Coming up: vocabulary quiz tomorrow.
In class: vocabulary review
watching David Tennant perform the "O what a rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy from Act II.2.560-615.
accompanying graphic organizer
Please note that I am on the senior trip tomorrow. Mr. Calderon and a substitute will be working with you on some background information on Elizabethan theatre. The expectations are that you will conduct yourself in the dignified manner that you always do, so that we will not have to follow through with "consequences."
Name____________________________
Hamlet's Soliloquy: O, what a rogue
and peasant slave am I! (2.2)
Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
(560)
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, (569)
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown
the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams,
unpregnant of my cause, (578)
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?
Ha!
'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall (588)
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, (593)
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab, (597)
A scullion!
Fie upon't! foh! About, my brain! I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
Play something like
the murder of my father
Before mine uncle:
I'll observe his looks; (607)
I'll tent him to the
quick: if he but blench,
I know my course. The
spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and
the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing
shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness
and my melancholy,
As he is very potent
with such spirits, (613)
Abuses me to damn me:
I'll have grounds
More relative than
this: the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch
the conscience of the king.
1. What is the image created when Hamlet
refers to himself as a “rogue and peasant slave?”
2. (Lines 561-570) Hamlet describes himself to the player
who earlier recited a speech earlier in the scene. How does
Hamlet describe this player? Use text
3. What would the actor do if he was as passionate as
Hamlet’s situation in having to kill King Claudius? Give 3
textual examples.
4. What type of figurative language device is
“drown the stage with tears?”
5. What does the simile “Like a John-a-dreams, unpregnant
of my cause” imply about Hamlet’s behavior?
6. And how does Hamlet actually perceive himself as
behaving? Give three textual examples
7. Paraphrase lines 605-616.
7. Paraphrase lines 605-616.
1.
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