The placement of words in an English sentence often affects the meaning. “The dog bit the boy” and “The boy bit the dog” mean very different things. Shakespeare frequently shifts his sentences away from “normal” English arrangements, for a variety of purposes—to create the rhythm he seeks, to emphasize a particular word, to give a character his or her own speech patterns, or to allow the character to speak in a special way. Actors in a good performance will have worked out the sentence structures and will deliver their speeches so that the meaning is clear. As you read, do as the actor does. Check to see if words are being presented in an unusual sequence when you become puzzled by a particular passage.
First, find the subject and verb. Shakespeare often puts the verb before the subject. In the opening scene of Hamlet, when Horatio says “So frowned he once,” he is using such a construction, as he is when he says “That can I.” Such inversions rarely cause much confusion.
More challenging is Shakespeare’s tendency to place the object before the subject and verb (e.g., instead of “I hit him,” we might find “Him I hit”). When Horatio says, “In what particular thought to work I know not,” he is using such an inverted construction (the normal order would be, “I know not in what particular thought to work”). Horatio uses another such inversion when he says, “of the truth herein / This present object made probation.”
In Hamlet, Shakespeare often uses sentence structures that depend on the separation of words that would normally appear together. Horatio’s “When he the ambitious Norway combated” separates the subject and verb (“he combated”), interjecting between them the object of the verb (“the ambitious Norway”). In the second scene, Claudius’s “which have freely gone / With this affair along” interrupts the phrase “gone along.” To create for yourself sentences that seem more like the English of everyday speech, you may wish to rearrange the words, putting together the word clusters and placing the remaining words in their more familiar order. You will usually find that the sentences will gain in clarity but will lose their rhythm or shift their emphases.
Locating and, if necessary, rearranging words that “belong together” is especially necessary in passages that separate subjects from verbs and verbs from objects by long delaying or expanding interruptions—a structure that is used frequently in Hamlet. For example, when Horatio tells the story of how King Hamlet won the Norwegian lands and how the prince of Norway seeks to regain them, he uses a series of such interrupted constructions:
our last king,
Whose image even but now appeared to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride,
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet
(For so this side of our known world esteemed him)
Did slay this Fortinbras; who by a sealed compact
Did forfeit, with his life, all those lands . . .
Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimprovèd mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes. . . .
Here the interruptions provide details that catch the audience up in Horatio’s story. The separation of the basic sentence elements (“our last king was dared to the combat”) forces the audience to attend to supporting details while waiting for the basic sentence elements to come together. In the second scene of Hamlet, Claudius uses the same kind of interrupted construction in his opening speech:
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we (as ‘twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole)
Taken to wife . . .
where the basic elements of the sentence are simply “we [i.e., I] have taken to wife our sometime sister [i.e., my former sister-in-law].” Claudius’s speech, like Horatio’s, is a narrative of past events, but the interrupted sentence structure here seems designed to add formality to the speech and, perhaps, to cover over the bald statement carried in the stripped-down sentence.
Sometimes, Shakespeare holds back all of the basic sentence elements, delaying them until much subordinate material has already been given. Marcellus follows such a delaying structure when he says, “Thus twice before, and jump [i.e., exactly] at this dead hour, / With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch” (where a “normally” constructed English sentence would have begun with the basic sentence elements: “He hath gone by our watch”). Bernardo’s sentence that precedes the entrance of the Ghost uses the same delayed construction (“Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, / the bell then beating one”), but the Ghost’s entrance breaks off Bernardo’s words before the subject of the sentence (“Marcellus and myself”) finds a verb. Hamlet, too, in his first soliloquy uses a delayed construction when he says,” Within a month, / Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears / Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, / She married.”
Shakespeare’s sentences are sometimes complicated because he omits words and parts of words that English sentences normally require. (In conversation, we, too, often omit words. We say, “Heard from him yet?” and our hearer supplies the missing “Have you.”) In Hamlet omissions seem to be used primarily for compressed expression. For instance, Marcellus says, “Therefore I have entreated him along / With us,” omitting the words “to come” or “to go” before “along”; a few lines later, Bernardo omits the word “with” in the construction “let us once again assail your ears [with] . . . what we have . . . seen.”
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Hamlet. © 1992 Folger Shakespeare Library
