Pennsylvania College of Technology   Dr. Vavra's ENL 121: Lit & Comp

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1     When sitting down and reading Hamlet by William Shakespeare, it made me think back to when I read the play in high school. I tried to remember as much as I could. By reading the play earlier in high school, it made me understand the play a lot more. When asked to go through the play and explain the foils of Hamlet, I find it kind of hard to come up with the foils. When coming up with foils, I guess the first foil I can come up with is Hamlet and the King. Looking at another one, I guess it would have to be the Queen and Ophelia. These are the only two foils that I can come up with that have some similarities and some differences, but still think it is kind of difficult to determine which characters in Hamlet are foils. [SS - 1]

[Definition of foils?]

2     To start off, we must look at two of the main characters in the play. They would be Hamlet and the King. When looking at them [both?] as foils, we look at their similarities and their differences. We will first look at these two’s differences. We look at Hamlet and the King[,] and we see that they are different in a couple of ways. First, one is a King[,] while the other is the son of the ex-King. Another would be that Hamlet didn’t know really how his father was killed until his ghost told him, while the King knew how he was killed because he murdered him.  Looking at another difference, we would have to say that these two were different in their actions. Hamlet was trying to act like he was insane, while the King was trying to act like a King and that he really cared that something was wrong with Hamlet. These would be some differences of Hamlet and the King.

[Beginning with the differences and then moving to the similarities reflects a major misunderstanding of comparison / contrast thinking. The similarities need to be established first, as justification for looking at the differences.]

3     Going on to look at the similarities of Hamlet and the King, we first have to start off with that they both loved the Queen. We can see this in that the King murdered Hamlet’s father because he loved his wife, in [Delete "in."] which [whom] he later married. When we look at Hamlet we see him also in love with the Queen, who is his mother. Hamlet in the play ends up having sex with his mother. [Could we have some evidence of this, please?] This is one way we can see that Hamlet and the King are similar. Next we would have to look at them being similar in that they are both males and both murder[er]s. The King is a murderer in that he murdered Hamlet’s father before the play even started. He also murdered him because he loved his wife and she was in love with him so he murdered him. [Evidence? Perhaps his primary motive was that he wanted the throne?] Hamlet is a murderer in that at the end of the play, he ends up killing his mother with the poison drink. [He did not.] He also kills the King with the poisonous sword. This is how we can say that both Hamlet and the King are murderers. These are a couple of ways we can say that Hamlet and the King are similar. Through these similarities and differences we can say that Hamlet and the King are foils. [This statement again reflects a misunderstanding of foils, and may be the result of not including the definition in the essay.]

4     Going on to the next foils, [Poor transition] I would have to say we must look at the Queen and Ophelia. I feel these two have some similarities and differences, which make them, foils. We first look at their differences. I can only come up with one big difference between these two ladies. That is that one is a Queen and the other is a young lady. This is one of the only differences I can see in the Queen and Ophelia.

5     When looking at the Queen and Ophelia, I find a little [few] more similarities than differences. When we look at them[,] we first start off with that they are both women. That was not hard to figure out. Next we look at them and see both in love with a man. The queen is in love with the King[,] while Ophelia is in love with Hamlet. Another thing we find similar with the Queen and Ophelia is that they were both killed in the play. We see that the poison that was put in the drink of the King’s [It is not the King's drink.] killed the Queen, but she ended up drinking the drink and getting poisoned and later dying. While Ophelia died in the plat [sic] when she ran away, she got down to a stream and was on a branch, which she slipped on and fell. [SS -1] She landed in the stream and ended up dying from the fall. [Does this mean that she was "killed"?] When looking at these two ladies[,] we see that they had more similarities than differences, but I still felt they were foils of each other.

6     When going back and looking at the play, I find it hard to come up with foils of the play. I could only come up with Hamlet and the King being foils and the Queen and Ophelia being foils. These are the only two I could come up with, but feel they were two of the biggest foils in the play. Like I said, it is kind of hard to come up with foils in this play because it is a hard play to understand.

[The last paragraph, like the whole paper, raises questions about what this student was doing in class. During class discussions, there were many hints, perhaps even direct statements, that Laertes and Polonius were foils.]

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