Asked by Bob

Read the excerpt from Act III of Hamlet.

Hamlet: O God, your only jig-maker. What should a man do but be merry? for, look you, how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours.

Ophelia: Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.

Hamlet: So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year; but, by ’r lady, he must build churches then, or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is, ‘For, O! for, O! the hobby-horse is forgot.’

How does the excerpt exemplify Elizabethan drama?

by exploring human emotions
by referencing Biblical concepts
by addressing political policies
by praising the lives of saints

All Answers 1

Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
by exploring human emotions

The passage shows Hamlet’s complex feelings about grief, mourning, memory, and anger (irony, bitterness at his mother’s cheerfulness and his father’s quick “forgetting”), a hallmark of Elizabethan drama’s focus on psychological depth.