(a) Hamlet, 1.2 — addressing his mother Gertrude's swift remarriage to Claudius. (b) Gertrude, 3.2 — during the play-within-the-play, watching the Player Queen's vow to her Player King. (c) Horatio, 5.2 — at Hamlet's death, the play's final benediction.
B. Most readings highlight Hamlet's tendency to think where action is called for — the soliloquies dramatise this delay. (Some critics, e.g. Nuttall, emphasise Hamlet's ethical scrupulosity rather than weakness.)
B. Blank verse = unrhymed iambic pentameter — the standard meter of Shakespeare's plays.
Soliloquy — character alone on stage, voicing inner thoughts to the audience (Hamlet's "To be, or not to be"). Aside — short speech delivered to the audience (or another character) while others on stage are theoretically not hearing. Dramatic monologue — sustained speech by one character, may be addressed to others on stage (Browning's "My Last Duchess" is a literary cousin).
A. The gravediggers' bawdy humour relieves tension, and the Yorick speech turns the play's accumulated reflection on death into a tactile encounter with a skull, immediately before the final blood-bath.
Peripeteia = (i) reversal of fortune; Anagnorisis = (iii) recognition; Catharsis = (ii) audience's emotional purgation. In Hamlet: peripeteia in 3.2 (the Mousetrap reveals Claudius's guilt and Hamlet's path solidifies); anagnorisis at 5.2 (Hamlet/Laertes recognise the King's plot at the duel); catharsis at the play's close.
Devices: (1) Antithesis ("To be, or not to be") frames existence and non-existence as a binary; (2) Mixed metaphor ("take arms against a sea of troubles") strains coherence — one cannot fight an ocean — enacting the futility Hamlet contemplates. Question: whether endurance ("suffer") or self-destruction ("end them") is more "noble" — many editors read this as a meditation on suicide; others as a meditation on action. Verse: blank verse gives the speech philosophical seriousness; the line breaks force pauses around "suffer" and "trouble" emphasising the choice. Marks: 2 devices, 2 question, 1 form.
Sample thesis: "Hamlet's madness begins as a deliberate disguise (the 'antic disposition' he announces to Horatio in 1.5) but the strain of sustained pretence — combined with grief, isolation, and the impossible ethical pressure of revenge — bleeds the performance into genuine instability by Act 4." Supporting: (1) "I am but mad north-north-west" (2.2) shows self-aware control; (2) the closet scene's vision of the Ghost when Gertrude sees nothing suggests slipping perception. Complicating: (3) the consistent wit and lucidity of his exchanges with the gravediggers (5.1) suggest he never fully loses his mind. Marks: 1 thesis, 2 supporting, 1 complicating, 1 communication.
All three are revenge sons: Hamlet (father killed by Claudius), Laertes (father Polonius killed by Hamlet), Fortinbras (father killed by King Hamlet long before play). Laertes acts immediately and with passion — he raises a mob, storms the castle, and willingly conspires in the poisoned-rapier plot. Fortinbras acts politically — he raises an army, marches across Europe to die "for an eggshell." Hamlet, alone, hesitates. The juxtaposition (foil characters) makes Hamlet's delay structurally visible: it is not the situation but his particular relation to it that produces the delay. Marks: 1 each character, 2 thematic synthesis.
Marks rubric: clear topic sentence (1), two embedded quotations with proper Shakespeare citation format (2.1.1) (2), interpretive analysis of HOW the disease imagery operates (2), conclusion linking back (1). Sample evidence: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" (1.4.90); the "ulcerous place" Hamlet describes to Gertrude (3.4.147); "this canker of our nature" describing Claudius (5.2.69).
Look for: identification of Ophelia as caught between her father (Polonius) ordering her behaviour, her brother (Laertes) instructing her about her chastity, her lover (Hamlet) berating her in 3.1, and the King and Queen using her to spy. Madness reading: psychological collapse under contradictory paternal/lover demands plus grief; or, as feminist critics argue, the only space the play permits her interiority is in fragmented song after she has lost the men who governed her. Marks: 1 social position, 2 treatment, 1 interpretation, 1 communication.
Horatio is the rational sceptic (he is initially unsure about the Ghost), the loyal university friend, the audience's surrogate (he sees what Hamlet sees), and the play's surviving witness. Hamlet's dying request — "Report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied" — gives Horatio the function of telling the play's truth. Without Horatio there is no narrative continuity from Denmark's bloody floor to the audience. Marks: 2 functions, 1 ending request, 1 communication.
Look for: a clear contemporary setting; a specific staging choice tied to thematic meaning (e.g., security cameras for the surveillance theme; corporate boardroom for the play-within-a-play); thoughtful weighing of gain/loss (gain: relevance, accessibility; risk: losing the verse, anachronism). Marks: 1 setting, 2 staging choice + meaning, 2 evaluation.
Possible: The Lion King (overt parallel — uncle kills king-father, son must avenge); Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (existential reframing); the film The Northman (Eggers, 2022, drawing on the same Amleth saga Shakespeare used). Strong responses identify a substantive parallel rather than a surface coincidence and analyse what comparison reveals. Marks: 1 selection, 3 substance of parallel, 1 communication.
Strong answers might point to: the soliloquies' direct access to interior thought as the foundation of psychological realism; Hamlet's combination of intellectual brilliance with crippling indecision making him universally relatable; the play's openness to interpretation (every age finds its own Hamlet — Romantic melancholy, modernist alienation, post-Freudian Oedipal son, post-9/11 hesitator about violence). Marks: 1 thesis, 3 evidence and reasoning, 1 communication.