Unit 3: Hamlet — Practice Quiz

Solution: The Ghost (Hamlet's father, the late King Hamlet) appears in Act 1 Scene 5 and tells Hamlet that Claudius poured poison in his ear in the orchard. The fratricide is the wound that the rest of the play is trying to heal — and avenge.

Solution: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Hamlet's old friends from Wittenberg, summoned to court by Claudius and Gertrude to learn the cause of Hamlet's "transformation." Their willingness to be used by the King makes them small-scale moral parallels to the larger corruption.

Solution: Hamlet stabs through the curtain (arras) thinking he is killing Claudius. The mis-killing of Polonius accelerates the tragedy: Ophelia's madness, Laertes' return, and the lethal duel all flow from this moment.

Solution: A soliloquy is delivered by a character alone on stage; it gives the audience direct access to interior thought. (An aside is similar but spoken aside while others are present.) Hamlet has 7 major soliloquies — more than any other Shakespearean character.

Solution: The figure mixes two incompatible images (taking up weapons + an ocean of troubles). The strain enacts the impossibility of the action being contemplated; many critics read this as a window into Hamlet's overburdened thinking.

Solution: Shakespeare's standard medium is blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). Prose marks lower-status speakers, comic exchanges, the gravediggers, letters, and Hamlet's antic madness. The form-shift carries meaning.

Solution: Hamartia = the tragic error or flaw that precipitates the hero's downfall. For Hamlet, common readings include over-thinking / inability to act, melancholy, or excessive scrupulosity. Other Aristotelian terms: peripeteia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition), catharsis (purgation of pity and fear).

Solution: Catharsis = purgation/cleansing of pity and fear by witnessing the tragic action. Aristotle saw it as the social function of tragedy.

Solution: Hamlet belongs to the revenge tragedy tradition (Seneca → Kyd's Spanish Tragedy → Shakespeare). Conventions include: a ghost calling for revenge, a delaying protagonist, a play-within-a-play, multiple deaths, madness (real or feigned).

Solution: The motif of disease/rot recurs: Claudius's poisoning of King Hamlet, the "ulcer" Hamlet tells Gertrude of in 3.4, Hamlet's images of "an unweeded garden." The polluted body is figured as the polluted state.

Solution: Yorick — "a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy" — was the court jester whose skull Hamlet holds. The image of mortality reducing wit to bone is central to the play's memento mori meditation.

Solution: Hamlet famously declares "the play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King" (2.2). When Claudius reacts to the on-stage poisoning, Hamlet treats this as confirmation of the Ghost's testimony.