Advanced Placement English
Semester Examination
Death of a Salesman
Study Guide Overview:
1. Make certain that you have read/re-read the play Death of a Salesman carefully.
2. Be able to give accurate descriptions of major characters:
Willy Loman
Biff Loman
Happy Loman
Linda Loman
Ben Loman/Willy’s Brother
Charley
Bernard
Bill Oliver
3. Be able to identify the speaker of significant lines from the play.
4. Be able to discuss the alternate titles of the play.
5. Be able to explain major incidents in the play, such as Willy Loman’s reasons for suicide.
6. Compare/contrast the original set of the play with Miller’s final decision to use imaginary walls as part of the set.
7. Be able to discuss/present careful descriptions of two-three major flashbacks in the play.
8. Be able to give reasons why a common human was seen as an appropriate subject for tragedy in Arthur Miller’s essay “Tragedy and the Common Man.”
9. Be able to discuss major symbols in the play: stockings, Biff’s sneakers with the University of Virginia printed on them, etc.
10. Discuss examples of Willy Loman’s difficulty in separating fantasy from reality.
11. Be able to explain several examples of foreshadowing employed by Miller within the play.
12. Know the following information: Originally, Miller had wanted to call the play The Inside of a Head , and he had planned to begin it with “an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up.” Fortunately, he settled upon less mechanical methods to reveal Willy’s psychology. In later describing what he thought he had done,
Miller said he tried to dramatize “a disintegrating personality at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.”
13. Be able to describe how the voice of the present and the voice of the past is confused within the mind of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman .
14. Be able to explain answers to study guide questions related to the play on the following page.

Advanced Placement English
Semester Examination
Death of a Salesman
Study Guide Questions
1. Miller’s opening stage directions call for actors to observe imaginary walls when the action is in the present and to step freely through walls when the scene is in the past. Do you find this technique of staging effective? Why? Why not?
2. Miller professed himself fascinated by the “agony of someone who has some driving, implacable wish in him” ( Paris Review interview). What--as we learn in the opening scene-- are Willy Loman’s obsessions?
3. What case can be made for seeing Linda as the center of the play--the character around whom all events revolve? Sum up the kind of person she is.
4. Seeing his father’s Boston side-girl has a profound effect on Biff. How would you sum it up? (For example, Biff’s faith in his father is shattered. From then on, Biff seeks failure and avoids success.)
5. Apparently Biff’s discovery of Willy’s infidelity took place before World War II, about
1939. In this respect, does Death of a Salesman seem at all dated? Do you think it possible, in the present day, for a son to be so greatly shocked by his father’s sexual foible that the son’s entire career would be ruined?
6. How is it possible to read the play as the story of Biff’s eventual triumph? Why does Biff, at the funeral, give his brother a “hopeless” look?
7. How are we supposed to feel about Willy’s suicide? In what way is Willy, in killing himself, self-deluded to the end?
8. What meanings do you find in the flute music? In stockings--those that Willy gives to the
Boston side girl and those he doesn’t like to see Linda mending? In Biff’s sneakers with the
“University of Virginia” lettered on them (which he later burns)? In seeds and gardening?
9. Of what importance to the play are Charley and his son Bernard? How is their father-son relationship different from the relationship between Willy and Biff?
10. What do you understand Bernard to mean in telling Willy, “sometimes. . .it’s better for a man just to walk away”?
11. Explain Charley’s point when he argues, “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman and you don’t know that.” (Miller, in his introduction to the play, makes an applicable comment: “When asked what Willy was selling, what was in his bags, I could only reply, ‘Himself.’”)
12. What do you make of the character of Ben? Do you see him as a realistic character or as a figment of Willy’s imagination?

13. Suppose Miller had told the story of Willy and Biff in chronological order. If the incident in the Boston hotel had come early in the play, instead of late, what would have been lost?
14. The death of another salesman is mentioned in this play--that of Dave Singleman. How does
Willy view Singleman’s death? Is Willy’s attitude the attitude of the reader?
15. In a famous speech in the Requiem, Charley calls a salesman a man who “don’t put a bolt to a nut,” and Charley recalls that Willy “was a happy man with a batch of cement.” What theme of the play does Charley express? At what other moments in the play does this theme emerge? Why is Willy, near death, so desperately eager to plant seeds in a garden?
Advanced Placement English
Semester Examination
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Study Guide Overview:
1. Character Identification: Know all characters listed on the first page under “List of
Characters.”
2. Be able to identify major conflicts and incidents in the play.
3. Be able to identify the speaker of key quotation from the play.
4. Complete the reading on the last two pages of Act IV and the pages for Act V.
5. Read the explanatory information on the left hand side of the pages in the text for
Act I-Act V.
6. Read the information on the characteristics/ingredients of an Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy on pages 246-247 of the text. Be able to apply these characteristics to the play of Hamlet.
Ingredients of a Revenge Tragedy:
 a melancholy hero/avenger
 a hesitating avenger (without hesitation the play would be over too quickly)
 a villain who was to be killed in revenge
 complex plotting
 murders (usually from sexual motives) and other physical horrors
 a play-within-a-play
 sexual obsession and lust related to the passion for revenge
 a ghost who calls for revenge
 real or feigned madness
 the death of the revenger