Characters
This character’s conventional femininity stands in strong contrast to their respective play’ toxic masculinity.
Who is Lady Macduff?
This term refers to an “in-between zone.” For example, in Hamlet this is the space between the Elizabethan period and the Jacobean period.
What is liminality?
This failed plan to blow up parliament leads to England being an anti-catholic country.
What is the Gunpowder Plot?
This play, written before the death of Queen Elizabeth, nevertheless looks towards the Jacobean period and represents a sense of being in-between.
What is Hamlet?
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
Who is Caliban?
These two minor characters don't get Hamlet's profound speech concerning man and the trappings of the body.
Who are Rosencratz and Guildenstern?
This term functions as an important link to the gunpowder plot in Macbeth.
What is equivocation?
Hamlet tells his mother he will not go to this town, which is also known for its role in the Protestant Reformation.
What is Wittenberg?
This document leaked in 1599 lays out the Jacobean absolutist philosophy of monarchy.
What is Basilicon Doron?
Denmark's a prison.
Who is Hamlet?
Described as a blue-eyed hag, this off-stage character still has an influential force in the play.
Who is Sycorax?
This term refers to having contempt for the world.
What is contemptus mundi?
This book, written by King James, endorsed the practice of witchhunting.
What is Daemonologie?
This text, written by King James, evinces his deep fascination with the occult.
What is Daemonologie?
I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things, for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all,
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty—
Who is Gonzalo?
This character not only brings news of a death, but their name also alludes to God’s enemy.
Who is Seyton?
This Greek term refers to scapegoat and the use of someone to move things along without moving the needle too much.
What is Pharmakos?
A man upset about a breakup loses his head after he spearheads this rebellion.
What is the Essex Rebellion?
Written in French around 1580 and first translated into English in 1603, this text by Michel de Montaigne rhetorically invokes new-world indigenous societies to critique contemporary France and Europe.
What is Of Cannibals?
Be not offended.
I speak not as in absolute fear of you.
I think our country sinks beneath the yoke.
It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds. I think withal
There would be hands uplifted in my right;
Who is Malcolm?
This characters interracial marriage upsets nature and causes chaos.
Who is Claribel?
T.S. Eliot criticized Hamlet for lacking this term which refers to having something external to explain the internal.
What is objective correlative?
Named after the word “trial” and a town, Hamlet alludes to this assembly meeting which was called to determine how to respond to Martin Luther’s teachings.
What is the Diet of Worms (1521)?
The title of this 16th century book by Thomas More literally translates to "no place."
What is Utopia?
Faith, here’s an equivocator
that could swear in both the scales against either
scale, who committed treason enough for God’s
sake yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in,
equivocator. (Knock.) Knock, knock, knock! Who’s
there?
Who is the Porter in Macbeth?