FAMOUS PLAYWRIGHT POET AND OTHERS
HAMLET
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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Hamlet-will use the play to prove Claudius’ guilt
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Polonius-wants to watch Hamlet “act crazy” around Ophelia
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King Claudius-wants the travelling actors to leave his kingdom
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Rosencrantz-he’s pretending to be Hamlet’s friend to get in good with the king
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Detailed explanation-1: -What does ‘the play’s the thing’ mean? “The play’s the thing” appears in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It means that Hamlet is using the play as an instrument to touch the conscience of Claudius. He wants to make him aware of the fact that he knows who actually killed his father.
Detailed explanation-2: -He resolves to devise a trap for Claudius, forcing the king to watch a play whose plot closely resembles the murder of Hamlet’s father; if the king is guilty, he thinks, he will surely show some visible sign of guilt when he sees his sin reenacted on stage.
Detailed explanation-3: -He arranges to stage a play to ctach prey. Thus Hamlet is successful to catch or test the guilty conscience of the King by enacting the play-within-play.
Detailed explanation-4: -Hamlet hatches his plan to determine Claudius’ guilt: he has heard that sometimes guilty people are so moved by seeing similar crimes to the ones they’ve committed acted out before them that they will confess everything there and then. Thus will Claudius’ murder ‘speak’, even without having a tongue to do so.
Detailed explanation-5: -Claudius used the word conscience in the moral sense, a sense of guilt. Hamlet here really means consciousness, our awareness, makes us cowards. We can imagine our own death.