Tuesday March 2

Vocabulary 2 quiz for Hamlet is this Friday. It will be the same format. Well done with yesterday's quiz!

You were to have read Act V.i. last night

In class:
Select one following soliloquies from Hamlet and paraphrase in paragraph form. Make sure you include the setting from which the soliloquy has evolved.
II.ii.

549 Now I am alone.
550 O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
551 Is it not monstrous that this player here,
552 But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
553 Could force his soul so to his own conceit
554 That from her working all his visage wann'd,
555 Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
556 A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
557 With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
558 For Hecuba!
559 What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
560 That he should weep for her? What would he do,
561 Had he the motive and the cue for passion
562 That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
563 And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
564 Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
565 Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
566 The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
567 A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
568 Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
569 And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
570 Upon whose property and most dear life
571 A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
572 Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
573 Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
574 Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
575 As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?
576 Ha! 'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
577 But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall
578 To make oppression bitter, or ere this
579 I should have fatted all the region kites
580 With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
581 Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
582 O, vengeance!
583 Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
584 That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
585 Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
586 Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
587 And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
588 A stallion! Fie upon't! foh!
589 About, my brain! Hum — I have heard
590 That guilty creatures sitting at a play
591 Have by the very cunning of the scene
592 Been struck so to the soul that presently
593 They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
594 For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
595 With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
596 Play something like the murder of my father
597 Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks;
598 I'll tent him to the quick. If he but blench,
599 I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
600 May be the devil, and the devil hath power
601 To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
602 Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
603 As he is very potent with such spirits,
604 Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
605 More relative than this: the play's the thing
606 Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

Exit.











III.i.
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 65
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks 70
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 75
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay, 80
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 85
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of? 90
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn away, 95
And lose the name of action.