Outline for Arts Speech
Richard McCormack
IB TOK R3
- Story of Hamlet
- Hamlet son of late king Claudius, mother remarried less than 2 months after her husband’s death.
- Ghost of late king visits Hamlet and tells him that the new king murdered him.
- Hamlet lashes out at everyone around him, including his love Ophelia.
- Hamlet plots to kill king
- Hamlet stages a play called “The Mousetrap,” in which a king is murdered by his brother, who then takes up with his wife, Claudius freaked out and Hamlet Claudius is guilty.
- Hamlet visited his mother and derides her for taking up such man.
- Polonius, Ophelia’s father, hid himself in Gertrude’s, Hamlet’s mother, room behind a curtain. When he calls out for help, Hamlet kills him thinking that it is the king.
- Because of the murder, Hamlet is sent to England and when he returns to Elsinore, he sees a funeral-taking place, he finds that Ophelia has drowned. Her brother Laertes, blaming Hamlet for the death his father and sister, challenges Hamlet to a duel.
- At the duel, Laertes poisons his blade to make sure Hamlet will die. At the same time, Claudius inserts a poison pearl into a wine cup in hope that Hamlet will drink it.
- Every important character dies: Gertrude gets to the cup first, and dies. Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poison blade, Hamlet mortally wounds Laertes. Hamlet then finds out that Claudius put poison in the cup and he goes after the king and kills him. Then Hamlet lies down and dies.
- This play is often referred to as “the one in which everybody dies.”
