What the Prestwick House Study Guide for Hamlet Actually Gives You
Prestwick House produces study guides for a lot of commonly taught texts. The Hamlet one follows their standard template: plot summary, character breakdowns, theme analysis, essay prompts, and a handful of supplementary readings. It's aimed at high school and introductory college courses. The writing is functional, not brilliant. It gets you through the material without adding much that isn't already in the play. Most teachers who assign this are looking for a scaffold. Students read the primary text on their own, then use the guide to check comprehension and build essay material. The guide's essay prompts are the part that matters most. They tend to be broad enough that students can argue in either direction, which is fine for a standard five-paragraph structure but thin if you're trying to write something that actually thinks. The character analyses are decent for memorization. You can pull quick summaries of Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia, Gertrude, and the minor figures. They're not deep. If a professor asks about the political mechanics of Elsinore or the significance of the fencing scene as structural counterpoint, you're on your own after skimming those sections.
I've used this guide for two semesters of first-year composition courses. The typical workflow is: assign Act 1, have students read the relevant guide sections the same night, then use the essay prompts as discussion starters the next day. It takes about 45 minutes of prep time per act. That's competitive. Nothing free or open-access does that cleanly without a lot of teacher customization.
What It Misses
The biggest gap is historical and textual context. Prestwick House touches on the early modern period in a sentence or two here and there, but it doesn't engage with the Quarto versus Folio variations at all. That matters. The "To be or not to be" soliloquy appears in different positions across the two textual witnesses. The final scene has significant differences. If your course requires any engagement with editorial issues, this guide won't help you. Another blind spot is performance history. There's no discussion of how different productions handle the Mousetrap scene, or how the gender politics of Ophelia's mad scene shift across centuries of staging. You need a separate resource for that. A good option is the Arden Shakespeare's performance notes if you can access them, or open lecture archives from MIT OpenCourseWare covering Shakespeare staging. The supplementary readings section is where the guide gets weird. Prestwick House includes excerpts from unrelated secondary texts that supposedly illuminate Hamlet. Some of them are okay. One year they assigned a Freudian essay that was more annoying than useful. Another year it was a feminist critique that had actual points. The selection feels random because it basically is. Don't treat those readings as required depth. Read them if your syllabus demands it and move on.
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Practical Problems and Workarounds
I ran into a specific issue last fall. My students were using the digital version of the guide, and the page references for the plot summary didn't match the edition of Hamlet we were reading in class. The guide references a generic Pelican Shakespeare pagination, but I'd assigned the Oxford World's Classics edition. Students kept getting lost looking for scenes that didn't line up. I solved it by creating a simple act-and-scene cross-reference table and posting it on our LMS. Took about 20 minutes and eliminated the confusion entirely. Going forward, I always check which Shakespeare edition the guide assumes before assigning it. Another problem: the study questions at the back of each act section are too uniform. They follow the same pattern—comprehension, then analysis, then personal response. The third question type is filler. I stopped assigning those. Instead I adapt the first two types into discussion boards and use my own prompts for anything requiring argumentation.
When to Use It and When Not To
This guide works well if you need a ready-made companion on a deadline. It's also functional for tutoring sessions where a student needs to quickly orient themselves to the play's structure. The plot summary alone is worth the price if you're trying to untangle the graveyard scene or the play-within-a-play for someone who's lost track. It falls apart if you're teaching an advanced seminar. The analysis doesn't go beyond surface-level thematic observation. There's no engagement with critical theory, no engagement with scholarly debates, and no bibliography that would help a student do real research. In that case, the Norton Shakespeare's critical essays section or the Shakespeare Quarterly database will serve you much better, even though they require more effort to navigate. For most undergraduate survey courses and AP English Literature classes, the Prestwick House Hamlet guide is adequate. It's not memorable. It won't change how a student thinks about the play. But it will help them survive the assignments and write passable essays. That's what it's designed to do, and it does that without drama or friction.
If you're a student looking for a download link, Prestwick House sells the guide directly through their website and through major textbook retailers. Some schools license it through their library systems. Check with your instructor before buying anything independently, since some courses require the latest edition and older printings sometimes have outdated essay prompts that no longer match the current curriculum.
