“Get thee to a nunnery” | double-entendre (Hamlet to Ophelia) |
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “To thine own self be true” | aphorism (Polonius to Laertes) |
“O God, God/ How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable/ Seem to me the uses of this world!” | apostrophe (Hamlet in first soliloquy) |
“so excellent a king, that was to this/Hyperion to a Satyr…” | juxtaposition (Hamlet in Act I. soliloquy) |
“for yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward.” | paradox (Hamlet to Polonius) |
“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/That he should weep for her? What would he do /Had he the motive and the cue for passion/That I have? … Yet I… can say nothing…” | situational irony (Hamlet in Act II soliloquy) |
for murder, though it have no tongue, will speak/with most miraculous organ” | personification (Hamlet in Act II soliloquy) |
[being overly upset when your father dies] “tis a fault to heaven, /a fault against the dead,/ a fault to nature…” | anaphora; (King to Hamlet in Act II) |
“… the play’s the thing/wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King | an alliterative couplet (Hamlet In Act II soliloquy) |
“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason… infinite in faculties…” | hyperbole (Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II.ii) |
“Good Hamlet… let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark” | synecdoche (Gertrude to Hamlet I.ii — there are 2 examples in this one phrase) |
“Tis not alone my inky cloak… nor customary suits of solemn black,/Nor windy suspiration of forced breath…/ nor the dejected havior of the visage…/That can denote me truly” | polysyndeton; (Hamlet to Gertrude I.ii) |
Hamlet Terms Quotations
July 24, 2019