Important Speeches of Act III to Analyze
The speeches below are designated by scene and speaker. For each speech, do the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Reread the selection
Pay attention to the speaker
Translate words and phrases you do not know
Understand the context in which they are speaking (i.e. what just happened, why are they speaking,
what they are saying, etc.)
5. Understand and annotate in your text what this says about character, plot, conflict, and what, if any,
literary devices are used.
6. Remember that you will be given either the entire speech or part of a speech and asked to analyze those
lines. Do not speak in terms of the speech as a whole or in general terms. The more specific you can be
the better.
Scene i:
 Lines 57-62: How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience.
 Lines 64-98: To Be or Not To Be
 Lines 131-140: Get thee to a nunnery.
 Lines 163-175: O what a noble mind is here overthrown!
 Lines: 176-189: Love? His affections do not that way tend
 Lines 190-201: Let his queen-mother all alone entreat him to show his grief
 Lines 203-204: Madness in great ones must not go unwatched
Scene ii:
 Lines 286-290: He poisons him in the garden for his estate…
 Line 291: The King rises
 Lines 295: Give me some light! Away!
 Lines 312-313: O good Horatio. I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound…
 Line 339-340 The Queen, your mother, in most great affliction of spirit…
 Lines 359-360 She desires to speak with you in her closet ere you go to bed.
 Lines 422-432: Let me be cruel, not unnatural, I will speak daggers to her; but…
Scene iii:
 Lines 1-7: I like him not, nor stands it safe with us to let his madness range. Therefore prepare you. I your
commission will forthwith dispatch and he to Engliand shall along with you
 Lines 28-37: My lord, he’s going to his mother’s closet, Behind the arras I’ll convey myself To hear the
process
 Lines 40-76: O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;
 Lines 76-101: Now might I do it, now he is a-praying. And so he goes to heaven…
 Lines 102-103: My words fly up my thoughts remain below; Words without thoughts never to heaven go
Scene iv:
 Line 12: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended
 Line 13: Mother, you have my father much offended
 Line 29: How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead.
 Line 30: O, I am slain
 Lines 34-35: A bloody deed – almost as bad good mother as kill a king and marry with his brother
 Lines 47-48: What have I done, that thou dar’st wag thy tongue in noise so rude against me
 Lines 63-98: Look here upon this picture and on this, the counterfeit presentment of two brothers…
 Lines 107-109: O speak to me no more!
 Lines 126-131: Do not forget. This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose…
 Line 149: To whom do you speak this?
 Line 150: Do you see nothing there?
 Line 180-200: But go not to my uncle’s bed. Assume a virtue if you have it not.
 Lines 203-217: Not his by no means that I bid you do…
 Lines 219-221: Be thou assured if words be made of breath And breath of life, I have no life to breathe what
thou hast said to me.
 Line 222: I must to England, you know that.