As you read Hamlet, you may notice unfamiliar words. Some of them are simply no longer used. In the opening scenes of Hamlet, we find such words as “parle” (i.e., discussion, meeting), “soft” (an exclamation meaning “hold” or “enough” or “wait a minute”) and “marry” (an oath “by the Virgin Mary,” which had by Shakespeare’s time become a mere interjection, like “indeed”). Words like these are explained in notes to the text in the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Hamlet. They will also become more familiar to you as you read Shakespeare’s plays.
Some words are strange not because of changes in language but because Shakespeare is using them to create a dramatic world. Hamlet builds, in its opening scenes, a location, a past history, and a background mythology through references to “the Dane,” to “buried Denmark,” to Elsinore, to partisans and jointresses, to Hyperion and Niobe and Hercules. These “local” words and references build the world of Denmark that Hamlet, Gertrude, and Claudius inhabit and that will become increasingly familiar to you as you get further into the play.
In Hamlet, as in all of Shakespeare’s writing, the most problematic words are those that we still use but that we use with a different meaning. In the first scene of Hamlet, the word rivals is used where we would use “companions.” Later in the scene, we find the word his where we would use “its” and the word still used (as it most often is in Shakespeare) to mean “always.” Similarly, the word sensible means “confirmed by the senses”; extravagant means “wandering”; and cousin is used (as it is generally in Shakespeare) to mean simply “kinsman.” When Hamlet says, “I doubt some foul play,” we would say, “I suspect some treacherous action.” Such words are also explained in the notes in the Folger edition. They, too, will become familiar as you read more of Shakespeare’s language.
