| blank verse | unrhyming iambic pentameter10 syllables |
| Voltimand and Cornelius | Courtiers whom Claudius sends to Norway to persuade the king to prevent Fortinbras from attacking. |
| Reynaldo | Polonius’s servant, who is sent to France by Polonius to check up on and spy on Laertes. |
| dramatis personae | list of main characters |
| The Ur-Hamlet | is the name given to theoretical play to be in existence before 1589 |
| Yorick | He is the dead court jester whose skull is exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of the play. The sight of Yorick’s skull evokes a monologue from Prince Hamlet on the vile effects of death: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? |
| Example of anacharism | The anachronism present in this passage is the mentioning of Hamlet’s attendance at The University of Wittenberg, in a town in Germany. It is also the University where Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern study as well. However, The University of Wittenberg was not founded until 1502. While this play’s setting is set in about the 800s in Denmark. However, this reference helped Shakespeare’s audience understand the character of Hamlet easier and more efficiently. This reference quickly establishes Hamlet’s background information. Just by understanding the University of Wittenberg the audience would recognize that Hamlet is a scholar, and that he is probably a Protestant because of the anachronism’s mention of a school that Martin Luther first nailed up his 95 theses which sparked the Protestant Reformation .And due to the information of Hamlet’s intellectualism given by this anachronism the audience could safely assume that Hamlet was a skeptic — not a believer in spirits and ghosts which could set up his initial resistance to his father’s ghost as well as provide a contrast with the mention of academics from the preliminary chapter in which the ghost is first mentioned. |
| inciting action | … |
| deus ex machina | “god from the machine” |
Hamlet
August 11, 2019