-
There are a million questions
relevant to this play. I have selected my favorites. Don't be fooled
into thinking that these represent the only important issues in this
play. "If we had world enough and time..." Images to watch: poison,
infection, revenge, secrecy, the arras, madness.
-
Consider the ghost. Should Hamlet
believe him? Is he really Hamlet's dad? How does your belief in him
affect your reading of the play?
-
Is there really a ghost at all? Even
if an actor portrays him (as is usually done), how do you know that he
is really therefor Hamlet? Does the ghost ask Hamlet to do anything
that has not already occurred to Hamlet? Is Hamlet sane? Are we
watching/reading real, historical events or simply a play within
Hamlet's mind?
-
What exactly does the ghost order
Hamlet to do? How well does Hamlet follow orders?
-
Compare the 3 men of action--Hamlet,
Laertes, Fortinbras--of this play. How successful is action versus
contemplation in this play?
-
Consider Hamlet's "friends"--Horatio,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
-
Consider the Claudius-Gertrude
relationship. Did Gertrude know of Claudius' murder of her first
husband? What (if anything) is Gertrude guilty of in the play?
-
Watch
out for the enormous amount of play-acting within the play. Many
characters are forced to put on an act. How does all of this relate to
the play-within-a-play in Act III? Why is this mini-play at the center
(literally) of Hamlet?
-
In
the performance of the play-within-the-play, Hamlet assumes that a
guilty man, seeing his guilt enacted before him in a drama, will be
forced to somehow display his guilt. Is this reasonable? This happens
to be a belief of many of the Puritan drama critics of Shakespeare's
age; they fear that the sight of evil on a stage will force the
audience to go out and commit evil. The playwrights responded by saying
that the sight of goodness would cause goodness and the sight of evil
would shame a person into confessing his crime. What does Shakespeare
seem to think?
-
$1,000,000.
Question--What, exactly, is rotten in the state of Denmark?
-
How
does Ophelia relate to Hamlet? What is her purpose in the play? Does he
really ever love her?
from
http://www.jetlink.net/~massij/wssq/hamlet.html
