you not) expect Hamlet to avenge his father’s death? Why? What most likely event would you expect to happen? Why?

What does Shakespeare hope to accomplish by introducing two clown grave diggers in a graveyard? (To heighten the tragic grief of Hamlet, Laertes, and Gertrude.)

Summative Assessment

Choose one of the questions below  to write an analytically essay on Hamlet.

2008.  In a literary work, a minor character, often known as a foil, possesses traits that emphasize, by contrast or comparison, the distinctive characteristics and qualities of the main character. For example, the ideas or behavior of a minor character might be used to highlight the weaknesses or strengths of the main character. Choose a novel or play in which a minor character serves as a foil for the main character. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the relation between the minor character and the major character illuminates the meaning of the work.

2002, Form B.  Often in literature, a character’s success in achieving goals depends on keeping a secret and divulging it only at the right moment, if at all. Choose a novel or play of literary merit that requires a character to keep a secret. In a well-organized essay, briefly explain the necessity for secrecy and how the character’s choice to reveal or keep the secret affects the plot and contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.

2001.  One definition of madness is “mental delusion or the eccentric behavior arising from it.” But Emily Dickinson wrote

Much madness is divinest Sense- To a discerning Eye-

Novelists and playwrights have often seen madness with a “discerning Eye.” Select a novel or play in which a character’s apparent madness or irrational behavior plays an important role. Then write a well-organized essay in which you explain what this delusion or eccentric behavior consists of and how it might be judged reasonable. Explain the significance of the “madness” to the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

1998.  In his essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau offers the following assessment of literature:

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in  Hamlet   and  The Iliad , in all scriptures and mythologies, not learned in schools, that delights us.

From the works that you have studied in school, choose a novel, play, or epic poem that you may initially have thought was conventional and tame but that you now value for its “uncivilized free and wild thinking.” Write an essay in which you explain what constitutes its “uncivilized free and wild thinking” and how that thinking is central to the value of the work as a whole. Support your ideas with specific references to the work you choose.

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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William Shakespeare

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Hamlet . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Hamlet: Introduction

Hamlet: plot summary, hamlet: detailed summary & analysis, hamlet: themes, hamlet: quotes, hamlet: characters, hamlet: symbols, hamlet: literary devices, hamlet: quizzes, hamlet: theme wheel, brief biography of william shakespeare.

Historical Context of Hamlet

Other books related to hamlet.

• Full Title: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
• When Written: Likely between 1599 and 1602
• Where Written: Stratford-upon-Avon or London, England
• When Published: First Quarto printed 1603; Second Quarto printed 1604; First Folio printed 1623
• Literary Period: Renaissance
• Genre: Tragic play; revenge play
• Setting: Elsinore Castle, Denmark, during the late Middle Ages
• Climax: After seeing Claudius’s emotional reaction to a play Hamlet has had staged in order to make Claudius face a fictionalized version of his own murder plot against the former king, Hamlet resolves to kill the Claudius without guilt.
• Antagonist: Claudius
• Point of View: Dramatic

Extra Credit for Hamlet

The Role of a Lifetime. The role of Hamlet is often considered one of the most challenging theatrical roles ever written, and has been widely interpreted on stage and screen by famous actors throughout history. Shakespeare is rumored to have originally written the role for John Burbage, one of the most well-known actors of the Elizabethan era. Since Shakespeare’s time, actors John Barrymore, Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Jude Law, Kenneth Branagh, and Ethan Hawke are just a few actors who have tried their hand at playing the Dane. When Daniel Day-Lewis took to the stage as Hamlet in London in 1989, he left the stage mid-performance one night after reportedly seeing the ghost of his real father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, and has not acted in a single live theater production since.

Shakespeare or Not?  There are some who believe Shakespeare did not actually write many—or any—of the plays attributed to him. The most common “Anti-Stratfordian” theory is that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and used Shakespeare as a front man, as aristocrats were not supposed to write plays. Others claim Shakespeare’s contemporaries such as Thomas Kyd or Christopher Marlowe may have authored his works. Most contemporary scholarship, however, supports the idea that the Bard really did compose the numerous plays and poems which have established him, in the eyes of many, as the greatest writer in history.

College 101

• AP English Literature and Composition

AP English Literature and Composition Article Type: Connect

Ap® english literature and composition sample essays (the good, the bad, and the ugly).

The free response section of the beloved AP® Lit exam requires three written responses from students:

(1) A literary analysis of a given poem (2) A literary analysis of a given passage of prose fiction (this may include drama) (3) An analysis that examines a specific concept, issue, or element in a work of literary merit selected by the student

We're focusing on the third here, which scores students on a scale of 1-9 (and fingers crossed, not 0). The essays below represent the range of scores, and they're followed up with a score breakdown showing you what  to  do, and uh, what  not  to do.

Something else you should do? Prepare for your AP exams with Shmoop .

Scoring Guidelines

For all things AP Lit, including exam format, past exams, and scoring information, refer to the  College Board's AP Central page .

According to the College Board : "The score should reflect the quality of the essay as a whole—its content, style, and mechanics. Reward the students for what they do well . The score for an exceptionally well-written essay may be raised by 1 point above the otherwise appropriate score. In no case may a poorly written essay be scored higher than a 3."

Many works of literature deal with family conflicts, or with individual characters whose relationships with family members change over time, or play a significant role in the character's understanding of him- or herself.

In a well-written essay, analyze how a character's relationship to a family member or members, or a character's understanding of family, functions in the work, and what it shows about the characters and themes of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot. You may select a novel or a play of literary merit.

Madness, a theme that runs throughout William Shakespeare's Hamlet , manifests itself as both an authentic illness as well as a shrewd manipulation. By play's end, there is even a gray area between the two that is difficult to discern. But whether the concern is Ophelia truly losing her mind following her father's murder, Hamlet's act of madness after meeting with his father's ghost, or the arguable proposition that Hamlet's "antic disposition" has devolved into the genuine article, one thing is for certain—Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius have the greatest effect, directly or indirectly, on all of these instances.

Ophelia's madness is the only example that is assuredly real. Throughout much of the play, she is level-headed and quite competent. She's a bit sad, perhaps, at the vulgarity Hamlet displays toward her, especially prior to the play-within-a-play. It seems as if she truly loved Hamlet and was hopeful to marry him someday. Yet, she's able to carry out her father's wishes, returning the gifts Hamlet had given her in the past and informing him she does not love him.

When Ophelia appears before the king and queen following Polonius' death, though, she speaks nonsense and appears to have cracked. Her madness later takes the ultimate toll on her, as her drowning in the river is presumed a suicide.

This madness, and Ophelia's death, are certainly the result of Hamlet killing her father. But they can be traced back beyond her love for her father, all the way to Hamlet's relationship with his uncle/new stepfather. Hamlet's relationship with Claudius is already poor when the play begins because he's upset about Claudius taking his father's place so soon. It becomes immeasurably worse when King Hamlet's ghost arrives. The ghost informs Hamlet that Claudius murdered him so he could wear the crown of Denmark.

Once Hamlet learns of this duplicity, his whole relationship with Claudius is based on his desire for and inability to take revenge. Even though he takes an unreasonably long amount of time before finally gaining that revenge at the end of the play, everything he does from this point forward has something to do with it. It doesn't matter to Hamlet who is affected as he plots his revenge. It doesn't even matter to him that Ophelia, the woman he loved, is at first an innocent bystander, and then a pawn of her father and the king. Hamlet's act of madness centers on treating her in a borderline abusive manner.

Along with the way Hamlet treats her, the primary factor in Ophelia's suicide is Hamlet's murder of Polonius. Hamlet doesn't mean to kill Polonius, but it's a moment that most closely represents his act descending into real madness. When he is summoned to his mother's room following the play he stages, Hamlet's plan has just proven that the ghost told the truth, and Claudius really did murder his father. Hamlet's ire, and his desire to kill Claudius, are never higher than they are just then. This is also the moment when he hears a noise from behind the arras and, believing it's Claudius, Hamlet finally attempts to take his vengeance in a fit of rage. So, although he mistakenly kills the wrong man, Hamlet's utter disdain for Claudius ultimately leads to Ophelia's own madness and suicide.

Another moment where Hamlet might have truly lost it is when he stumbles upon Ophelia's funeral, which is how he learns of her suicide. After seeing Laertes' overblown show of grief, Hamlet makes a similar demonstration. He pronounces his love for Ophelia, jumps into the grave with Laertes, and they fight. He later claims he was just upset at Laertes' public display of affection, but it appears possible Hamlet is truly overcome at this point when realizing all that has happened. And again, since Ophelia's death can ultimately be traced back all the way to Hamlet's relationship with Claudius, it's fair to say this is another example of that relationship emphasizing the theme of madness in the play.

Despite Claudius being the center of his revenge plot, Hamlet is also greatly affected by his deteriorating relationship with Gertrude. Even before knowing the truth of his father's murder, Hamlet has lost his respect for his mother. He feels she's disrespected his father by remarrying so quickly after his father's death, and by marrying his father's brother. This is the main source of Hamlet's depression at the start of the play.

His relationship with his mother, then, makes his plan easier to carry out after meeting the ghost. Considering the change in his demeanor that everyone around the castle has noticed due to his depression, the "crazy" act he puts on seems like a logical progression. Had it been more out of character, more people might have caught on to his act.

The way things have changed with Gertrude also affects Hamlet because he doesn't have that source of comfort he should have from his mother. Considering she's part of the problem, he can't go to her for support, guidance, or comfort when trying to deal with Claudius and make good on his promise of revenge. Their relationship, then, isn't as directly responsible for the different acts of madness as is Hamlet's relationship with Claudius, but it holds some responsibility in terms of its omission from the help it should provide.

It's impossible to know whether Hamlet ever truly descends into madness, or if it never advances beyond his planned performance. Either possibility, though, is influenced most clearly by his relationships with Claudius and Gertrude. And the one definitive example of madness—Ophelia's cracking—is also a result of those relationships. Madness ultimately shapes this play more than any other theme, and the various types of madness on display all result from these two relationships of Hamlet.

Hoo boy, there's a lot of madness going on in Hamlet . This essay expertly argues that Hamlet's mommy and daddy problems are the cause of pretty much all of it. Doesn't matter much if it's real or fake, or even if he's the one gone mad.

This essay even makes a compelling case about how Ophelia's madness is only linked to her father's death superficially, and is really due to Hamlet's beef with Claudius. 

Complete with textual evidence, attention to detail, and insightful analysis, this well-organized essay has a clear and convincing message. If there's a weakness, it's that this essay doesn't give equal time to Hamlet's relationship with Gertrude as it does to his relationship with Claudius. But the College Board understands that writing three essays in two hours is hard work, so those gracious folks aren't expecting absolute perfection. And because the prompt doesn't require more than one relationship discussion, anything mentioned about Gertrude is just gravy as far as we're concerned.

A central theme in Shakespeare's Hamlet is madness, which is demonstrated through Hamlet himself and through Ophelia. Hamlet's madness is seemingly all an act he perpetuates to help him gain vengeance for his father, while Ophelia's madness is a true tragedy. In both cases, the real and imagined cases of madness can be traced back to Hamlet's relationships with his mother and stepfather, Gertrude and Claudius.

Ophelia's madness is undeniably real. In her early scenes, she shows herself as a good daughter who is willing to carry out her father's plans, even though it pits her against Hamlet. Yet, following her father's death, she cracks. She sings and talks nonsense, and unlike Hamlet, there's no reason for her to put on an act. Following the unhinged manner in which she acts in front of the king and queen, it's not much of a surprise to discover that Ophelia has committed suicide.

Ophelia's madness and death are a direct result of Hamlet killing her father. But there's also a deeper reason for her madness. Her father's death isn't even supposed to happen. It's a mistake that stems from Hamlet's relationship with Claudius, and his desire for revenge.

Once Hamlet learns of Claudius' role in his father's death, everything becomes about taking revenge. All Hamlet's thoughts and actions are driven by what he's learned about Claudius. It doesn't matter to Hamlet who is affected as he plots his revenge. It doesn't matter to Hamlet that Ophelia is at first an innocent bystander, and then a pawn of her father and the king. He still purposely uses her, the woman he loves, as his primary way of putting on his act of madness. He treats her intentionally poorly as a means of showing everyone around him how crazy he's become, all in the name of fulfilling his plans for revenge.

The combination of Hamlet's horrendous treatment of her, topped with his murder of her father, is what drives Ophelia over the edge. When Hamlet kills Polonius, this is one moment where his act might possibly have given way to true madness. This happens directly after the play-within-a-play, which is when Hamlet discovers proof for himself that Claudius really killed his father. That revelation, and his belief that Claudius was the one spying on his mother and him, drives Hamlet to blindly drive his sword through the tapestry, which conceals Polonius. He does this in a fit of rage because of his hatred of Claudius. Polonius really ends up as collateral damage—as does Ophelia—but her madness, both their deaths, and Hamlet's possible true madness in that moment, are all the result of Hamlet's hatred of Claudius.

If Hamlet's feelings toward Claudius are to blame for all these events, then they are also naturally the reason Hamlet might have lost his mind a second time, this time at Ophelia's funeral. When he and Horatio come upon her funeral and he realizes she has killed herself, he understands the reasoning must be due to Polonius' death, possibly coupled with how he'd been treating her. And Hamlet knows better than anyone that, without his grudge against Claudius and need to put on his "antic disposition," none of this would have happened. This drives Hamlet to reveal himself to the gathering, jump down into the grave with Laertes, and begin a fight with him. It is possible this is simply a continuation of his act, but this could also be a moment of true emotion and hysteria overtaking him. He knows his actions drove Ophelia to her grave. He also knows Claudius is the reason behind all his actions.

Hamlet's poor relationship with his mother is also a cause of issues for him. He has already lost his respect for his mother because of her remarrying so quickly after his father's death, and because she married his father's brother. Even as the play begins, Hamlet is depressed, and it's primarily based on his mother's actions and what they've done to his relationship with her.

This relationship with his mother, then, helps him carry out his plan after meeting the ghost. Everyone has already seen a drastic change in his behavior and demeanor, so the "crazy" act he puts on seems like a logical progression. If it had come out of nowhere, it might have been harder for anyone to buy into.

Hamlet's madness, whether entirely an act or a combination of performance meeting reality, is a result of his relationships with Gertrude and Claudius. And though Ophelia would probably blame Hamlet for her condition, it's clear her madness also finds its roots in the toxic state of affairs between Hamlet and his parents. There's no escaping madness throughout the play, and all examples of it are rooted in that relationship.

Hamlet's relationship with Claudius is center stage again in this essay. Most of the persuasive analysis about the theme of madness comes from this area, with just a little bit of help provided by his disgust with Gertrude. 

No doubt this essay is still plenty insightful when it discusses the reasons for Ophelia's transformation from dutiful daughter to raving crackpot. But there's a bit less evidence from the text and sophisticated language in this essay than in the nine-pointer.

A central theme in Hamlet is madness, which is demonstrated through both Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet's madness is primarily an act to help him gain vengeance for his father, although it's possible it becomes real at a few key moments. Meanwhile, Ophelia's madness is definitely real. In either case, this madness can be traced back to Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius.

Ophelia's madness is undeniably real. Early in the play, she seems fine. She's a good daughter to Polonius and does what he says, even though it hurts her to make Hamlet upset. Following her father's death, though, she cracks. She's nothing like what she was earlier, singing and talking nonsense. Later, we find out she has committed suicide. This is a drastic change from what she's like in the beginning. And while this change is because of what Hamlet does, it goes deeper than that. Everything that causes her madness stems from Hamlet's relationship with Claudius, and his desire for revenge.

All Hamlet's thoughts and actions are driven by what he's learned about Claudius. It doesn't even matter to him that he hurts Ophelia in the process of his revenge. He purposely uses her, the woman he loves, as his primary way of putting on his act of madness. He treats her poorly to show everyone around him how crazy he's become, all to help him fulfill his plans for revenge.

Hamlet's abusive treatment of Ophelia, along with his murder of her father, drives her to madness. When Hamlet kills Polonius, this is one moment where his act might possibly have given way to true madness. He commits this murder in a fit of rage, but he believes it's Claudius he's killing, not Polonius. Polonius' interference puts him in the wrong place at the wrong time, right when Hamlet might be demonstrating genuine madness himself.

Hamlet might have also legitimately been mad with grief at Ophelia's funeral. When Hamlet discovers she has killed herself, he realizes his actions must have caused this. And he knows that, without his grudge against Claudius and need to act crazy, she would still be alive. This drives Hamlet to reveal himself to the gathering, jump down into the grave with Laertes, and begin a fight with him. It is possible this is simply a continuation of his act, or it might be something more.

Hamlet's relationship with Gertrude also plays a part in the theme of madness in the play. Even before knowing the truth of his father's murder, Hamlet has lost his respect for his mother because he feels she's disrespected his father by remarrying so quickly after his father's death, and by marrying his father's brother. This is why Hamlet is depressed at the start of the play.

His relationship with his mother, then, makes his plan easier to carry out after meeting the ghost. Considering how he has changed because of his depression, the "crazy" act he puts on seems like a logical progression.

All the madness displayed in this play has its roots in Hamlet's relationships with Claudius and Gertrude. The toxic nature of those relationships causes him to act crazy, possibly to really be crazy at a few points in time, and causes the actions that instigate Ophelia's madness.

This essay gives "reasonable analysis," as the College Board would put it, of Hamlet's scheme, how it causes Ophelia's mental breakdown, and how it all stems from the toxic fumes of his relationships with Claudius and Gertrude. 

The analysis isn't as thorough or perceptive as the highest scored essays, though. For example, when Hamlet and Laertes duke it out in the graveyard like the Undertaker and Kane, there's only a passing mention of the fact that Hamlet might not be acting anymore.

Madness plays a crucial role in William Shakespeare's Hamlet . Hamlet himself has toxic relationships with his mother, Queen Gertrude, and his uncle, King Claudius. These relationships instigate a great deal of the madness in the play, from both Hamlet and Ophelia.

Ophelia is the character who demonstrates genuine madness. Late in the play, she seems to lose her mind. She speaks a lot of nonsense to the king and queen, and shortly later, we find out that she's dead of an apparent suicide. It seems as if her father's murder at Hamlet's hands is the cause of her madness. But, looking deeper, Hamlet only kills Polonius accidentally, when he thinks he's killing Claudius. So it's still Hamlet's terrible relationship with Claudius, and his desire for revenge, that really causes Ophelia's madness.

The reason Hamlet's relationship with Claudius is so toxic is two-fold. The main reason forms when the ghost of Hamlet's father shows up and tells him that Claudius actually killed him. This is what causes Hamlet to act crazy. He's beside himself with anger and grief, but he still feels he needs to determine if the ghost is telling the truth. He thinks that by acting as if he's lost his mind, he'll be able to investigate what the ghost has told him, and probably carry out vengeance against Claudius, as well.

Even before the ghost showed up, though, Hamlet's relationship with Claudius was also strained because of Hamlet's depression. Hamlet already hated that Gertrude remarried so quickly. And it's worse that she remarried Claudius, since he was the king's brother. Claudius doesn't like the way Hamlet was acting so down in the dumps, or the way he continually makes nasty remarks toward Gertrude. But once Hamlet really starts acting crazy and putting on this show to investigate, Claudius actually tries to have him killed. He seems to see through the act more than everyone else, who all think Hamlet is only acting this way because Ophelia rejected him.

Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius are the determining factor in all the madness in the play. These relationships had already been affected because of Hamlet's grief for his dead father and his perceived lack of respect from his mother. Learning of Claudius' betrayal is too much for him to bear, causing his act of madness, and also indirectly being responsible for Ophelia's madness, as well.

The fall from a 7 score to a 6 score is more apparent than the fall from a 9 to an 8, and maybe even from an 8 to a 7. In this essay, the link between Hamlet's steaming pile of a relationship with Claudius and Gertrude and the play's madness is still explained, but the insight is getting weaker and less thorough. The discussion's beginning to get a little artificial for everyone's liking here.

The student's analysis, or lack thereof, of Ophelia's madness, and the need to look beyond her father's death to understand the real cause, is noticeably short and underdeveloped when compared to the higher scored essays. This essay also fails to examine whether Hamlet might've actually gone a little crazy himself in a couple of instances. It's just presumed that everything he does is an act, which could be true...if we had more discussion to back it up. (But really, that's probably giving him too much credit.)

In Hamlet , by William Shakespeare, the character Hamlet's poor relationships with his mother, Queen Gertrude, and his uncle, King Claudius, show a great deal about his madness, and madness is a major theme in the play.

It's shown early on that Hamlet is unhappy with the fact that his mother remarried so soon after her husband's (Hamlet's father's) death. The fact that she marries Hamlet's uncle just makes it worse. Hamlet consistently acts childish and makes snide remarks, like when he refers to Claudius as his "uncle-father" and Gertrude as his "aunt-mother." He has great disdain for her actions and considers them incestuous. Even though he goes on to put on a show of madness, it's possible that he actually does go a little mad, and there's no question that Gertrude's actions are a part of that.

Hamlet's relationship with Claudius contributes to his madness even more. He's already upset about this new marriage, which has caused him to lose his respect for his mother. Now, when the ghost of his father shows up and tells him that Claudius actually killed him, this makes things even worse. This is what actually causes Hamlet to act crazy. He thinks that by acting as if he's lost his mind, it will be easier for him to investigate what the ghost has told him, and probably to carry out vengeance against Claudius, as well.

Even before the ghost showed up, though, Hamlet's relationship with Claudius was also strained because of Hamlet's depression. Claudius doesn't like the way Hamlet was acting so down in the dumps, or the way he continually makes nasty remarks toward Gertrude. Once Hamlet really starts acting crazy, Claudius goes so far as to try to have him killed. He seems to see through the act more than everyone else, who all think Hamlet is only acting this way because Ophelia rejected him.

Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius have a huge impact on the theme of madness. The changes that occur when you take a young man already grieving over his dead father and his perceived lack of respect from his mother, and combine them with the news of betrayal from another member of his own family, is enough to cause Hamlet to choose to act mad, and maybe even to actually go a little mad.

The difference between a 6 and a 5 is that a 5 is lacking even more in organization, is more simplistic and general in its analysis, and the biggie: it leans on plot summary more than it should.

This essay provides an accurate, but relatively one-dimensional, discussion of Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius, and how they affect his show of madness. But the discussion doesn't go deeper than some nicely summarized plot points and it never digs into Ophelia's madness, which is a major part of the theme throughout the play.

There is no doubt that a character's relationship with one or more family members or friends in a book or play can have a drastic impact on the story as a whole. In the play Hamlet , the relationships that Hamlet, the main character, has with Gertrude, Claudius, and Ophelia, are these types of relationships. These relationships affect the theme of madness in the play.

Hamlet's relationship with his mother has taken a significant turn for the worse since his father died and she quickly remarried his uncle, the dead king's brother. Hamlet sees this as a betrayal of his father, as if his death didn't even affect Gertrude at all. He feels it's totally unreasonable for her to have moved on and remarried so quickly. Hamlet's relationship with her, then, becomes testy, as he treats her quite badly for what he thinks are her sins. If Hamlet really goes mad, Gertrude's actions are definitely a part of that.

Claudius has an even more direct effect on Hamlet's madness. Hamlet is disgusted enough with him already because he views this new marriage as incestuous. But when the ghost of King Hamlet appears and tells Hamlet that Claudius actually murdered him for the crown, this is what really puts Hamlet on the road toward madness. It's his desire to avenge his father that causes him to put on a display of madness.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, is Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia. It appears that Hamlet and Ophelia had been in love with one another at some point in time. It's never entirely clear how Hamlet really feels about her as the play progresses. His treatment of her is a major part of his plan, since she's the one who relays information about his behavior back to Polonius and Claudius. So, their relationship is part of Hamlet's fake madness. But after Hamlet kills Polonius, it manifests real madness. Ophelia truly loses her mind and winds up killing herself. And Hamlet, upon discovering this at her funeral, jumps out of hiding and into her grave, seeming to have gone mad himself, at least momentarily.

In conclusion, madness is a major theme throughout the play. Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius both cause him to put his plan of demonstrating madness into effect. And his relationship with Ophelia is not only a major part of that plan, but it also might cause him some real, temporary madness, as well as Ophelia's legitimate fatal madness.

This essay is about as deep as an above ground swimming pool. 

It's fairly well-written, but Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius are only given a paragraph each, so there's not much going on beyond, "Hamlet's uncle killed his father, so now Hamlet will act crazy." We'd call that an unsupported, oversimplified, plot-based explanation. 

Plus, instead of discussing Ophelia's madness as a consequence of Hamlet's relationship with Claudius, this student discusses Hamlet's direct relationship with Ophelia. The problem is, Ophelia's not a family member, so not only does this discussion not fit the question, but there are a lot of complexities left unexplained here.

In Hamlet , Hamlet's understanding of family, and his relationship with some of his family members, affects the themes of the whole play. His relationships with his mother, Gertrude, and uncle/stepfather, Claudius, in particular, have the most drastic effects on the themes.

Hamlet's relationship with his mother isn't good anymore. When the play begins, his father, the king, is already dead, and his mother has already remarried Hamlet's uncle. Hamlet doesn't like the fact that she remarried right away. He thinks this happened way too quickly. Hamlet also thinks that the fact that she married her dead husband's brother is disgusting and wrong.

Hamlet's relationship with his uncle, the new king and his new stepfather, also isn't good anymore. Hamlet doesn't get along with him for all the same reasons he doesn't get along with his mother anymore. But Claudius also became the king, which is supposed to be Hamlet's job in the future. So, Hamlet has even more reason to hate Claudius now.

The changes in Hamlet's relationships with his mother and stepfather affect the play's themes pretty drastically. They show that family is important, but if what the ghost told Hamlet is true, then it's really not everything. Clearly, Gertrude and Claudius valued power more than family when they plotted against the old king. And Hamlet's sanity is also directly impacted by these two relationships. These changes are what cause him to put on an act of madness. But it's possible that he actually goes a little mad. Some readers read the play that way, and if Hamlet really does go crazy a little bit, it's because of the crimes Gertrude and Claudius committed, and how they affected Hamlet.

Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius have a huge effect on the whole play. Their evil actions change who Hamlet is as a person and a character. The changes in these relationships have major repercussions on the themes of family and madness.

Yikes. This essay is way oversimplified. It's a 3 and not a 4 because it's oversimplified to the point of it being a "misreading and/or inept writing," as the College Board would call it. Sure, it hits on the changes in Hamlet's relationships with Gertrude and Claudius, but by barely scraping the surface, it's little more than a summary. 

This essay attempts to touch on the ghost, but misses the mark in discussing this figure's critical role in informing Hamlet of the truth and driving the wedge between him and his "parents." The essay also fails to go beyond identifying family and madness as two themes in the play, so there's no real insight presented on these talking points.

In Hamlet , Hamlet had a lot of problems. Hamlet's problems include problems with his family, including his mother Gertrude, his new father Claudius and his sister Ophelia. Hamlet's problems are that he thinks his mother married his new father too fast after his original father died and also that he's in love with his sister. Because Hamlet hates his mother and new father, it causes him to have a lot of angst. He thinks a lot about killing himself. And when he finds out Opheila doesn't love him the way he loves her it makes him even more upset; this is why he jumped into Ophelia's grave at her funeral after he escaped from the pirates who took over his ship and killed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet's also upset that his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don't like him anymore and are trying to trap him because the king asked them to.

If his mom didn't remarry only two days after his dad died then Hamlet wouldn't be so upset. He's not a fan of his uncle so he doesn't want him to be king. And also, Hamlet wants to be king someday. He feels like he's being replaced and like he'll never get to be king now. He thinks the king is after him so he never has a challenger to the throne, but Hamlet still doesn't want to kill the king. He thinks it's wrong and that it will automatically send him to hell, so he refuses to do it for the ghost.

Because of the death of Hamlet's father, his mother remarrying his uncle after just two days, and his sister not loving him romantically like he loved her (and then she killed herself, too, which upset Hamlet even more), Hamlet is upset, angry, and suicidal. His relationships with all his family members really changed a lot because all these things happened to him, and because his friends turned their back on him.

We've moved on to the College Board's class of poorly-written essays here. This writer clearly misread certain parts of the play, and the essay, aside from being poorly-written and weighed down with poor grammar and structure, is filled with inaccuracies. 

For starters, Ophelia isn't Hamlet's sister, so (1) the essay is mainly a summary, (2) it's poor summary at that, and (3) it's completely haphazard. It jumps around from Ophelia's death to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Claudius not wanting Hamlet to challenge him for the throne. All without rhyme or reason. This incoherent essay also fails to answer the question, because it never mentions the themes of the play and how they're influenced by Hamlet's relationships with his family.

Hamlet used to, like, love his mom. But then she helped kill his dad. And then she married his uncle. So now he hates her.

Hamlet doesn't really know how family works. Now he's got a messed up situation with his mom and his uncle. His uncle is the new king and his dad is dead. His dad was the king. His dad's ghost is hanging around trying to get Hamlet to kill the new king.

Hamlet doesn't have a relationship with his uncle. I mean, how do you have a relationship with the guy who killed your dad and married your mom? He wants to kill his uncle for most of the book but he always chickens out or can't do it at the right time.

This is a bad and weird situation for Hamlet. He doesn't get along with anybody in his family. He's always moping around and acting all emo. And then he kills a bunch of people and gets killed. His family situation doesn't really work good.

There's no real introduction or conclusion to this essay, and there's only the vaguest attempt to answer the question. At one point, the essay—er, this informal piece of writing unrecognizable as an essay—even addresses the reader. It's a 1 because it gets a few facts right, but aside from those, this writing is way too short to carry any substance. 

"This is a bad and weird situation" hardly passes for insight. 'Nuff said.

A score of 0 is either blank or very ugly. Avert your eyes. 

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Home » English » AP English Literature & Composition » How to Use Hamlet For Everything

Rebekah Hendershot

How to Use Hamlet For Everything

Table of contents, ap english literature & composition how to use hamlet for everything.

Section 4: The Essays: Lecture 5 | 21:15 min

In this lesson, our instructor Rebekah Hendershot, teaches you How to Use Hamlet for (Almost) Everything. You’ll learn why Hamlet is a great text to use to just about any essay and where to find the questions use in this lesson. Rebekah uses Hamlet and The Search for Justice, Hamlet and the Illuminating Incident, Hamlet and the Symbol, and Hamlet and the Social Justice Issuse to teach different ways of tackling essay prompts. The lesson concludes with when you shouldn’t use Hamlet and then the Ultimate Essay Secret.

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• Lesson Overview 0:10
• Why Hamlet Works for Everything (Almost) 1:16
• Considered one of the greatest works of English literature
• It's long enough to be broken down
• Rich range of male and female characters
• Variety of interpretations
• Elements of many genres
• It's public domain
• Where to Find the Questions 3:18
• 2011: Hamlet and the Search for Justice 4:18
• “Life is a search for justice”
• What are you being asked to analyze?
• How to Answer 5:06
• How does Hamlet understand justice?
• Is his search for justice successful?
• 2011B: Hamlet and the Illuminating Incident 7:10
• A work of fiction uses the “illuminating incident“ as a ”magic casement”
• What are you being asked to explain?
• How to Answer 8:08
• The play Hamlet puts on before Claudius
• Literal summary and window into the soul
• Focus on Claudius's prayer
• 2009: Hamlet and the Symbol 9:40
• The definition of a symbol
• What are you being asked to focus on and analyze?
• How to Answer 10:24
• Yorick's skull
• How does it function in the work?
• What does it reveal about the characters or themes?
• 2009B: Hamlet and the Social Issue 12:14
• What are you being asked to do?
• How to Answer 12:52
• Uh-oh! Hamlet isn't very socially or politically conscious
• Class conflict in the play
• Gender in the play
• How to Answer, cont. 14:02
• What literary elements does Shakespeare use to explore this issue?
• How does this contribute to the meaning of the work as a whole?
• Don't Just Use Hamlet 16:37
• How about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and racism?
• Remember you are writing under a time limit
• Don't use Hamlet if you haven't read it
• The Ultimate Essay Secret 18:03

AP English Literature and Composition

Section 1: Introduction  8:43  27:10  9:40  11:23Section 2: Shakespeare: Plays & Sonnets  22:20  4:18  26:51  39:28  24:00  30:59  24:32  30:12  30:34  30:55  19:08  23:55  29:12  23:42  20:46  19:38  21:09Section 3: Multiple-Choice Section  14:22  9:17  11:41  9:48Section 4: The Essays  21:54  11:03  11:08  17:28  21:15Section 5: Test Walkthrough  15:24  19:25  10:07  7:24  14:43

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107 Exceptional Hamlet Essay Topics: Questions & Prompts

Every academic paper starts with a captivating idea, and Hamlet research paper or essay shouldn’t be an exception. In the list below, our team has collected unique and inspiring topics for you. You can use them in your writing or develop your own idea according to the format.

Here are some Hamlet essay topics for you:

• Elaborate on the weather in Denmark. How does it reflect the state of affairs and mood in the country? How does it change throughout the play? Start this Hamlet essay by describing the foggy weather in the first scene and gradually provide more examples as evidence.
• Think of irony in Hamlet . How and for what purposes did Shakespeare incorporate it in the play? Provide examples of the lines and situations that can be considered ironic.
• Reflect on Gertrude’s marriages. Why did she marry Claudius? Did they have an affair when King Hamlet was alive? Or did she agree on the new marriage to help the country?
• Compare and contrast Claudius and King Oedipus from Oedipus the King . What character traits do they share? Who is a better politician? Why?
• Explain whether you think Gertrude is on Hamlet’s or Claudius’ side. Did she switch the side by the end of the play? Analyze her conversation with Hamlet and how she later told Claudius that Hamlet was mad. Why did she drink the suspicious (poisoned) wine?
• Analyze the fact that dying Hamlet asked Horatio to spread his story. Will Horatio retell it without changes? Can he tell the truth about what happened at all?
• Examine an approach to violence in Hamlet . Are violence and aggression excessive in the play? How do characters react to it? Comment on how violence is mainly linked to vengeance.
• Consider the Ghost of Old Hamlet and all his appearances in Hamlet . Who saw him? Who do you think can see him? In your Hamlet essay, analyze every scene where he occurred and elaborate on why he did so.
• Talk about the relationship between Gertrude and Old Hamlet. Analyze what we know about their marriage and her reaction to her husband’s death. Did Gertrude see the Ghost in the scene with Hamlet? Could she have pretended that she didn’t?
• If Hamlet had survived, would he have been a good king? Analyze his strengths and weaknesses concerning the matter. Did he prove to be a good leader or politician in the play? Consider that Fortinbras explicitly stated that Hamlet could’ve become a good ruler.
• Elaborate on the way Hamlet killed Polonius in act 3, scene 4. Why did Hamlet act so quickly and calmly when he hesitates to kill his enemy, Claudius? Was this murder intentional? Did Hamlet regret it or freak out about it?
• Explore Hamlet’s mental state. How did grief affect him? His depression and suicidal tendencies are apparent. How do they change throughout the play?
• Compare Hamlet’s attitude towards the only women in the play, Ophelia and Gertrude. Why does he shame both of them for their sexual relationships? Examine his dialogues with his mother and his (ex)girlfriend, where he expresses cruelty. Elaborate on how his mother’s remarriage affected his relationships with the women.
• Examine the madness that Hamlet may or may not obtain. Thanks to his dialogue with Horatio, we know that he fakes his insanity. But could it have changed by the end of the play? What could’ve caused it? Analyze the evidence of his abnormal behavior and whether you can consider it natural, not acted.
• Analyze how Hamlet reflects on suicide. Provide examples from the soliloquies where Hamlet presumably tells the truth about his feelings. He considers suicide as an option, way out of the situation. Why doesn’t he commit it? Or was his death close to suicide?
• Consider whether the Ghost exists or not. A few people have seen him, but may it have been a case of mass hysteria? Hamlet may have gone mad over the death of his father and his mother’s remarriage. What if he imagined his dialogues with deceased King Hamlet? Provide evidence for that opinion or refute it.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s trust issues. He suspects everyone from the start except for one person. Why does Hamlet trust Horatio? Analyze how the prince never lies during their conversations, even when the truth is a little insane. Why does Horatio believe everything he says?
• Examine friendship in Hamlet . Most of the relationships in the play are based on manipulation and benefit. Who can you see as friends in Hamlet ? Reflect on whether Hamlet values his friendship with Horatio. What can you say about Hamlet’s friends from childhood?
• Analyze the literary period during which Shakespeare came up with Hamlet . What features of the Elizabethan era does he illustrate in the play? Examplify various scenes and dialogues to prove your point.
• Consider prominent theatrical productions of Hamlet . How did they change over the centuries? What does modern theatre do that the Medieval one could not? Did theatrical performances evolve?
• Compare and contrast the original play and Lion King by Disney corporation. What are the key differences that were made in the cartoon? Why did Disney decide to come up with them? Analyze which version do you like more and why.
• Comment on the theme of death and mortality What events and objects made Hamlet obsessed with death? Elaborate on the role that religion plays in his considerations concerning the matter.
• Examine Claudius’ soliloquy . What’s its role in the play? What’s the crucial idea of his speech? Elaborate on the reasons why Claudius, the villain, has a soliloquy in Hamlet .
• Analyze all the symbols of death in the play What symbols from Hamlet refer to mortality? Speculate whether you can call fences, poison, unweeded gardens, flowers, and so on a symbol of death.
• Explore the conflicts of Hamlet . The play combines inner and outer conflicts, which are addressed mainly through Hamlet’s monologues. List the fundamental oppositions and lines that exemplify them.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude Why is he upset with her? How does it affect his actions and opinion about all the women? Does Gertrude love her son?
• Analyze the setting of the play. Does the fact that Hamlet takes place in Denmark play any crucial role? Speculate why Shakespeare may have decided upon this country and support your opinion with evidence.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia. Does the prince consider her significant? Does he care about her? Compare how he treated Ophelia before and after her death.
• Comment on Hamlet’s religious beliefs Does religion have an impact on the prince’s decisions? Why is Hamlet considered a protestant? Prove your point by providing evidence from the play.
• Reflect on the theme of revenge Why does everyone value revenge in the play? Why do people passionately seek it in the society presented in Hamlet ? Elaborate on what impact it has on the characters’ motivations and decisions.
• Consider the language of Hamlet . Explain that Shakespeare’s play is well-known for its rich language and broad vocabulary. He composed a few characters who pay close attention to the words they say and hear. Why is language crucial for Hamlet?
• Examine Fortinbras. Who is he? Why is he a character foil for Hamlet? Analyze why he succeeded in everything he did and even became the king of Denmark.
• Analyze imagery and descriptions in the play. How does Shakespeare enhance each scene by alternating descriptions of the weather and nature? Provide examples of prominent images presented in the play and elaborate on their purpose.
• Compare Hamlet to Oedipus Rex . What do the characters of the famous plays have in common? Do they have a similar goal? Elaborate on how their character traits affect the endings of the respective plays.
• Explore the deception in Hamlet . What things and events are built on lies? Why and how do characters try to manipulate each other throughout the whole play?
• Elaborate on the imagery of rot and diseases How do unweeded gardens reflect the state of affairs? Explain how ill atmosphere foreshadows and represents problems caused by the actions of the royal court’s members.
• Comment on the role of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the play. Speculate whether they are simply comic relief characters or they have another purpose in Hamlet . Why did Shakespeare decide that he needed such characters in the play?
• Analyze Gertrude’s attitude towards Ophelia. Elaborate on the scenes where Gertrude communicates with Ophelia and mentions her. What does the queen think of her and her relationships with Hamlet? How does Gertrude comments on Ophelia’s death?
• Compare Hamlet’s and Horatio’s character traits. In what ways are they different and similar? What Horatio’s qualities Hamlet explicitly admires and lacks?
• Speculate on Shakespeare’s opinion about theatre. Examine a few references to the English stage of the Elizabethan era that the author put in the play in Act 2. How does he comment on the theatre of his own time through Hamlet’s lines of dialogue?
• Explore the relationships between Hamlet and Claudius. Why does Hamlet suspect his uncle from the start? Does Claudius think of Hamlet as dangerous? When does he become highly aware of his nephew’s capabilities?
• Consider the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When and how did they die? Why does a reader find out about it after the deaths of the royal family members? Speculate on the reasons why it was structured to be so anticlimactic. Why did W. S. Gilbert write a short comic play about them?
• Analyze the reception and comprehension of Hamlet . Why is it one of the most popular Shakespeare’s plays even today? Is it still relevant? Explain why nowadays our understanding of the play differs from the one from the writer’s era.
• Comment on the appearance vs. reality in Hamlet . Why do so many characters pretend to have another personality or obtain character traits that they don’t have? Why does Hamlet see through the pretense?
• Elaborate on Ophelia’s death . Was it a suicide, how gravediggers presumed, or an accident, as Gertrude claimed? Explain in your Hamlet essay the reasons for Ophelia to commit suicide. Did she have a choice?
• Reflect on political corruption. What characters represent corrupted politicians in the play? How do they manipulate public opinion?
• Analyze one movie adaptation of Hamlet . Write about the changes that were made in the film version. What differences from the play did you like? What changes were you surprised to see?
• Examine the political situation in the play. What war did Fortinbras lead? Why? How does it affect Denmark during the play and after it’s the last scene?
• Explore the role of women in Hamlet . The play presents the social norms that were relevant for people of this period. What parts of women’s lives did men explicitly control? Provide examples from the play.
• Compare Laertes and Hamlet . Laertes is known as Hamlet’s character foil. Examine similarities and differences in their character traits.
• Consider the doubt and indecisiveness of Hamlet . Why are such traits uncommon for the genre? What do they say about the prince as a character? Explain how these qualities affect the plot and Hamlet’s thought process.
• Elaborate on the symbolism in the play. Finding symbolism can be challenging as the interpretations differ. Some individuals consider particular objects as symbols, while others don’t. What do you view as examples of symbolism in the play? Why? What role do they play in understanding the story?
• Reflect on the Oedipus complex. Comment on whether Hamlet has it or not. Provide evidence from the play, especially from the scene with Gertrude, to prove your point. How can this idea be approached on the stage? Find examples of theatrical productions where Hamlet and Gertrude had a conversation in her closet.
• Compare and contrast Claudius and Polonius. What character traits do they have in common? Explain how they are not who they are trying to appear. Who is better at lying and manipulating others? Why?
• Examine how revenge affected characters in Hamlet . Three characters wish to avenge their fathers: Laertes, Hamlet, and Fortinbras. How does revenge affect their lives? Who succeeded in getting their revenge?
• Consider the family theme. What role does family play for various characters? Elaborate on how blood ties motivate multiple characters.
• Reflect on Yorick’s role in the play. Who was Yorick? What impact did he have on Hamlet during the prince’s childhood and present time? Elaborate on how Yorick led Hamlet to his last soliloquy.
• Analyze the religious conflict of the play. How did events from Shakespeare’s time affect the theme of religion? Explain how Hamlet presents the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism through the prince and King Hamlet.
• Comment on the theme of madness. Who went mad in the play? Compare Hamlet’s and Laerte’s insanity to Ophelia’s one. How was her madness different from the other examples?
• Explore Polonius’ character. What was Polonius’ motivation throughout the play? Whom did he manipulate, and why? Explain why he tried to appear a good person and a parent.
• Elaborate on the reasons why Hamlet is the protagonist of the story. What makes him a tragic hero? Why is he considered a good person after every crime he committed and every cruel thing he said to his mother and Ophelia?
• Think of the conflict of good and evil. What imagery is associated with each of them in the play? Does evil spread like a disease?
• Explain how Hamlet differs from other plays of Shakespeare’s time . What new features and connections within the story did the writer present? How did Shakespeare make characters contribute to the plot?
• Analyze the “To be or not to be” speech. It’s one of the most famous lines in history, but what meaning is behind it? Elaborate on the circumstances around the monologue and whether Hamlet is partially lying.
• Reflect on performances of Hamlet. Choose a couple of performances on the stage or in a movie and compare them. Whose version of the character you prefer and why?
• Elaborate on the movie Ophelia (2018). What’s intriguing about a story told from Ophelia’s point of view? Exemplify the differences from the original play and how the change of perspective affected the story.
• Explore Hamlet’s obsession with inaction and action . What stops Hamlet from acting decisively? Exemplify situations from the play when characters act quickly, without any doubt compared to Hamlet’s almost constant hesitance.
• Compare Hamlet and King Lear. What similar character traits have an impact on the respective plays? Can we call the prince and the king victims of the social norms?
• Think of how the play’s themes are relevant nowadays . Which of them remained timeless, relevant for any period? Are any themes become obsolete and useless in today’s world? Elaborate on each theme separately with examples from the play.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s mood swings . Provide examples of how the prince’s mood affects his actions and speech. What can and did influence his mood?
• Examine Polonius’ death. Why was he hiding behind the tapestry during the scene? Was it his idea? How did he die? Elaborate on irony in the way he was murdered. How did it affect the plot?
• Analyze Hamlet as an actor. Is he good at playing a character? Elaborate on his dialogue with the First Player and his opinion about acting.
• Consider the motif of betrayal. Who betrays Hamlet? Explain how the attitude towards this act varies from character to character. How does Hamlet’s betrayal affect Ophelia?
• Explore the connection between honor and revenge . Explain why it’s the principal motivation for such characters as Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras. Comment on scenes where it reveals itself through actions and conversations.
• Elaborate on Hamlet’s death. Was it the only logical conclusion for Hamlet’s psychological and emotional development? Was he satisfied?
• Comment on the genre of the play . Can we call it revenge tragedy without any reservation? How did Shakespeare ruin the genre by Hamlet ?
• Compare Hamlet and the Ghost. What can you say about the language that the characters use? List the lines that state that Hamlet and the Ghost look similar.
• Think of the father-son relationships in the play . Analyze the relationships between Hamlet and King Hamlet and compare them to those of Laertes and Polonius. Which features are common for both of them?
• Elaborate on the name Hamlet . What does it mean? What’s its country of origin? Add a sentence or two about Amleth.
• Consider allusions to historical figures in the play. Why does Hamlet mention Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar in act 5? Why did Shakespeare include allusions at all?
• Examine soliloquies in Hamlet . What’s their role in the play? Provide lines from soliloquies that let us dive into the thoughts and intentions of a character. Does anyone lie during such a speech?
• Compare the two film adaptations of the play. Elaborate on different film techniques and alterations of the plot. Concentrate on one scene in particular and explain what changes were made.
• Explore Hamlet’s nihilism. When does Hamlet start to display features that are inherent to this school of thought? Explain how the prince came to nihilism, what pushed him to this.
• List the most painful moments of Hamlet’s life and elaborate on them. Include events that happened before the first act and within the play. Prove your point with evidence from the prince’s lines.
• Think of what poison represents. What does it refer to? Who dies from poison in the play?
• Consider the play from the public’s perspective. How does Claudius manipulate the public’s opinion? What do people think of the new king and Hamlet?
• Compare and contrast Gertrude and Ophelia. What traits do they have in common? Explain differences and similarities in their affection towards Hamlet. Who controls these women?
• Elaborate on the villain of the story. Who can be considered an antagonist of the play? Why do some people regard Hamlet as a villain?
• Imagine how Hamlet could’ve reacted to modern society. What aspects of the future would he appreciate? What social norms would shock him? Would he be more comfortable in our period?
• Evaluate all the relationships in Hamlet’s life. What’s the most significant one? Why? What relationships changed throughout the play?
• Comment on contradictions in the play. What contradictions does Hamlet face? Is he himself a contradictory character? Provide examples of Hamlet’s contradictions
• Explore the fencing in the last scene of Hamlet . What does it contribute to the story? Does it affect the end of the duel?
• Elaborate on the gravediggers. How did their job affect their attitude towards death? Comment on their humor and whether it’s a coping mechanism. Does it illustrate their perception of life?
• Compare Claudius and King Hamlet. What qualities differentiate them? What do they have in common? Speculate on who was a more talented politician and a better leader.
• Think of comic relief in Hamlet . Comment on how Polonius, Osric, gravediggers, and Hamlet’s dialogues with them enlighten the mood. Was the humor appropriate for revenge tragedies before Shakespeare?
• Consider foreshadowing in the play. What events are foreshadowed early on in Hamlet ? Present lines and features from act 1 that indicate the tragic end.
• Elaborate on justice and truth . How does Shakespeare show attitude towards justice common for this time? Does Hamlet approach fairness differently from the others? Elaborate on how Hamlet both pursue the truth and ignores it.
• Examine the “Get thee to a nunnery, go.” sentence. Why did Hamlet say so to Ophelia? What made the prince think that she was vicious?
• Comment on Hamlet’s cruelty. When does Hamlet become cruel towards other characters? Is he cruel towards himself? Analyze situations where Hamlet talks viciously and whether it’s intentional or not.
• Explore Hamlet’s character . Why is the prince such an unusual figure for revenge tragedies? Explain how Shakespeare created the hero who struggles to act with firmness and constantly reflects on his actions and decisions. Is he easy to understand and relate to?
• Analyze the play within the play. What’s its role in plot development? Why did Hamlet let the play take place? Explain what scene he added and why. Elaborate on the title The Mousetrap .
• Examine the consequences of revenge . What conclusion does Shakespeare provide for the theme of revenge? Explain how does it influence the deaths of Hamlet and Laertes, the absolute victory of Fortinbras.
• Reflect on Hamlet’s hesitance to kill Claudius . Why does he consider murdering his uncle in act 1? What stops him? Illustrate all the occasions when Hamlet could’ve killed Claudius but didn’t, and one time he did. What pushed him in the end?
• Compare Claudius to Laertes. Are there any similarities? How do these characters form an alliance by the end of the play?
• Comment on Gertrude’s guiltiness . Hamlet considers his mother guilty of too many crimes, but was she guilty of anything? Speculate whether she participated in King Hamlet’s murder or had an affair with Claudius before her husband’s death. Was she loyal to Hamlet?
• Elaborate on the “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark …“ line. Who says it? Explain the context of the line, its meaning, and what it foreshadows.
• Examine Polonius’ advice to Laertes. Provide its meaning and reflect on Polonius’ intentions. Why is this speech ironic?

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• Sample Character Analysis Essay - "Hamlet"

Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Existentialism

by Feross Aboukhadijeh, 12th grade

What is mankind? Who am I? What is the meaning of life? These are multifaceted existential questions that ancient and modern philosophies have yet to adequately answer. Countless philosophers have spent their lifetimes in search of answers to these questions but died before finding a suitable answer. Certainly, the philosophy of existentialism is an interesting phenomenon. The dictionary defines existentialism as a "philosophical movement . . . centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will" ("Existentialism"). The character Hamlet from Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet explores these existential questions, seeking truth and understanding as he tries to come to grips with his father's death. In the end, Hamlet proves to be an exceedingly existential character.

Prince Hamlet is a university student who enjoys contemplating difficult philosophical questions. When his father, king of Denmark, dies, he returns home to find evidence of foul play in his father’s death. The Ghost of Hamlet (the dead king) tells Prince Hamlet that his uncle Claudius is the murderer. Throughout the rest of the play, Hamlet seeks to prove Claudius’ guilt before he takes action against Claudius. However, Hamlet is pensive ad extremum, at times even brooding; he constantly overuses his intellect while ignoring his emotions and ignoring what "feels right." His extreme logic causes him to delay his revenge against Claudius until the final scene of the play where he kills Claudius and proves that he has progressed into a truly existential character.

At the beginning of the play, Hamlet acts out of pure intellect and processed logic. He suppresses his natural instincts, his emotions, and trusts only in the power of his intelligence. For instance, when Hamlet encounters his father's ghost, he does not believe it is his father—even though he has an emotional reaction upon seeing it. Hamlet says “Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell / Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death, / Have burst their cerements . . . Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?” (I.iv.46-48,57). Hamlet is so confused by the sight of his father’s ghost that he is unsure of how to act. His intellect tells him that the sight is not possible, however his emotions tell him otherwise. However, he stifles his emotion and retains his doubts about the ghost. Later, Hamlet plans a play where actors re-enact the king's murder in an effort to prove the validity of what the ghost has told him.

Although Hamlet appears to be the epitome of an anti-existentialist from the outset of the story, Hamlet's logic slowly begins to unravel scene by scene, like a blood-soaked bandage, with layer after layer revealing snippets of Hamlet's emotion and feeling. When Hamlet utters the famous lines " To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles " he is contemplating the thought of suicide and wishing that God had not made suicide a sin (III.i.58-61). Hamlet's anxiety, uncertainty, and tensions cause him to doubt the power of reason alone to solve his problems. Hamlet begins to realize that reason is impotent to deal with the depths of human life—one of the central assertions of existentialism (Bigelow, paragraph 6). Perhaps this is why Hamlet feigns madness; he realizes that he lacks the emotions to avenge his father's death. Indeed, Hamlet does go temporarily insane in Act I, scene ii, and it is during this time when he is able to act out of pure sensation, with no thoughts about the consequences of what he says or does (e.g. when he undeservingly criticizes Ophelia). However, in uniting his emotions and reason, Hamlet is careful to avoid the temptation to commit suicide because if one commits suicide to escape life's pain, then one is damned to eternal suffering in hell. To Hamlet (and most other people of the 1600s), suicide is morally wrong. By making the decision to stay alive and fight Claudius' corruption, Hamlet demonstrates existential qualities. However, this is not the only scene where Hamlet acts existentially.

In Act IV, Hamlet encounters alienation and nothingness when he meets a Norwegian captain under the command of Fortinbras. When Hamlet asks the captain about the cause and purpose of the conflict, he is shocked to learn that the countries' armies will go to war over "a little patch of land / That hath in it no profit but the name" (IV.iv.98-99). After Hamlet recovers from the shock of the captain's honesty, he is dumbstruck by the thought that Fortinbras would sacrifice the lives of thousands of men for an admittedly inferior "patch of land." At this point in the play, Hamlet is still struggling with his own inaction, unable to kill Claudius even though he knows of his guilt. Hamlet has a good reason to kill Claudius, yet he fails to do it. How can Fortinbras sacrifice so much for such a futile purpose? In this scene, Hamlet realizes the brutality of humanity and first ponders the idea that no one is safe—another central pillar of existentialism.

From this point on, Hamlet declares that he will have bloody thoughts. "My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" (IV.iv. 9 . 56 ). Hamlet is impressed by the forcefulness of characters like Fortinbras and Laertes, who turn thought into action quickly (Phillips). Laertes, who, like Hamlet, has a father to avenge, does not hesitate for a moment when seeking vengeance on his father's murderer. As Hamlet decides to strive for this personal quality, he begins to act increasingly existential and decreasingly reflective.

When Hamlet finally does achieve his father’s vengeance, he was not spurred to it on his own, but by watching his mother and Ophelia die in front of his own eyes. Furthermore, as Hamlet realized that he had only two minutes to survive, he really had nothing to lose; this is when he made his move to stab and poison Claudius.

Prince Hamlet is introduced as a reflective, slow-to-act character. While he stays true to this characterization for almost the entire play, he does undergo a transformation by the end of the play. By the end, Hamlet decides that he is no longer going to deprive himself of the revenge he so badly desires against Claudius, so he kills him. At this point, Hamlet is existential. He is the only character who fights back against Claudius’s usurpation of the throne, and he accepts the consequences of his actions (i.e. death) without a flinch. This final existential act is what qualifies Hamlet as an existential character in an existential drama at a time when existentialism did not exist in literature.

Works Cited

Bigelow, Gordon E. “A Primer of Existentialism.” The Practical Stylist with Readings . N.p.: n.p., n.d.

“Existentialism.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary . Merriam-Webster, Incorporated . 4 Mar. 2008 <http://www.merriam-webster.com/‌dictionary/‌existentialism>.

Phillips, Brian. SparkNote on Hamlet . 4 Mar. 2008 <http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/>.

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This Pre-AP/AP Resource for  Hamlet  by William Shakespeare   can give students an edge on their AP English exams by providing guided practice that models the format, style, and skill achievement of the multiple-choice and free response questions students will encounter. Teachers can easily integrate resource guide activities into their existing lesson plans to gauge understanding of literary and language content while simultaneously familiarizing students with AP exam formats.

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HAMLET - AP Literature Essay Prompt - Act Three

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Deciphering Shakespeare’s Enigmatic ‘Hamlet’

This essay about William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” examines its lasting impact on literature. Set in the 17th century “Hamlet” explores themes of repression madness and mortality through the story of Prince Hamlet and his quest for revenge. The play’s introspective monologues complex characters and intricate themes of deceit and moral decay highlight Shakespeare’s mastery. The essay underscores “Hamlet’s” enduring relevance and its profound influence on literary and cultural landscapes.

How it works

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In works out the total a “farm” stands so as indelible precept art Shakespeare littéraire investigates deeply the human soul and untangles prickly positions that outstrip time existential. Through his nuanced characters language and ill-timed themes prosperous a game continues to provoke a discussion and conversation condenses he his position so as account English literature patient.

This exploration of “Hamlet” underscores its enduring significance unveiling the profound impact of Shakespeare’s narrative on literary and cultural landscapes. The play’s exploration of human frailty and the complexities of moral agency ensures its perennial relevance inviting ongoing interpretation and appreciation from diverse audiences.

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