IB English Paper 2

“O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven; it hath the primal eldest curse upon’t a bother’s murder”

Claudius talking about the sin he committed and killing his brother

“Doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away.”

King Hamlet’s curse

“O that this too solid flesh would melt…the everlasting..his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God”

Hamlet acknowledges the sin of suicide

“A villain kills my father, and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven”

Hamlet doesn’t kill Claudius because he is praying and thought he would send him to heaven

“With devotions visage, and pious action we do sugar / o’er the devil himself”

When we coverup pious actions with evil intent

“The time is out of joint.”

Things are not as they should be

“God has given you one face and you make yourself another”

Double faced women

"“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”

Hamlet’s main stopping force as to why he can’t kill claudius

“H: Denmark’s a prison, R: Then is the world one.”

Exchange between hamlet and rosencratz about prisons

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,”

When hamlet compares death to a deep sleep and we shuffle off “something“

I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”

Hamlet’s anxiety prevents him from achieving his true potential

“I swung my staff and saw the old man crash Back from his car in blood...Then all of them I slew.”

Oedipus kills his father and the people around him

“That know my sin! I have sinned in birth and breath. I have sinned with woman. I have sinned with death”

Oedipus acknowledges that he has sinned

Cast me from Thebes ... now, quick ... where none may see/My visage more, nor mingle words with me

Oedipus expresses his desire to be exiled from Thebes

“What word, what deed of mine, what bitter task, May save my city.”

Oedipus questions what he can do to save his city

“And I had done a hellish thing, / And it would work ‘em woe: / For all averr’d, I had kill’d the bird / That made the breeze to blow.”

The mariner’s hellish thing

“And when I woke it rain’d…Sure I had drunken, and still my body drank”

The mariner’s baptism

“He’ll Shrieve my soul, he’ll wash away / The albatross’s blood”

Removal of the albatross’s blood from the mariner

“Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.”

Water everywhere for the mariner

“Instead of the cross, the Albatross, / About my neck was hung.”

Instead of the cross

“With a woeful agony / Which forced me to begin my tale”

The mariner’s agony and punishment to tell his tale

“And till my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns”

The mariner’s heart burns

Alone, alone, all alone / alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint took pity on / my soul in agony.”

Isolation of the mariner

“As if it had been a christian soul, / we hail’d it in God’s name”

As if the albatross was a soul

“a man who stands revealed as cursed by birth”

Oedipus was cursed since birth