1. Analyze Hamlet's famous speech "To Be or Not to Be." Go line by line:
"To be or not to be, that is the question."

•What is Hamlet suggesting in this first line. Try to ORIGINATE YOUR OWN idea and expression.

2. Let's consider Ophelia and Gertrude as the only female characters in this play.

•What is Shakespeare telling his audience about the status of women through these characters?

•What clues do we get about their social positions as women? Use specific dialogue and examples from the play to demonstrate your arguments.

3. As a character, Hamlet is almost overwhelming because of his strange behavior, especially toward women, the fake or possibly real madness, and his melancholy. Many spectators barely notice the other characters. Let's have a closer look at Polonius and his family.

•What do they represent in the play from a social point of view?

•Why do their plans go so horribly wrong, when they conform to all the rules and want to help?

•How does their social status and conformism become evident in the way they speak, behave, or react? Use specific examples and dialogue from the play to support your answers.

4. What's your opinion with this below?

The greatness of Shakespeare is that he presents us with characters of complexity. It is difficult to know whether Hamlet is really mad, feigning madness, or is a garden-variety brooding adolescent. And as many critics who say, "Hamlet had a thing for his mom," there are those who are appalled by that notion....Shakespeare presents psychological studies that are utterly modern.

Even the opening Act has everyone (quite willing to believe in ghosts, yet as Christians simultaneously, unwilling) uncertain of what they are seeing, bleary-eyed at night in a misty fog. Hamlet leaves the stage proper to speak with the ghost, and so there are no witnesses privy to that conversation--therefore, we cannot determine to what extent the ghost is even real or a projection of Hamlet's already troubled mind and spirit. Hamlet himself further complicates matters, unsure himself of what he's seeing, until he commits to what may well be in his own mind only.

So, every character in a Shakespeare play (apart from the "stock" players--the fool, for example) is layered in complexity.

Nothing and no one is a simple matter of analysis--they are too deeply constructed and, psychologically, very modern.

Everyone since Shakespeare, who is intelligently trained, has had to deal with making characters complex, ever since. In a very real sense, every modern drama pays tribute to Shakespeare.

Additionally, Shakespeare is often vulgar--I mean he speaks as one of the people. In his own life, he grew up a farmer's (John Shakespeare's) son, who turned entrepreneur, rose to what we would regard today as upper-middle class, held a position of community responsibility, and then fell from his office, lost all his money, and was rather disgraced. W. Shakespeare got Anne Hathaway (9 years his senior) pregnant when he was 19; so he was a teen father. He began his theater life as an actor, and so was often away from his family in Stratford. He was found guilty of poaching (which might have gotten him hung), but was allowed to pay a fine instead.

So, Shakespeare had had a very richly textured life experience, and he knew how people worked because he had EMPATHY.

Also, he was in touch with modern times--the free Blacks of Elizabethan England, while not a profusion of numbers, impacted the society and inter-racial marriage was practiced without harm. Both the racism AND the liberal nature of his culture found expression in Othello.

In Elizabethan England, there were no slaves. So, the "Blackamoors" as they were called were free to make livings, rise in society, as any one else--difficult enough! If you notice, there is a court member in the Elizabethan depiction above--he is a man of color. To be at court in any capacity was to be rising....

Shakespeare in Othello shows us to what extent the Elizabethans were color blind and to what extent they were simultaneously racist.