Hamlet quotes for 1st Semester Exam

Dennis

***Know Speaker, Meaning, to whom the line is spoken, and the point in the play from
where it comes

1. ‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature,

Hamlet, to give these mourning duties to your father,
But you must know your father lost a father,
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow.

**Claudius to Hamlet, discussing Hamlet’s mourning for his father, Act I

2. Sleeping within my orchard,

My custom always in the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,
And in the porches of my ear did pour
The leperous distilment…

**Ghost of King Hamlet to Hamlet, discussing his murder, Act I

3. O speak to me no more.
These words like daggers enter in my ears.
No more, sweet Hamlet.

**Gertrude to Hamlet, during the meeting in her bedroom after the play, Act IV

4. The play’s the thing,

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

**Hamlet, alone, elaborating on his plan to alter The Murder of Gonzago to make
Claudius feel guilty, Act II

5. It is here, Hamlet. Hamlet, thou art slain;

No med’cine in the world can do thee good.
In thee there is not half an hour’s life.
 The treacherous instrument is in thy hand,
Unbated and envenomed. The foul practice
Hath turned itself on me. Lo, here I lie,
Never to rise again. Thy mother’s poisoned.
I can no more. The King, the King’s to blame.

**Laertes, to Hamlet, upon his own mortal wound in the fencing match, Act V

6. O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter…

**Hamlet, to himself, discussing the option of suicide and his sadness, Act I

7. Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

**Polonius to Laertes, giving fatherly advice before he ships back off to school in France,
Act II

8. Now might I do it pat, now ‘a is a-praying.

And now I’ll do’t. And so ‘a goes to heaven,
And so am I revenged. That would be scanned.
A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain, send to heaven.

**Hamlet, to himself in the chapel, discussing why he will not take the opportunity to kill
Caludius, Act III