View a FREE sample

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What do Hamlet, the Player, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern do when pirates attack?

2. Talking about acting on assumptions, what does the Player ask the two men?

3. What is Rosencrantz's response when Guildenstern asks how his leg feels?

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

5. How many corpses does the Player say the drama will have at the end?

Short Essay Questions

1. What causes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to laugh over the new coin game?

2. How are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern trying to figure out where they are?

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

4. The stage is dark when Act 3 begins. Describe what the audience hears.

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

6. What is Guildenstern's rationale for not catching Hamlet?

7. What is Rosencrantz's dark question on the subject of death?

8. What are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern doing at the beginning of Act 2?

9. What game does Rosencrantz initiate on the ship?

10. After a blackout when someone shouts for the lights to come up, what does the audience see?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write a paper on why and how there were no female actors during the Elizabethan age. Use Alfred as your example of how female characters were portrayed. Include the idea that Shakespeare himself may have begun his career in the theater as a female impersonator.

Essay Topic 2

Write a paper about the use of language styles in Stoppard's play. To what end does Stoppard utilize Elizabethan English in some scenes and modern English in others. Does this also help in identifying locations?

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 678 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample