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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What makes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern laugh at this new coin game?

2. What is Guildenstern's ominous prediction?

3. What is it that Guildenstern still does not know?

4. What do they bicker about?

5. What does Claudius tell Guildenstern and Rosencrantz?

Short Essay Questions

1. What happens when Rosencrantz hears music?

2. Describe the funny bowing scene with Hamlet and Claudius.

3. What blunder does Rosencrantz make over what he thinks is a woman?

4. What does Hamlet ask the Player?

5. How does the audience realize that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are really dead?

6. Tell about the dialogue between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after Rosencrantz insists they have permission to leave.

7. What transpires when Rosencrantz brings up the subject of death?

8. What game does Rosencrantz initiate on the ship?

9. When Hamlet does return, what does he say about the body?

10. What is the lie Rosencrantz tells Claudius?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write a paper on the tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive. Using the lies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern told Claudius about the whereabouts of Hamlet, discuss in your paper how telling lies almost always ends in difficult situations. Give a real world example.

Essay Topic 2

Write a paper on costuming for a play. Hamlet has been staged often in modern dress. Why, then, is it important in Stoppard's play that the costumes be Elizabethan? What do you think the costumes add to the play?

Essay Topic 3

Write a paper on how reading a play is different from reading a novel. In a play, how much depends on the imagination of the reader? What is included in a novel that is missing from a play? What part does "seeing" play in the reading of a drama?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 769 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample