Hamlet: Quotation Analysis
Name:
For the following quotes:
1. State the speaker, person being spoken to and context.
2. “Translate” and explain the significance of the quotation.
3. Refer to any literary features and themes you see in the quotation.
1. Who’s there?
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2. She is married. Oh most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets.
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
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3. 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 reed.
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4. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
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5. But come—
Here before, never so help you mercy,
How strange or odd some’er I bear myself,
As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on
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6. The spirit I have seen may be a devil –
And the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps,
Out of weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
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.
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7. How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plastering art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
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8. ‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
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9. If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry:
be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape
calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go. Farewell.
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10. Oh my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder.
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11. Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass but my madness speaks;
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen.
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12. …To bear all smooth and even,
This sudden sending him away must seem
Deliberate pause. Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.
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13. …When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
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14. Give me your pardon sir, I’ve done you wrong;
But pardon’t as you are a gentleman.
This presence knows,
And you needs must have heard, how I am punished
With a sore distraction.
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15. Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go bid the soldiers shoot.
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