Thinking about 'Hamlet'
Here are 15 exercises on quotations in Hamlet. They are designed for pair-work 10-minute sessions in class, but work perfectly well for individuals. You need to know the play well, so these are for revision at a late stage. The purpose is to make your mind work hard: retrieving factual details, certainly, about the sequence of the play, individual quotations and so on, but more importantly know making you think and create connections. You don’t need to write on the original sheet itself: just take a piece of paper and jot down your responses.
Take 10-15 minutes, and when finished find the quotation in context and then fill in any gaps.
‘O God God, / How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!’ 1.ii - here.
‘Be thy intents wicked or charitable, / Thou com’st in such a questionable shape / That I will speak to thee.’ I.iv - here.
‘Why then ‘tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.’ II ii - here.
‘What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have?’ II ii - here.
‘O ‘tis too true. / How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!’ III i - here.
‘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.’ III i - here.
‘Now see that noble and most sovereign reason / Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh.’ III i - here.
‘My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, / And like a man to double business bound? I stand in pause where I shall first begin, / And both neglect.’ III iii - here.
‘Confess yourself to heaven, / Repent what’s past, avoid what is to come, / And do not spread the compost o’er the weeds / To make them ranker.’ III iv - here.
‘O Gertrude, Gertrude, / When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions.’ IV iv - here.
‘No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarise. / Revenge should have no bounds.’ IV.vi - here.
‘Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, / As one incapable of her own distress.’ IV vii - here.
‘Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’ V i - here.
‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.’ V ii - here.
‘If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.’ V ii - here.