Chris O. Cook’s 201 classes
BMCC Fall 2014
Portfolio: Final Paper and Revisions
The Final Portfolio is to be placed in my mailbox in N751 on or by Friday 12/19. Assume that the office
door will be locked at 5:00pm. In addition to the Hamlet paper (see below), it may contain revisions of
either or both of the first two papers for a new grade (or not, if you are satisfied with your original
grades). Attaching/Including the original versions is not necessary; I will grade all revisions as though
they are totally new assignments (if you somehow manage to make the revision even worse than the
original, I will disregard the revision and keep the higher grade). The Grammar Bonus is in effect on
both the Hamlet paper and the revisions of the earlier papers. If you are turning in multiple papers, put
all of them in a manila envelope or plain folder — anything fancier than that is unnecessary.
The Hamlet paper is due in the Final Portfolio on 12/19. If you are not doing any revisions, then just
turn in the Hamlet paper by itself. The required length is a minimum of five full double-spaced pages.
Critical sources and a Works Cited page are mandatory. Quoting from the text in the body of the paper
is mandatory. The good news is that there are no requirements about content other than that the
paper is about Hamlet and argues a thesis. If you are going to be comparing Hamlet to another text, get
my permission first, and remember that you have to be talking about Hamlet most of the time. If you
are having trouble coming up with a thesis, contact me and I will help you come up with one. Since the
Hamlet paper is the assignment where students most frequently fail on plagiarism, I should remind you
one last time that a) if you plagiarize, I will catch you, and it is an automatic “F” with no do-overs, and b)
there is no logical reason to plagiarize — just put quotation marks around the stuff you were going to
plagiarize and cite it as research. I should also remind you, just so no-one can say they weren’t warned,
that if you don’t do the Hamlet paper, you fail the entire course. Let’s see, what else could someone
possibly screw up here… Oh, I’ve got it: since many of you have copies of Hamlet that have the fake
words on facing pages from the real words, please be careful that when you are quoting from the text,
you do not accidentally quote the fake words instead of the real words, as there will be heavy
penalties for doing so.
If you are having trouble coming up with a thesis, some good idea to explore are…
--How guilty or innocent do you think Gertrude is, and why?
--Is Hamlet a hero, or just an extremely eloquent jerk?
--Is there a message about religion in Hamlet, and if so, what is it?
--Hamlet himself is pretty sexist, but is the play itself sexist? Why or why not?
--What is the play’s message about the relationship between life and art?
--Do you believe the “Ophelia is pregnant” theory?
--Hamlet can be overly didactic and make things more complicated than they need to be, but is he ever
just wrong? Do you think Shakespeare intended us to agree with or believe everything Hamlet says, or
did the Bard want us to view his melancholy prince more skeptically?