Prepping for the Test

For your test, Thursday...

Part I. 10 Quote Identifications: Character and audience.

Part II. Passage analysis: Select 3 or 5 longer quotes which you will have to paraphrase and explain the significance.

Part III. "Words, Words, Words" Essay: Select 3 significant words from Hamlet  - explain their connection (and their significance).


Here's a sampling of words... What will your three words be?

Search MIT online text:

Edit - Find (Command F)

Search words by Character:

BE SURE YOU USE THE OED - Print out definitions of your THREE words - and an outline with quotes.

Word	Number of times used	Comments
Noble	19
Kind	13
Distemper	4
True	25
Truth	6
Good	More than a 100 times
Kind	13
Revenge	16
Ear	53
Voice	12
Silence	4
Mad	85
Bad	7

How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know?
Taken from Statistical Reasoning for Everyday Life, Bennett, Briggs, Triola, Second Edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 2002

For the Shakespeare question, the first sample consists of the complete known works of Shakespeare, specifically the number of words that are used once, twice, three times, and so forth. Table 1 shows a (small) part of the first sample. The table says that in the works of Shakespeare, 14,376 words were used exactly once, 4343 words were used exactly twice, and so forth. The full table is much larger and continues far beyond 10 occurrences. For example, in the full table, we would see that 5 words were used exactly 100 times and 846 words were used more than 100 times. In his complete works, Shakespeare used 31,534 different words and a grand total of 884,647 words counting repetitions. (The task of counting words is a nontrivial task; the results are compiled in a concordance of the works of Shakespeare.)

Table 1. The number of words in the complete works of Shakespeare that are use once, twice, up to ten times.

Occurrences	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Number of words	14, 376	4343	2292	1463	1043	837	638	519	430	364

Check out these students performing lines from Hamlet.