Questions for Hamlet, ACT I:
1. How can you tell what kind of a king Claudius is? What actions characterize him? What do we learn about him from his first speech? See I.2.1-39. What things does Hamlet complain about in relation to his uncle the King? How are the styles of speech of Hamlet and Claudius different?
2. What kind of a son is Prince Hamlet, and what kind of a character is he in ACT I? Why is he so concerned with the difference between appearances and reality? See I.2.76-88 and the following dialogue with his mother, Queen Gertrude.
3. Why is Horatio an important character, and what do we learn from him in ACT I? What facets of the character of Hamlet come out around Horatio? How important is this?
4. What kind of a father is Polonius, and how does he deal with his son and daughter? How much does he seem to care about them, and how much does he work at controlling them, or spying on them, or using them?
5. What does the Ghost of King Hamlet mean to the guards and Horatio in ACT I? How does the story that the Ghost tells have significance for the plot? What does the story mean to Prince Hamlet?
6. What exactly did Claudius and Gertrude do to the late King? Where does the Ghost talk about this? Does the Ghost want revenge on Claudius, Gertrude, or both of them? Does the Ghost give reasons for his request? How does Hamlet feel about the requests the Ghost makes?
7. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy, what does he want to do (I.2.133-64)? How does this compare to his last soliloquy in ACT I? (See I.5.99-116) What is Hamlet planning to do at this point, i.e. at the end of ACT I.
Things you should know or be able to figure out yourself as you are reading (items like these could show up on a quiz):
Specialized Shakespearean vocabulary/specialized meanings/difficult syntax:
(See the preface pp. xiv-xxiii if you are having trouble with the meaning!)
I.1.17 "the Dane" = the King of Denmark.
"Denmark" also can mean the King of Denmark, as in I.1, 56: "the majesty of buried Denmark" i.e. the majesty of the late king.
I.1.54 "usurp"-- the ghost is unnatural and so is a "usurper" of the night, like one who has seized control without any right to. It's ironic for Horatio to call King Hamlet's ghost a usurper because King Claudius is the literal usurper.
This unconscious gaffe of Horatio's could explain why the ghost looks "offended."
I.1.74 -- see the picture on p. 8.
I.1.92-101-- The essential parts of the history are that:
"our last king... was... dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet...
Did slay this Fortinbras, who by sealed compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all his lands
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror."
i.e. King Hamlet, dared by King Fortinbras to combat, slew Fortinbras, who forfeited his lands and his life to the winner. The "compact, / Well ratified by law and heraldry" means that they were following the medieval laws of single combat, combat in general and tournaments.
The following lines (I.1, 102-107) explain that if King Hamlet had lost, then lands of Denmark would have been lost to Norway.
I.1.98 Fortinbras = "strong-in-arm" in French.
I.1.126-137 The Great Chain of Being is evoked by Horatio, i.e. a little before Julius Caesar was assassinated, corpses left their graves and in their shrouds (sheets) they shrieked dementedly in the streets of Rome. See the notes in your book for the other disasters in Nature that went along with the "feared" events or evil times.
I.1.138 "soft" = hold on, wait a minute, or enough!
I.1.148-150 --it was an idea in folklore that ghosts knew where treasures were hidden.
I.1.158-161-- Marcellus, who is a Christian, shows great humility, pointing out that the ghost is literally above and beyond them, unlike Horatio, who is a skeptical humanist scholar and "rational."
I.1.172-179-- Marcellus has one of the only pure, innocent and clearly Christian speeches in the whole play. Though Marcellus is a minor character, he is sounding one of the only hopeful notes in Act I. Christian themes will disappear until almost the very end of the play. Prior to that, Hamlet's system of belief seems more pagan/humanist than Christian.
I.2.10-13-- Claudius shows his "oxymoronic style," i.e. he links together things that should not be linked together.
ox·y·mo·ron
n. pl. ox·y·mo·ra (-môr, -mr) or ox·y·mo·ronsA rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in a deafening silence and a mournful optimist.
I.2.25. When King Claudius says, "so much for him," it would be appropriate if he meant Young Fortinbras the prince and the military threat to Denmark. However, because of the long interjections about his "most valiant brother" right before this, it sounds like he could also mean, so much for our late brother, King Hamlet.
Interestingly, when the old King of Norway died, the uncle of Fortinbras took over even though he was unfit to rule! That is, Denmark is not the only place where things seem awry.
I.2.66 and following.... Hamlet's punning style is in stark contrast to Claudius' oxymoronic style. Hamlet's puns point out the disparity between what is and what should be, between what is and what "seems." Hamlet is already preoccupied with the gap between appearances and reality even before hearing the truth from the ghost of King Hamlet.
I.2.79-89-- When Hamlet says no outward forms can denote him truly, i.e. no "actions that a man might play" show what is inside him. Outward "suits of woe" are only for show.
Critics have pointed out that this passage in particular makes Hamlet the first tragic hero with a truly deep inner psychology. He even has a significant childhood memory about Yorick, the jester, at the end. While other tragic heroes have had childhood stories, like Oedipus having a tale of his parents trying to outsmart the gods by sending him far away etc., the Oedipus story of origins has no character-defining value; it has plot value. Hamlet's childhood memory serves only to show us another dimension of his deeper psychology. Similarly, his passion for the theater is mostly extraneous to the plot, but it shows his inner psychology again. In this way, this tragedy is a breakthrough for self-consciousness in literature.
I.2.135-136-- the "Everlasting" = God and "His canon" means "canon law" or the law of the church. So Hamlet is angry that it's a sin to kill yourself because that is what he wants to do.
I.2.147-148-- "she would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on" means Gertrude used to hang on to King Hamlet as if having him more made her want him even more.
I.2.187-188--Hamlet is being sarcastic, saying that the King was trying to save money by using leftovers from the funeral for the wedding banquet, i.e. that is why Claudius and Gertrude married so quickly.
I.2.272-- "loves" is not romantic love but more like caring about in a social sense, a bond of loyalty, like friendship but stronger.
I.3.22-23 "He may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself" = Hamlet cannot like a commoner choose whomever he loves to marry, because, Laertes explains, he may have to marry for the good of the state of Denmark.
I.3.84-86--When Polonius says, "to thine own self be true, / And it must follow... / Thou canst be false to any man" becomes especially ironic after Act I because he spies on his own son and forces Ophelia to work as a spy for the king against her will and against Hamlet, whom she loves.
I.4.17-18-- When Hamlet says the king's drinking is a "custom / More honored in the breach than in the observance," he means that it is more honorable to break this custom of heavy drinking than to observe (follow) it.
I.4.26-following--The sense is that in some men with some in-born natural flaw, which they couldn't help, i.e. with one defect will be tainted in the general public's eye by that one fault no matter how good they are in every other way. See Note on p. 50, also.
This is pointedly placed immediately before the entry of the Ghost, who Hamlet and Horation do not know yet what to make of, i.e. is it good, bad, a demon etc. The ghost will reveal that he had faults of nature that have put him in a kind of Purgatory. He will also reveal that Gertrude was unfaithful to him, which was not his fault, but it does destroy the image the prince had of his parents' marriage and of his mother's virtue. The Ghost will blame Claudius for seducing Gertrude (I.5.50-52); his anger at Claudius and Gertrude is clear. Even so, the ghost warns Hamlet, "Taint not the mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven..." (I.5.92-95).
Immediately after this speech of the ghost, Hamlet seems tainted with exactly the impulsive hate for his mother that the ghost warned against: "O most pernicious woman! (I.5.112). It is at least possible, then, that Prince Hamlet also has one natural flaw that may taint the way he appears in general no matter how good he is in every other way.
I.5.99-100-- When Hamlet says, "O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? / And shall I couple hell? O fie!" he is calling on the powers of the spiritual world and the earth, the realms of the ghost and of people, and then, doubting the origins of the ghost again, imagines it may be from hell. He's saying, 'O angels, O people, and what else? Shall I call on hell, too?'
ACT II Study Questions
1. If you had to compare Polonius as a father to King Hamlet as a father, what do they have in common? What makes them different?
2. Is Hamlet really in love with Ophelia or is he just acting crazy like a "melancholy lover" in II.1.87-112?
3. When the Queen corrects the king about the identities of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (II.2.35-36), what do you think Shakespeare was trying to show?
4. If you compare the actions of Fortinbras to those of Hamlet in Act II, how do they look? See II.2.64-85.
5. How effective are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as spies for the king?
6. II.2.343-- when Hamlet says, "He that plays the king shall be welcome," what do you think he is hinting at?
{II.2.362 and following... For an explanation of the theatrical companies made of boys, which were competing with Shakespeare's theater, see xl-xli.}
7. In the soliloquy, "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I" (II.2.576 and following), why is Hamlet so upset that an actor can cry over a fiction?
8. Is Hamlet's decision to use art as a weapon ("the play's the thing" etc.) a good idea? Is it just avoiding the real job of a revenging hero?