Preview of the Hamlet's Soliloquy Copywork printable worksheet

Hamlet's Soliloquy Copywork

The best-known speech in English, set for unhurried handwriting practice.

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About this printable

Hamlet weighs living against dying in thirty-three lines that every student eventually meets. Copying the soliloquy by hand slows the reading down and makes its questions land. Pairs well with lessons on soliloquy, iambic pentameter, and Elizabethan drama. 17 pages, 1/4-inch letters in manuscript print on dashed manuscript lines. Sheets included: Copywork (Step 1), First Letter Hints (Step 2), Memory Lines (Step 3), Source Text, First Letters Only, Randomized Redacting. Hamlet, Act III Scene 1. Public domain text.

What's on the sheet

ON THIS SHEET: 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; · 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. — Hamlet, Act III Scene 1. LETTER SIZE: 1/4-inch. HANDWRITING: manuscript print. SHEETS: Copywork (Step 1), First Letter Hints (Step 2), Memory Lines (Step 3), Source Text, First Letters Only, Randomized Redacting.

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  • Category Shakespeare
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