Daggers Drawn by Maxim Jakubowski

Author:Maxim Jakubowski [Jakubowski, Maxim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

HOMEWORK

PHIL LOVESEY

English Homework

Judy Harris – Year 10

In your opinion, is Hamlet merely faking his madness, or is he really insane?

This term we have been studying Hamlet, a play written ages ago by William Shakespeare. It’s quite good, though the words are all strange for modern people to really understand. There’s lots of stuff that is really, really old that Sir had to try and explain to us before it made any sense, not that most of the class seemed bothered, goofing around as usual.

Most of us thought the film was way better than the book, but that Mel Gibson bloke still used all the old words, so that when there wasn’t much going on except him talking, I noticed quite a few of the class were either mucking about or texting. I even told Sir about this after one lesson but all he did was sort of smile at me and say Shakespeare wasn’t for everyone, and maybe it was better for me if the class didn’t think I was telling tales – which seemed quite harsh, as I was only trying to help him.

The story of Hamlet goes like this: There’s this prince (Hamlet) who lives in another country a long time ago. His dad dies, and his mum marries Hamlet’s uncle, so he doesn’t get to become king. He gets real mad about this and reckons his mum’s a bit of a whore, especially when the ghost of his dad comes back and tells Hamlet that the pair of them were an item before he died, and that the uncle even dripped poison into his ear and murdered him to get off with Hamlet’s mum and become king.

This was quite a spooky bit in the film, the ghost thing, and most of the class were watching except Cheryl Bassington who was texting her boyfriend under the desk. He’s an apprentice plumber who lives down our road, and I often see him pick her up on his crappy little motorbike thing. She says they’ve ‘done it’ loads of times, which I think is really lame at her age, as I reckon you should save yourself for someone who really loves you.

Hamlet has a woman who loves him. Her name’s Ophelia and she sort of hangs around the palace pining for him. It’s that Helena Bonham Carter in the film, and all the lads in the class were right crude about her in her nightie. Steve Norris made a sort of ‘joke’ about boning-Bonham-Carter which even Sir sniggered at, but I just thought was sick. I think Ophelia’s really sad because she really does love Hamlet, and when he starts acting a bit mental, she gets really upset. He even tells her that he never loved her, and that she should go away and become a nun. Even Polonius (her own dad) uses Ophelia to test if Hamlet really is mad, which seems well odd – but then he gets stabbed behind a curtain, which serves him right for being such a bad dad in the first place.

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