Sorry for digging up an old post to quote but this user did try refute some earlier claims I made, so I may as well start from the claim that speeches are harder than hamlet
thats a fair argument and im not trying to say that hamlet in any case is easy, otherwise i doubt they would have set it for the advanced course, though for the question, i do think a text that consists of one entirety of one text is much easier to approach thana bunch of speeches or essays.. and how you said about it having 2 main themes that contradict, i guess if you only talked about one and backed up your evidence and it soundly answered the question, then it would work, wouldnt it? because a marker looks at what you present them, not other pieces of the text that you dont talk about.. and if that answers the question then thats all you need
I'll start by saying I think the speeches are inappropriate for modb in the first place given what modb is supposed to be, but although I don't do them I am convinced that even if you choose to study all seven they are considerably easier than Hamlet and the other texts in the module.
The thing is because you know that the various speeches are disparate I assume no marker expects you to come to some sort of overwhelming conclusion about what they all mean specifically, but something broader about teaching idealism or humanism or something that basically can come in any form and is pretty adaptable and within that you just analyse each speech. Essentially what you have to do is read all seven, come up with the techniques and general appreciation of how they work, and come to some conclusion about how they may or may not fit together as a whole. Given no marker will expect this to be highly specific it mustnt be that hard.
By contrast Hamlet is seriously a ridiculously messy play, the sort of thing people write PhD thesises centred around. In my opinion it's sorta designed as that; in terms of its genre, its style, whatever it is a hotchpotch of so many different things. It has a ridiculous number of very significant scenes (each of which probably is harder to analyse than any one of the speeches), which don't create a unitary text but rather a play thats divided and confused (perhaps intentionally on Shakespeare's part). To make it worse, the ending is probably one of the weirdest and most confusing parts of the whole play. And not only do students have to come up with some sort of meaningful reading supposedly of the whole text, and a reading much more in depth than what I'd assume you'd have to do for the speeches, but they have to prepare to answer a ridiculously huge range of questions for which their readings just might not fit. HSC two years ago was about the "importance of loyalty" - for a lot of people, you'd be really struggling to twist the definition of loyalty there to fit your reading of the play. Essentially memorising a Hamlet essay just doesn't make the cut if you want to secure a good mark, you have to learn much much more material than you could ever use in one single essay. And if you ask me that's what mod b is designed for.
Maybe I'm a cynical bastard but I don't have that much sympathy for people complaining they only learnt two or three speeches or poems and the one on the paper specified didn't match what they're studied. Becuase what you're supposed to do in this module is 'critically study' (whatever that means) the text you are given, here it is a collection of speeches, so youre meant to look at the collection of speeches. Not a sub-collection of the collection. Teachers and coaching colleges instructing students only to learn two of them are sorta cheating the system and teaching to the test, that's something that is bad and undermines the aim of teaching students literature. The board of studies realises this and thus keeps it within its right to throw odd questions; for example when they changed AOS to ask for only one related by surprise in 2009: the course tells you to learn two relateds, but this doesnt mean learn one paragraph for each of your relateds which you can then parrot in the test (or even worse as part of an entire parroted essay). If you have just prepared for what you assumed the exam would be, well that means you haven't properly prepared for the course; and the examination is an examination of the course not some dreamt up vision of what every HSC exam is likely to look like by people who run coaching colleges.