Set by Didier d'Argent You were asked for an extract from a student's essay on a literary topic that would give his or her teacher/tutor a clue that it might not be entirely the student's own work

Report by Ms de Meaner

Superb. Hon menshes to M E Ault ("The dark imagery intermittently overshadowing Donne's verse sheds oblique light on his philosophical doubts. He could be a miserable sod") and Patrick O'Byrne. £20 to the winners, the best of whom (David Silverman) also gets the Tesco vouchers. Aldous Hucknall? Why is that so funny?

Hamlet

Well, what I'm getting at is, Hamlet is a prince not in two minds but a multiplicity of minds. Elsinore is a hall of distorting mirrors where the beleaguered beholder/prince is doomed to see himself through others' perceptions; the buffoon-statesman, the sycophantic duo of fellow students, the Thespian troupe, the King, the fair Ophelia and, disconcertingly, his guilt-ridden mother. I mean obviously his Mum will see him differently than his girlfriend. It stands to reason. Then there's the way he talks. Eg, "Absent thee from felicity awhile". Very fancy. We marvel at the mellifluous motion of the pentameter, the Latinate lexis, which will be counterpointed immediately by gasped Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Multiplisity or what?

Gerard Benson

Larkin

Larkin's poetry takes us on a journey from the kitchen-sink quotidian to an atheistic sense of the quasi-mystical. His poems don't always rhyme, except sometimes. His voice, ostensibly a heightened blokespeak, recalls Dad after a couple of Stellas when someone mentions immigrants. One thinks of "The Whitsun Weddings", about the old days when people got hitched, in which Larkin works his way from social observation to an almost transcendental conclusion. Which is cool, but everyone prefers "This Be the Verse", a searing if perhaps not entirely serious indictment of both sides of the Nature/Nurture debate, where he proves swearing is clever and funny. Incontrovertibly his finest work, "An Arundel Tomb" is uncharacteristically romantic. Arty girls always come across after it.

Adrian Fry

The Tempest

The Tempest has been termed "the apotheosis of unreality" (Leavis, 1952). Properly deconstructed, this unreality is not without functionality, the narrative never flinching from confronting timeless moral ambiguities. Leavis agree's with me then! the tempest is like totally random? Miranda's like "O Brave New World" like she's blatantly quoting Aldous Hucknall? How cool is that? However when deconstructing the Caliban phenomenon our objectivity is inevitably undermined by anachronistic alternative cultural perspectives, from Rousseauesque and Shelleyesque Romantic noble savage narratives and contemporary political sensitivities to that minging special need's loser in Year 11 who call's me a slag?

Nevertheless one cannot but sympathise with Caliban's existential dilemma, specially when that smug git with a stick keep's disrespecting his family?

David Silverman

Set by George Cowley

Rosie Campbell (NS, 21 May) writes that women tend to talk in personal rather than abstract terms about politics. Can we have two speeches, one male and one female, about a common political topic.

Max 100 words each by 14 June
Email: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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