Shakespeare plays often with language. Among its numerous forms of wordplay, Hamlet includes many puns and metaphors. A pun is a play on words that sound the same but have different meanings. When, in the second scene of Hamlet, Claudius calls Hamlet his “son” and asks him why his mood is so cloudy, Hamlet replies that he is, rather, “too much in the sun” (punning on son/sun). In the exchange between Gertrude and Hamlet:
QUEEN
Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
HAMLET
Ay, madam, it is common.
QUEEN
If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?
HAMLET
“Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
Hamlet’s reply is a pun on “seems”; for Gertrude, the question was “Why are you acting as if this death were something particularly awful,” but Hamlet responds as if she had asked “Why are you putting on this show of grief.”
In Polonius’s conversation with Ophelia in the third scene of the play, much of his dialogue is based on puns. The word tenders, for example, introduced by Ophelia to mean “offers,” is picked up by Polonius and used, first, to mean “coins” (“legal tender”), then shifted to its verb form “to tender” and used to mean “to regard,” and then, in the phrase “tender me a fool,” to mean, simultaneously, “present me,” “make me look like,” and “show yourself to me.”
In many of Shakespeare’s plays, one may not be aware that a character is punning, and the dialogue can seem simply silly or unintelligible; one must thus stay alert to the sounds of words and to the possibility of double meanings. In Hamlet, puns carry a heavier burden. Hamlet packs much of his feeling about Claudius into his single-line “aside”: “A little more than kin and less than kind,” where “kind” has the double meaning of “kindred” and “kindhearted.” Many of Polonius’s speeches also cannot be fully understood until one untangles the puns and related plays on words.
A metaphor is a play on words in which one object or idea is expressed as if it were something else, something with which it shares common features. For instance, when Horatio refers to the appearance of the Ghost as “a mote . . . that troubles the mind’s eye,” he is using metaphoric language: the mind is irritated by a question as the eye is irritated by a speck of dust. Hamlet’s description of the world as “an unweeded garden that grows to seed” uses metaphor to paint for us his bleak vision; behind his description of Gertrude and Claudius’s hasty marriage (“O, most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets”) is the metaphor of post-horses running skillfully and swiftly. Metaphors are often used when the idea being conveyed is hard to express or, for Hamlet, simply beyond normal expression; through metaphor, the speaker is given language that helps to carry the idea or the feeling to his or her listener—and to the audience.
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Hamlet. © 1992 Folger Shakespeare Library
