Hamlet

Why HSC markers love this text

Module B is the only HSC English module that asks for sustained engagement with a single work as a constructed text. Hamlet rewards that brief because every scene foregrounds its own theatricality. A reading that treats the soliloquies as dramatic events with rhetorical purpose, rather than transparent windows on character, will out-mark a reading that just paraphrases.

Structure at a glance

• Act 1 establishes the Ghost's claim, Hamlet's grief and the court's surveillance of him.
• Act 2 develops the player metaphor and Hamlet's strategy of feigned madness.
• Act 3 contains the play within the play, the prayer scene and the closet scene.
• Act 4 disperses the action through Ophelia's collapse and Laertes' return.
• Act 5 returns to the graveyard meditation on mortality and to the staged duel.

Soliloquies as dramatic events

Track six soliloquies across the play. Each one shifts Hamlet's stance on action: from grief in 1.2, to commitment in 2.2, to philosophical paralysis in 3.1, to bitter resolution in 3.4, to remorse in 4.4, to acceptance in 5.2. A strong essay maps this arc onto the play's structural movement rather than treating soliloquies as a portrait gallery.

Two readings to put in tension

A. C. Bradley reads Hamlet as a study in temperament, a sensitive intellectual destroyed by a task unsuited to him. Janet Adelman, by contrast, reads the play through the lens of maternal anxiety, foregrounding Gertrude's body and the closet scene as the play's structural centre. A sophisticated essay holds both readings and shows where each illuminates and where each over-reads.

Common pitfalls

Avoid plot summary. Avoid the conflation of Hamlet's voice with Shakespeare's intent. Avoid the "Oedipus complex" reading without acknowledging that this is Ernest Jones writing after Freud, not a reading endorsed by the text itself.

Essay scaffold

Introduction. Name your two critical readings and the structural feature they disagree about. Thesis: how Shakespeare constructs Hamlet's interiority as a problem the play cannot resolve.

Body 1. Soliloquy as a dramatic mode. Use 1.2 and 3.1 to show how interior speech is staged for an audience.

Body 2. The closet scene as the play's emotional centre. Apply both critical readings.

Body 3. The graveyard and the duel as the play's reconciliation with mortality.

Conclusion. Return to the play's continuing critical contestation as evidence of its value.