Quote Identification Test for Act I of Hamlet Tuesday, January 13. You will be presented with several quotes. Your task will be to:
a) identify the speaker
b) translate the quote into your own words
c) identify the context (discuss the situation/setting in detail)
d) explain the significance of the quote(importance to scene)
e) use vocabulary from unit 4 in your discussion (see below)
f) use literary terms in your response (see below)
To best prepare yourself for the test, practice tasks a-f for the following 20 excerpts. Be sure that you are able to use the vocabulary words from the current list in your sentences.
1. And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!
2. And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
3. O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
4. Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour […]
And with sudden vigor it doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine,
And a most instant tetter barked about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust
All my smooth body.
5. [I am] doomed for a certain term to walk the night
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood […]
6. He waxes desperate with imagination.
7. What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it.
8. Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee “Hamlet”
9. You must not take for fire. From this time
Be something scanter of your maiden presence.
Set your entreatments at a higher rate
Than a command to parle. For Lord Hamlet,
Believe so much in him that he is young,
And with a larger tether may he walk
Than may be given you.
10. This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee.
11. Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned through his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
12. And keep you in the rear of your affection
Out of the shot and danger of desire […]
Be wary, then; best safety lies in fear.
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
13. I shall the effect of this good lesson keep
As watchman to my heart. But good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.
14. My father’s spirit- in arms! All is not well.
I doubt some foul play. Would the nigh were come!
Till then, sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise […]
15. (Let me not think on ‘t; frailty, thy name is woman!)
16. But you must know your father lost a father,
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow.
17. Good Hamlet, cast they knighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not forever with thy veiled lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
18. Yet now I must confess, that duty done,
My thoughts and wishes bend again toward France
And bow them to your gracious leave and pardon.
19. Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Have we (as ‘twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole)
Taken to wife.
20. Before my God, I might not this believe
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of my own eyes.
Vocabulary Words / Unit 4
absconded
access
anarchy
arduous
auspicious
biased
dastardly
daunted
disentangling
embellish
fated
groundbreaking
halted
hoodwink
inanimate
incinerated
innovative
intrepid
larceny
notorious
perpetrate
pliant
pompous
posse
precipice
primitive
rectify
reprieve
reviled
Literary Terms
Characterization, Theme, Metaphor, Pun, Comic Relief, Setting
