Hamlet Act 1

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 5

What to study for the test?

You are expected to read the actual text of these scenes:

• Act 1 Scene 1 - Ghost
• Act 1 Scene 2 - Marriage
  
• Act 1 Scene 5 - Hamlet meets the Ghost
  
• Act 2 Scene 2 - Claudius becomes suspicious
  
• Act 3 Scene 1 - Hamlet's turmoil
  
• Act 3 Scene 2 - The play
  
• Act 3 Scene 3 - Claudius's plotting
  
• Act 3 Scene 4 - The closet scene
  
• Act 4 Scene 2 - Hamlet is banished
  
• Act 4 Scene 6 - Two bereaved sons return
  
• Act 5 scene 1 - Graveyard
• Act 5 Scene 2 - The tragic climax

From the other scenes you have to know the most important facts (i.e. the facts you need to know to understand the other scenes).

 

You are not allowed to use the text of the play at 

the test. 

Tip:

In the next slide you will find a link to a comic book version of Hamlet. It might be handy to use this as well besides reading the actual test. 

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Act 1, Scene 1 - Summary

Two guards at Elsinore Castle see the ghost of the recently dead King Hamlet. Horatio decides to tell Hamlet.

Act 1, Scene 2 - Marriage

www.dailymotion.com

6 minuten. 

Mee te lezen vanaf Act 1, scene 2 regel 1 t/m 128 .

Af en toe zijn er een paar regels weggelaten. 

A little more than kin, and less than kind

‘I am a little more than your mere blood relation now, because whereas previously you were just my uncle, now – because you’ve married my widowed mother – you’ve also become my “father”. But you are not of the same “kind”, or in the same league, as either my late father, or – I might add – as me.’

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

• I wished that my body would just melt, turn to water and become like the dew. 

Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d

His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!

• Or that the Almighty hadn’t made a law forbidding suicide. Oh God! God! 

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

• How weary, stale, flat and useless everything about life seemed! 

Fie on’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,

 That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

 Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

• The whole world is like an unweeded garden that has gone to seed – only ugly disgusting things thrived. He couldn’t believe what had happened.

But two months dead!—nay, not so much, not two:

So excellent a king; that was, to this,

Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,

That he might not beteem the winds of heaven.

• Only two months dead; no, not even two. Such an excellent king he was, compared with this one. It was like Hyperion, the sun god, compared to a lecherous satyr. He’d been so loving to his mother that he wouldn’t even allow the gentle breeze of heaven to blow too roughly on her face. 

Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him

As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on: and yet, within a month,
—Let me not think on’t,—Frailty, thy name is woman!—

Hamlet expresses his anger towards his mother, who hangs off Claudius as if her desire for him had only increased by being satisfied (by Hamlet’s father). It’s as if Gertrude was loved so well by Old Hamlet that, rather than sit around mourning his death, she needs to get her ‘fix’ from somewhere.

Hamlet blames his mother’s hasty remarriage on her ‘frailty’ as a member of womankind: women are the very embodiment of ‘frailty’, i.e. a lack of constancy in love. Or, to return to the ‘flesh’ image with which Hamlet began this soliloquy, women are too weak when it comes to matters of the flesh, and give in too easily

A little month; or ere those shoes were old

With which she followed my poor father’s body

Like Niobe, all tears;—why she, even she,—

O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason,

Would have mourn’d longer,—married with mine uncle,

My father’s brother; but no more like my father

Than I to Hercules:  

Before Gertrude’s shoes which she wore to Old Hamlet’s funeral were old, she married Hamlet’s uncle, who is about as much like Hamlet’s father as Hamlet is to the musclebound hero of classical legend, Hercules. Gertrude wept as she walked behind the body of Old Hamlet at his funeral, crying tears just as Niobe, another Greek mythological figure, did when her children were slain; but even ‘beast’ lacking in reason would have mourned for a dead husband longer than Gertrude did.

In the closing lines of the soliloquy, Hamlet refers to the ‘incestuous sheets’ of the bed that Gertrude shares with Claudius. Such an understanding of ‘incest’ – marrying someone who was not a blood-relative but a relative by law – would have doubtless been familiar to many of the original playgoers in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience: the Queen’s own father, King Henry VIII, had justified his divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, on Biblical grounds that it was a forbidden act to marry one’s brother’s widow.

‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt’ concludes with Hamlet having to endure his breaking heart in silence, for at this point in the play, Hamlet’s friend Horatio arrives with news of the sightings of the Ghost on the battlements, and Hamlet is about to learn that there is even more reason to hate Claudius.

within a month;

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears

Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,

She married:— O, most wicked speed, to post

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It is not, nor it cannot come to good;

But break my heart,—for I must hold my tongue.

Within a month of my father’s death—before the salt from her crocodile tears had washed out of her red eyes—she remarried. Oh, what wicked speed! To jump so quickly into a bed of incest! It is not good, and will not lead to any good either. But my heart must break in silence, because I must remain quiet

A character speaking to him or herself, relating his or her innermost thoughts and feelings as if thinking aloud is a ....

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Act 1 Scene 5 - Hamlet meets the Ghost

Hamlet Homework ACT 1 

• Hamlet Homework is a lesson-up lesson! 
• Read Act 1: scene 1, 2 and 5
• You can use the audiobooks in the next slides. 
• Watch the summary again if you like
• Do the quizzes. 

Goodluck!

Some modern adaptions include:

The Godfather (or many mafia plots for that matter)

The Lion King (Simba = Hamlet)

Sons of Anarchy (Jax = Hamlet)

The Simpsons also did Hamlet (Bart=Hamlet)

Put the events in the correct order:

a. Hamlet is sent away to England.

b. Gertrude, drinks from Hamlet’s poison cup. She dies.

c. Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, marries Hamlet’s mother. 

d. Hamlet pretends to be ‘mad’ to find out if his father was killed. 

e. Hamlet’s girlfriend Ophelia kills herself.

f. Hamlet kills Claudius and then dies from his wounds.

g. Hamlet puts on a play where a king is killed by his brother.

h. Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius.

i. Laertes dies in a fight with Hamlet.

j. Hamlet is told by a ghost that his father was murdered.