Teachers who read Hamlet with teenage classes are faced with a number of challenges: This most famous of famous texts may be experienced as too awe-inspiring. Assignments that involve popular media such as TV or blogs and "irreverently" recycled passages may work as icebreakers. Tasks such as finding more Hamlet references on the internet tap into young people's expertise in fields outside "highbrow" literature.
Understanding Hamlet through later texts
- Find references to the Danish prince in film and TV. Which aspects of his character do they pick on?
- Analyze parodies of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy. What are the oldest ones? Which features are changed in parodies? What topics is it used for? Find new, recent examples on the net.
- As part of a project on advertisements: which of the purposes and strategies of advertising do you recognize in Hamlet ads?
- Using quotation or idiom dictionaries (print or online): what are the most popular Hamlet passages? Which of them do you recognize?
Finding Hamlet references on the internet
- Find 10 more references for a given line on the internet. Research the complete and correct bibliographical information and upload the entries. Write a comment, where necessary.
- Can you find references to lines of the play that do not yet have any quotations attached to them? Research the complete and correct bibliographical information and upload the entries. Write a comment, where necessary.