Shakespeare's Hamlet Summative Test

Conclude your unit on Shakespeare’s Hamlet with this summative assessment, which is delivered as a Word Document and PDF. An answer key is included. This fifty-question assessment is divided into four sections and breaks down as follows. Students will demonstrate comprehension of the following:

• An encounter with a ghost
• The reason for Hamlet’s anger toward his mother
• Ophelia’s unsettling interactions with Hamlet
• Ophelia’s rejection of Hamlet
• Hamlet’s self-criticisms
• Hamlet’s fear
• Claudius’s guilty conscience
• Hamlet’s confession to Ophelia
• Ophelia’s emotional reaction to Hamlet’s fall from honor
• The purpose of a play performance
• The murder of Claudius
• Gertrude’s awareness that she married a killer
• Interactions among Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern
• The effect Fortinbras has on Hamlet
• The manner of Ophelia’s death
• Ophelia’s burial
• Laertes’s expression of extreme mourning
• Hamlet’s declaration on who should be the next King of Denmark
• The manner of Gertrude’s death
• Hamlet’s relationship with Laertes
• The similarities the gravediggers share with Hamlet
• Ophelia’s behavior right before her death
• Norway’s aggression toward Poland
• Claudius’s psychological state
• How Hamlet is affected by the actors
• Polonius’s sending a spy to report back on Laertes
• Laertes assessment of Hamlet’s love for Ophelia
• Hamlet’s criticism of his mother’s marriage
• Act 1, scene 2: It is not nor it cannot come to good, / But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
• Act 1, scene 3: Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain, / If with too credent ear you list his songs, / Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open / To his unmaster’d importunity.
• Act 1, scene 7: If thou art privy to thy country’s fate, / O, speak!
• Act 2, scene 2: Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! / O vengeance!
• Act 3, scene 3: The cease of majesty / Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw / What’s near it with it…
• Act 4, scene 1: So dreaded slander – / Whose whisper o’er the world’s diameter, / As level as the cannon to his blank, / Transports the poisoned shot – may miss our name / And hit the woundless air.
• Act 4, scene 2: But such officers do the / king best service in the end: he keeps them, like / an ape, in the corner of his jaw…
• Act 4, scene 4: How all occasions do inform against me, / And spur my dull revenge!
• Act 5, scene 1: Why, e’en so: and now my Lady Worm’s; chapless, and / knocked about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade: / here’s fine revolution, and we had the trick to / see’t. Did these bones cost no more the breeding, / but to play at loggats with ’em? Mine ache to think on’t.
• Metaphor
• Simile
• Hyperbole
• Allusion
• Personification
• Alliteration
• Sibilance
• Oxymoron