Problem
For each choice, analyze the quotation given using the following criteria:
Literal level: Where in the play does the quotation occur and which character says it?
• How does this passage serve to develop character, plot, or conflict?
• How does this passage serve to develop theme?
• Give an explication of the lines, focusing on literary devices and / or ways in which the lines targeted the Elizabethan audience.
Choice I
How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd.
(Hamlet: IV, iv, 32-38)
Choice II
Give me leave. Here lies the water; good: here stands the
man; good: if the man go to this water and drown himself, it is,
will he, nill he, he goes,-mark you that: but if the water come
to him and drown him, he drowns not himself; argal, he that is
not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.