1.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.” ------ Hamlet’s letter to
Ophelia
2. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” ------ Hamlet Act two
3. “To be, or not to be: that is the question” ------ Act 3
4. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” ------ Act 1
5. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.” ------Polonius Act 2
6. “Brevity is the soul of wit.” ------ Polonius Act 2
7. “Listen to many, speak to a few.” -------Polonius Act 1
8. “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain ------ Hamlet act 1
9. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” ------ Hamlet act 3
10. “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” ------ Claudius act 3
11. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions!” ------ Claudius act 4
12. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” ------ Gertrude act 3
13. “If we are true to ourselves, we can not be false to anyone.” ------ Polonius act 1
14. “I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.” ---Hamlet act 3
15. “To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” --- Hamlet act 2
16. “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting. That would not let me sleep.” ------ Hamlet act 5
17. “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!”------ Hamlet act 1
18. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I ------ Hamlet act 2
19. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! ------ Hamlet act 2
20. God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another ------ Hamlet act 3
21. How all occasions do inform against me, and spur my dull revenge. ------ Hamlet act 2
22. Not a whit. We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will
be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.
------ Hamlet act 5
23. The spirit that I have seen may be a devil, and the devil hath power. T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and
my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds. More relative than this. ------ Hamlet act
2

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Hamlet is considered the first modern play partly because of the psychological depth of its main character -- Hamlet suffers from
melancholy, self-doubt, and even delusions. The audience never quite knows what Hamlet is thinking, or what is real. In fact, Hamlet
himself declares again and again that he doesn't understand his doubts either ("I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.")
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1. Death was a much more ordinary presence in Elizabethan England than it is in the modern world. Infant mortality was high and plagues
swept whole nations. In this sense, the gravediggers exhibit a much more realistic approach to death than most people. Hamlet uses the
occasion for a more general examination of mortality. His attitude toward death is not necessarily inconsistent with that of the gravediggers,
but it is different in his emphasis on metaphysical rather than physical implications of death.
2. 3
3. Certainly Hamlet does visit his mother's bedchamber, and is immensely interested in her sexual relationships with other men, both of which
are classic elements of an Oedipal complex. Freud's reading of the play may have influenced his sexual theories—but it is important to
remember the order of events, especially because scholars tend to label Hamlet "Freudian." Better stated, Freud is Shakespearean, not the
other way around.
4. 4
5. Hamlet is musing about death, but whose death, or what kind of death, is frustratingly difficult to pin down. He is perhaps contemplating
suicide, perhaps thinking about the risks he must run in order to fulfill the task of revenge. He has an audience of Ophelia, Polonius and
Claudius, who are eavesdropping on him; but he most likely does not realize that they are present.
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7. "Life's but a stage," another Shakespearean character proclaims, and the playwright recognized quite well the dramatic trappings of life and
the life-like elements of staged productions. Soliloquies are modern in that they break what is much later termed the "fourth wall"
separating audience from stage; the character speaks directly to the audience. Although the whole atmosphere seems patently false and
theatrical, this serves to draw Hamlet somehow closer. Somehow, the effect of such "metatheatrical" gestures is to show not how different
acting is from life, but how similar life is to acting.
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9. The scene with gravediggers is a good example of tragedy mixed with comedy. The work is morbid, but the workers joke and sing as they
go about their business. They seem totally unaware of the majestic tragedy unfolding itself in the castle nearby. On a smaller level, Yorick's
skull embodies the tragicomic dichotomy; it is a gruesome, deathly object that once belonged to a joker. There are several other comic
scenes, including much of Hamlet's dialogue with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and most of Polonius' scenes before his death. This
gruesome mixture of pathos and humor is the essence of Shakespearean theater.
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11. Revenge is traditionally the cold-blooded pursuit to make up for one hurt with a strike against its perpetrator. Revenge is usually violent.
Hamlet is hardly a traditional play of revenge, because the main character is so uncertain and ambivalent about both the original strike and
what he should do about it. Melancholy and uncertainty play just as large a role in Hamlet's character as the desire for revenge.
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13. From the script, the audience gathers that Elsinore Castle is a remote place in northern Europe. Not much else is known: there were no sets
in Shakespeare's time. But the setting certainly matches Hamlet's melancholy mood, and the isolation of the place helps make the violence
and implied incest believable.
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15. Hamlet struggles with the question of whether the ghost is his father and decides that he must be who he says he is. The audience remains in
doubt, however, because of the ghost's claim that he comes from Purgatory (blasphemous in Elizabethan England), and the fact that
Gertrude is unable to see it when it appears to Hamlet in her chamber. One of the moral questions of the play is resolved, however, when it
becomes clear that Claudius is a murderer. Whether the ghost is Old Hamlet or a demon, he has told the truth about Claudius' guilt.
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17. At the end of the tragedy, it is not only Hamlet and most of the characters who die. The entire state of Denmark fails after Norway invades,
and the health of the nation seems very much wrapped up with the moral state of the leader. This accords with the medieval idea of the
"body politic" with the leader making up the head, literally, and the people the body of a personified state.