Review of Hamlet Test: April 27

Methods of Assessment ► True or false ► Multiple choice ► Matching ► Identify speakers (quotations) ► Quotation analysis (x2) ► Opinion paragraph (pivoting)

Hamlet’s Transformation “The Hamlet of Act 5 has arisen from the dead self of the earlier Hamlet. It is the resurrected Hamlet who says “Let it be,” rather than “To be or not to be” (Bloom 201).

Hamlet’s Genius “What would it be like to be confronted by Hamlet? Iago, who can so easily manipulate everyone is his play, would be unmasked by Hamlet in ten lines or less…Claudius is rendered furious or incoherent each time Hamlet tests him, and the badly outclassed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have great trouble even at keeping up with what the Prince of Denmark is saying to them” (Bloom 207).

Hamlet’s Wasted Potential “Unless you are an ideologue or a puritanical moralist, you are likely to fall in love with Hamlet…Where is his achievement? In proportion to his amazing gifts, no other fictive character seems to have been quite so adapt at throwing it all away” (Bloom ).

The Existential Hamlet “Hamlet’s malaise, as Nietzsche recognized, is not that he thinks too much but that he thinks much too well. He will perish of the truth, unless he turns to art, but he is royal as well as noble, and a nostalgia for action haunts him, though his intellect is profoundly skeptical of action” (Bloom 216).

A Play about Everything “Let us say then that Hamlet began as Revenge Tragedy, abruptly broke into a wild meditation upon plays and players, and entered the whirlpool of Shakespeare’s creative mind, to emerge into a transcendental tragedy in which a new kind of great man dies, afflicted with an absolute self- knowledge that death both mocks and is mocked by. That is the strongest of the plays, and remains perhaps the most perplexing, particularly because few among us can let it alone.”