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Hamlet study guide: act questions

By William Shakespeare · Edition: Open Source Shakespeare, Hamlet (the Globe text, opensourceshakespeare.org), a public-domain text with no editor's notes. · United States: first published around 1603, so in the public domain (works published before 1931; Cornell, Copyright Term and the Public Domain, https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain). Canada: William Shakespeare died in 1616, so the term had ended long before the extension to life plus 70 in force from 2022-12-30 (Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42, s. 6), which did not revive expired works.

This guide covers the five acts of Shakespeare's tragedy of a Danish prince, his father's ghost and the court at Elsinore. Each act page has a short summary written for this site and five questions with act and scene references.

How to use this guide

Open an act page and try the five questions before you read the summary. Then read the act in your own copy and check your answers against it. The summary is a short recap and does not replace reading the book.

About this edition

Every page in this guide follows one public-domain text, named in the edition note above, and uses no editor's notes or introductions. Summaries and questions are written for Mind86 and do not quote the book beyond a few words. Page and line numbers differ between editions, so the references name the chapter, act or scene instead.

How to study this book

  1. Guess first

    Before you read the act or the summary, try to answer the five questions from what you already know, even if you are unsure. Then read on.

    Source: St. Hilaire et al. 2023Limits: Guessing first helps with the questions you tried, not with parts of the act that no question asked about.

  2. Read it in your own copy

    Now read the act in your own copy, looking for the answers to the questions you guessed at. The summary here is a recap, not a substitute for the act.

    Source: Pan & Sana 2021Limits: The study found that testing before reading scored higher than testing after reading, on expository text passages (not novels or plays), with final tests 5 minutes or 2 days later.

  3. Quiz yourself

    Answer the five questions from memory, then open the answers and check them against the act reference.

    Source: Roediger & Karpicke 2006Limits: Testing beat rereading when the final test came days later; at five minutes, rereading scored higher.

  4. Try again after a few days

    Come back to the same questions a few days later, and again the week before your test.

    Source: Cepeda et al. 2006Limits: The best gap between study sessions grows with how far off your test is (studies of verbal recall tasks); these timings are suggestions, not a schedule from the study.

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Acts