Language Techniques - HAMLET #
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Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet uses the most memorable language. One school student asked for his opinion of the play tried to impress by admitting he enjoyed the action but found the language clichéd! It is true many of Hamlet’s phrases have resonated so well they have been frequently quoted and become clichéd.
Examples:
“Frailty, thy name is woman!” (Act I, Scene ii)
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” (Act I, Scene iii)
“This above all: to thine own self be true.” (Act I, Scene iii)
“That it should come to this!” (Act I, Scene ii)
“In my mind’s eye.” (Act I, Scene ii)
“The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” (Act II, Scene ii)
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t:’ (Act II, Scene ii)
“What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” (Act II, Scene ii)
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:’ (Act III, Scene i)
“Ay, there’s the rub:’ (Act III, Scene i)
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (Act III, Scene ii)
“Good night, sweet prince: and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (Act V, Scene ii)
“Hoist by his own petard” (Shot himself in the foot – injured by your own device)
While Hamlet is a deeply felt tragedy, Shakespeare uses a great deal of light humour to lighten the morbid atmosphere from time to time.
Shakespeare was not squeamish or prudish in his use of bawdy or suggestive language.
¨ Innuendo/double entendre:
Hamlet: “have you a daughter?”
Polonius: “I have my Lord.”
“Let her not walk i’ th’ sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive –Friend, look to’t.” 2.2. 179-183
Pol: “Will you walk out of the air sir? H “Into my grave” 2.2. 201
Ham. To Ophelia: “Do you think I meant country matters? 3.2. 104
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s equilibrium is related to Fortuna’s body where they live - not on her cap or the soles of her shoe, so Hamlet concludes:
“Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?
Guild: “Faith, her privates we.
Ham: “In the secret parts of Fortune? ..she is a strumpet.”
Polonius, the supreme diplomat uses language to obfuscate or confuse rather than clarify and Hamlet reacts by playing on his insincerity and sycophancy:
Pol: “Will you walk out of the air?”
Haml: “Into my grave?” (2.2.202 -3)
Or:
Hamlet: “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?”
Pol: “Tis like a camel indeed”.
Haml: “Methinks it is like a weasel”.
Pol: “It is backed like a weasel”
Ham: “Or like e a whale”.
Pol: “ Very like a Whale.”
LORD POLONIUS
The actors are come hither, my lord.
HAMLET
Buz, buz!
Note the demotive language Hamlet uses after he mistakenly killed Polonius:
I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room. Mother, good night. Indeed this counsellor
Is now most still, most secret and most grave,
Who was in life a foolish prating knave.
Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.
Good night, mother.
Hamlet gives much the same treatment to the fop – Osric.
HAMLET
…. Put your bonnet to his right use; ’tis for the head.
OSRIC
I thank your lordship, it is very hot.
HAMLET
No, believe me, ’tis very cold; the wind is northerly.
OSRIC
It is indifferent cold, my lord, indeed.
HAMLET
But yet methinks it is very sultry and hot for my complexion.
OSRIC
Exceedingly, my lord; it is very sultry,–as
’twere,–I cannot tell how.
HAMLET
(Mocking Osric by the derisive use of a pejorative – dirt for real estate)
He hath much land, and fertile: let a
beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at
the king’s mess: ’tis a chough; but, as I say,
spacious in the possession of dirt.
In Antony and Cleopatra, she makes a similar comment about Octavous
Osric also uses language to obfuscate and impress rather than simply communicate:
OSRIC
Sir, here is newly come to court Laertes; believe
me, an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent
differences, of very soft society and great showing:
indeed, to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or
calendar of gentry, for you shall find in him the
continent of what part a gentleman would see.
Hamlet responds with mimicry, mocking Osric’s bloated language:
HAMLET
Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you;
though, I know, to divide him inventorially would
dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw
neither, in respect of his quick sail. But, in the
verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of
great article; and his infusion of such dearth and
rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his
semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace
him, his umbrage, nothing more.
Horatio pleads to both for normal simpler language:
HORATIO
Is’t not possible to understand in another tongue?
You will do’t, sir, really.
Hamlet also ridicules Osric’s pompous language:
OSRIC
Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him
HAMLET
The concernancy, sir? why do we wrap the gentleman
in our more rawer breath?
OSRIC
Sir?
Hamlet plays with logic in his sparring with Claudius:
HAMLET
………………. But, come; for
England! Farewell, dear mother.
KING CLAUDIUS
Thy loving father, Hamlet.
HAMLET
My mother: father and mother is man and wife; man*
and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother. Come, for England!
Biblical Allusions:
HAMLET
Am I not i’ the right, old Jephthah?
LORD POLONIUS
If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter
that I love passing well.
An only daughter he had to sacrifice as he had made a foolish vow. (Judges 11:29-40)
¹Apologetics Press: Scripturally Speaking Jephthah’s Daughter by Dave Miller, Ph.D.
More at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2320
Figurative language:
’twas caviare to the general: