1. William Shakespeare Understanding The Bard

2. Important Terms to Know Couplet: Two lines of verse, usually joined by a rhyme at the end of each verse. Example: But if thou live, remember'd not to be, Die single and thine image dies with thee. Sonnet III, William Shakespeare

3. Important Terms to Know Pun: A play on words, where words often have more than one meaning. Dialogue: Conversation between two or more characters. Example: Speed: Away, ass! You’ll lose the tide if you tarry any longer. Launce: It is no matter if the tied were lost; for it is the unkindest tied that ever any man tied. Speed: What’s the unkindest tide? Launce: Why, he that’s tied here, Crab, my dog. Two Gentlemen of Verona

4. Important Terms to Know Aside: A remark or passage by a character in a play that is intended to be heard by the audience but unheard by the other characters in the play. Example: A little more than kin, and less than kind. Hamlet

5. Important Terms to Know Monologue- A long speech by an actor in a play, where the speaker is addressing an audience. Example: What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me? What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling? In leads or oils? what old or newer torture Must I receive, whose every word deserves To taste of thy most worst? Thy tyranny Together working with thy jealousies, Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle For girls of nine, O, think what they have done And then run mad indeed, stark mad! for all Thy by-gone fooleries were but spices of it. That thou betray'dst Polixenes,'twas nothing; That did but show thee, of a fool, inconstant And damnable ingrateful: nor was't much, Thou wouldst have poison'd good Camillo's honour, To have him kill a king: poor trespasses, More monstrous standing by: whereof I reckon The casting forth to crows thy baby-daughter To be or none or little; though a devil Would have shed water out of fire ere done't:

6. Nor is't directly laid to thee, the death Of the young prince, whose honourable thoughts, Thoughts high for one so tender, cleft the heart That could conceive a gross and foolish sire Blemish'd his gracious dam: this is not, no, Laid to thy answer: but the last,—O lords, When I have said, cry 'woe!' the queen, the queen, The sweet'st, dear'st creature's dead, and vengeance for't Not dropp'd down yet. A Winter’s Tale

7. Important Terms to Know Soliloquy- an act of speaking one’s thoughts aloud without an audience, specifically in a play. Example: To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life;

8. ` For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd. Hamlet