Looking Inward

Read Hamlet, Acts 3-4.4 (all of Act 3 and Act 4 up through Scene 4). (Available online here and here, as well as in the Humanities course book.) As you read, watch for moments where a character’s words unwittingly reveal something about his or her inward state of mind. Highlight your chosen passage (up to 30 lines long) and paste it into a comment below. Then reply to that comment with a 2-¶ deepening analysis of your quoted passage. Use the first paragraph to outline the speaker’s intent, and the second ¶ to call attention to an insight about the underlying significance of those words.

As you consider what passage to quote for this assignment, take note of what other students have already covered. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s interactions with Hamlet were entirely neglected from our discussion of Act 2 in our last class, so I’d love to see them get some coverage, even if it means drawing from Act 2 for today’s assignment. I’m also eager to see you draw on Hamlet’s scene with his mother after putting on the play, his musing on the tears shed by actors, his thoughts on the furious march of Fortinbras, and his failure to murder the praying Claudius.

For this assignment, it’s even more important that you pick a passage where there’s something interesting going on: a bad fit between what the character trying to argue and what he or she actually believes, or an ironic gap between what the speaker believes and what is actually happening. Passages where characters speak in paradoxes make good leads for the upcoming essay.