Access Provided by University of Waterloo at 09/04/11 2:51PM GMT
“Sallets in the Lines to
Make the Matter Savoury”:
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and
Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
Philip D. Collington
In a conversation with the players visiting Elsinor, Shakespeare’s Hamlet
requests a performance of Aeneas’s speech to Dido about the fall of Troy.
“I remember one said there were no sallets [i.e., herbs or spices] in the lines
to make the matter savoury,” Hamlet recalls, “nor no matter in the phrase
that might indict the author of affectation, but called it an honest method,
as wholesome as sweet.”1 In addition to its rhetorical purity, Hamlet appreciates the exclusivity of a speech that “pleased not the million” but
received approbation by “others whose judgements in such matters cried
in the top of mine” (2.2.428–30). In his sensitivity to the way literary utterances can be affected by stylistic interpolations (“sallets”), semantic
insertions (“matter”), and audience responses (“’twas caviare to the general. But it was—as I received it . . . an excellent play” [lines 428–31]),
Hamlet evokes signal concerns of Russian cultural philosopher Mikhail
Bakhtin. In his essay “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35), Bakhtin outlined
how cultural contexts and individual responses prove as important in
determining meaning as authorial intention or the language’s denotative
content.2 Anticipating by a half-century such approaches as intertextual,
new-historical, and reader-response criticism, Bakhtin posited a triangular hermeneutic whereby the author’s voice, sociohistorical contexts, and
audience responses intersect and “interanimate” discourses whose words
are already stratified with semantic layers (DN 296). The intersection of semantic elements renders each utterance a “hybrid construction” whereby
the speech of one becomes the speech of many: many styles, many speech
manners, many “semantic and axiological belief systems” (DN 304–5).
To Bakhtin, the novel exemplifies such hybridity because there stylistic and semantic interpolations coexist within a higher artistic unity. In the
novel, centrifugal energies of heteroglossia (the existence of a “diversity
of individual voices” [DN 262]) are harnessed by centripetal energies of
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 53, No. 3, Fall 2011
© 2011 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713–7819
238
Philip D. Collington
monologism (the organizing presence of the author’s or narrator’s voice
[DN 272]). A novelist is therefore less an originator than an “orchestrator”
(DN 366) of languages yoked together by the “superstructure” of this most
encompassing literary form (DN 409).3 One factor that has discouraged the
application of such insights to Shakespeare’s plays is Bakhtin’s insistence
that drama is precluded from dialogism because plays lack a centralized
controlling presence: “the system of languages in drama is organized on
completely different principles, and therefore its languages sound utterly
different than do the languages of the novel. There is no all-encompassing
language, dialogically oriented to separate languages” (DN 266). Drama is
purely centrifugal, a cacophony of characters and voices with no organizing principle.4
This present study will argue the contrary; that the plurivocality of
drama can generate the lively dialogic interanimations that Bakhtin limited to novelistic discourse. Using as a test case a single scene from Hamlet
(act 2, scene 2), I will outline how Shakespeare incorporates what Bakhtin
terms social “speech genres” and literary “inserted genres,” ranging from
Voltemand’s language of diplomacy, Polonius’s hair-splitting pedantry,
and Hamlet’s sentimental letter and poem to Ophelia; to Hamlet’s bizarre
riddles, philosophical musing, and sophomoric gossip with Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. There are also a street ballad, a satirical character sketch,
an excerpt of Senecan bombast, and a soliloquy by the prince. Each social
speech genre and literary inserted genre is set against more naturalistic
exchanges of dialogue (whether in prose or in verse), exchanges that advance plot and characterization without being encoded with identifiable
literary or social subgenres. These framing passages do not represent an
authorial presence or voice (as they might in the novel); instead, they provide an unobtrusive linguistic baseline against which the embedded forms
and styles contrast markedly.
Rather than simply juxtapose disparate linguistic styles and forms,
Hamlet creates what Bakhtin terms “dialogic reverberations” (DN 284)
when interpolated styles and forms overlap and interanimate one another,
creating multiple layers of meaning—such as when individual characters
appropriate the speech genres of others (e.g., Rozencrantz attempts to debate philosophy with the more erudite prince) or misconstrue the inserted
genres of others (e.g., Polonius mistakes Hamlet’s prophetic ballad as evidence of insanity). What Bakhtin says about the novel—that “the style of a
novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel
is the system of its ‘languages’” (DN 262)—can also be said of Hamlet.
The paper will begin by arguing for the play’s use of a common baseline
discourse; it will then demonstrate the heteroglot nature of Hamlet 2.2, outlining ten sample speech genres and inserted genres; and it will conclude
with a discussion of Bakhtin’s puzzling ambivalence toward dramatic
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
239
forms that at times (e.g., throughout DN) he describes as monologic, yet
elsewhere in his writings he celebrates as heteroglot or “saturated” with
diverse forms of speech communication.
The Baseline Discourse
In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin identifies the significance of parodic
or otherwise distinctive insertions that stand out against the average verbal
style of the controlling perspective. Bakhtin variously terms this average
verbal style the “dialogizing background” (DN 340), “framing” discourse
(DN 340), or “overall accentual system” (DN 288). One group of interpolations that stand out from this are “inserted genres” (DN 263) such as
distinct passages from artistic subgenres like short stories, songs, poems,
letters, and dramatic scenes, as well as from nonartistic subgenres like
official reports, church sermons, legal documents, and so forth. ­Inserted
genres are recognizable because they “usually preserve . . . their own
structural integrity and independence, as well as their own linguistic and
stylistic peculiarities” (DN 321). In the case of a second group of insertions,
“speech genres,” heteroglossia is recognizable because the dominant voice
provides an overall accentual system against which recognizable verbal
dialects, sociolects, idiolects, parodies, and so forth are thrown into relief.
The distinction between inserted genres and speech genres is therefore
one of form versus style, as both deviate from the “direct and unmediated
object-oriented discourse—[one concerned with] naming, informing, expressing, [and] representing.” This framing discourse, Bakhtin elsewhere
insists, originates in the “author’s speech.”5 In drama, the inclusion of inserted genres and speech genres should be no less apparent, but Bakhtin
maintained that neither poetry nor drama can be truly dialogic because
poetry affords “unmediated” access to the author’s lyric voice and to “his
own intention” (DN 285), and because drama lacks an “all-encompassing
language, dialogically oriented to separate languages” (DN 266).6
In fact, in Hamlet there is an “all-encompassing language” against
which various speech and inserted genres are contrasted, and this language takes the form of ordinary dialogue (whether in verse or in prose)
that does not call attention to itself qua a discrete rhetorical, literary, or cultural artifact. Frank Kermode calls this kind of language a “transparent,”
unobtrusive medium, one that should be “sufficiently elastic to sound like
a natural utterance, not even registered as poetry by the audience.”7 In
The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Keir Elam outlines how, even though
plays generally lack an authorial voice (e.g., in the form of a narrator), a
framing discourse nonetheless exists in the form of dialogue that furnishes
“dramatic information” regarding “individuals and events in a particular fictional context.”8 Elsewhere, Elam elaborates how such unobtrusive
240
Philip D. Collington
language becomes a kind of “automatized norm” or “first-order, denotational mode” against which rhetorical or stylistic deviations may then be
“foregrounded” or made “conspicuous.”9 Denotational passages pertain
largely to the matter at hand within the immediate confines of the dramatic
universe, and exhibit a relatively low level of “semanticization” or “synchronic density” in the form of subcodes, which add connotative valences
and evoke interpretive ambiguities that vary from performance to performance, or from reader to reader.10 In order for a connotative insertion to
work, there must exist “a denotational system devoted to signifieds which
are not identical with the connoted signifieds”; and as a result, the introduction of semantically or rhetorically distinct language into the baseline
discourse “is bound to make that use more conspicuous than a more modest, instrumental, ‘transparent’ deployment of dialogue.”11 On the other
hand, in cases where the baseline language itself is so “full of figures and
tropes [that this becomes] automatized,” an influx of “austere” or prosaic
language would appear “conspicuous” instead.12 In short, stylistic shifts
or semantic ambiguities make language more conspicuous or connotative
than the baseline discourse that enables them.
In Hamlet, for example, the following passage utilizes a baseline discourse to establish character (busybody Polonius; impressionable Ophelia)
and to advance the plot (Reynoldo will spy on Laertes; Hamlet is behaving
erratically), without foregrounding itself linguistically:
POLONIUS. Observe his inclination in yourself.
REYNOLDO. I shall my lord.
POLONIUS. And let him ply his music.
REYNOLDO. Well, my lord.
[Exit]/[Enter Ophelia]
POLONIUS. Farewell.—How now, Ophelia, what’s the matter?
OPHELIA. Alas my lord, I have been so affrighted.
POLONIUS. With what, i’ th’ name of God?
OPHELIA. My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled . . . (2.1.71–80)
Although even this unremarkable passage evinces a variety of subcodes—
such as indicators of class difference (servant Reynoldo addresses Polonius
as “my Lord”), vestimentary norms (the prince reportedly wears a doublet, braces, hose, and hat), and gender roles (Ophelia sews in a private
closet and dutifully reports Hamlet’s behavior to the family patriarch)—
what this passage lacks, significantly, are those “generic” or “intertextual”
subcodes that evoke prior knowledge of other literary texts, conventions,
genres, or “cultural typologies.”13
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
241
It is precisely such generic and intertextual subcodes that interest
Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel” in the form of speech genres and
inserted genres. One does not have to search far in Hamlet to find the dialogizing presence of generic subcodes, set against a more denotational
baseline discourse, such as in Polonius’s instructions to Reynoldo moments earlier:
See you now,
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.
So, by my former lecture and advice,
Shall you my son . . . (2.1.61–67, italics added)
Whether we term the generic subcode italicized here an inserted genre (a
proverb, resembling the traditional saying, “Tell a lie and find a truth”14)
or a speech genre (Polonius refers to it as a prepared “lecture” or homiletic
“advice”), the passage is distinguished from the surrounding conversation by its rehearsed quality, its pedantic tone, its proverbial content, and
its bracketing introduction (“See you now”) and conclusion (“So . . .”).
Indeed, the passage could be excerpted to stand alone, not just as instructions to Reynoldo (advancing the plot) or as characterization of Polonius
(the would-be Machiavellian schemer), but also as thematic commentary
on an entire play rife with “baits” and “indirections”—dialogizing overtones that transcend the confines of the immediate context of its utterance.
Baseline passages like that cited above (2.1.71–80) distinguish one
character from another, to be sure, but they do not contain distinct literary, generic, or social subgenres. In other words, baseline passages
represent dialogue, but do not exhibit dialogism. For Bakhtin, monologic
discourse represents a kind of prison house of meaning in which “a given
self-sufficient and hermetic utterance [is] imprison[ed], as it were, in the
dungeon of a single context” (DN 274). Dialogic discourse, on the other
hand, is much more liberating; for there “the investigator is confronted
with several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls” (DN 261). Thus
dialogism represents a kind of interplay or “struggle”—not between “individual wills” (i.e., characters)—but between literary and cultural forms
and systems of signification (DN 273). Rival forms and systems compete
with the “common language” of the novel, which Bakhtin described as
“the average norm of spoken and written language for a given social
group . . . taken by the author precisely as the common view, as the verbal approach to people and things normal for a given sphere of society”
242
Philip D. Collington
(DN 301). Such an “average norm” would change dramatically, say, from
the London merchants of a Jonsonion comedy to the Danish courtiers of
Shakespeare’s tragedy. The point is that once established, this linguistic
baseline functions as the dramatic equivalent of a shared neutral form.
So, when Claudius opens act 2, scene 2 with his greetings to
­Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his lines reiterate the neutral qualities of
a baseline discourse, setting the stage for the rhetorically varied scene
that follows:
CLAUDIUS. Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Moreover that we much did long to see you,
The need we have to use you did provoke
Our hasty sending. Something have you heard
Of Hamlet’s transformation—so I call it,
Since not th’exterior nor the inward man
Resembles what it was . . . (2.2.1–7)
Nothing in the king’s remarks calls attention to language or meter per
se; rather, they function to introduce two pivotal characters, to provide
a thumbnail sketch of recent narrative developments, and to set the next
phase of the plot in motion by assigning his guests to spy on the prince.
The rest of this opening exchange (lines 8–39) consists of politeness and
well wishing, and the overall effect is one of hierarchical deference and interpersonal cooperation, as the harmonic cadences of the lines establish an
overall accentual system that will be jarred shortly by the stilted formality
of Voltemand and by the rhetorical idiosyncracies of Polonius.
Time and again, Hamlet alerts playgoers and readers to rhetorical excesses, deviations from accepted performative conventions, or mutations
of established literary forms, such as when Gertrude admonishes Polonius
to abandon his rhetorical circumlocutions (“More matter with less art”
[2.2.95]), or when Hamlet comments on actors’ tendency to speak extemporaneously on stage (“the Lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank
verse shall halt for’t” [lines 322–23]), or when Hamlet later complains
about the truncated three-line prologue to “The Murder of Gonzago” (“Is
this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?” [3.2.142]). In each case, playgoers
and readers are alerted to deviations from the expected linguistic norm,
whether this be clarity in public speaking, fidelity to a theatrical script, or
conformity to dramatic conventions.
As I will demonstrate below, although Polonius fails to make sense
of the prince’s puzzling comments regarding fishmongers, maggots, and
crabs going backward, the counselor does recognize their distinctness
from the surrounding discourse: “How pregnant sometimes his replies
are” (2.2.207–8). Hamlet’s riddles and apparent non sequiturs are taken
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
243
as evidence of madness, as the prince appears unable to confine himself
to accepted modes of discourse; yet as four centuries of source hunting
and allusion identifying have documented, Hamlet is actually “mad in
craft” (3.4.177), as each inserted genre and speech genre provides relevant
and enriching semantic layers to the scene. Polonius’s inability to discern
meaning beyond the surface denotation of Hamlet’s cryptic responses represents what Bakhtin terms “passive understanding,” a literalist approach
by which one discerns “an utterance’s neutral signification [but] not its actual meaning” (DN 280–81). “Active understanding,” on the other hand,
recognizes the way connotations of individual words, and insertions of
various genres, render language a stratified complex of associative and
context-dependent meanings, rather than a linear path to a single semantic
referent. In active understanding, recipients draw on their personal store
of knowledge and experience—a store Bakhtin variously refers to as their
“conceptual horizon,” “apperceptive background,” and “subjective belief
system” (DN 281–82)—to access existing layers of meaning, or to create
entirely new ones. As these layers accrue, language becomes “saturated”
with overlapping associations whose coexistence is termed heteroglossia
and whose interaction constitutes dialogism: “As a result of the work done
by all these stratifying forces in language, there are no ‘neutral’ words and
forms—words and forms that can belong to ‘no one.’ . . . Each word tastes
of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all
words and forms are populated by intentions” (DN 293). No matter what
the speaker’s intentions, “[c]ontextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word” (DN 293).
It is my contention that the following speech genres and inserted
genres would have been recognizable as somehow distinct from the
surrounding baseline discourse to the average playgoer or reader in
­Shakespeare’s ­England. Those readers and playgoers might not themselves
have been conversant in the speech genre concerned or have recognized
specific literary or cultural allusions (indeed, for many of Shakespeare’s
inserted genres, sources have yet to be indisputably identified), but they
would have recognized that Hamlet 2.2 is punctuated with utterances that
sound significantly other when compared with the baseline discourse, and
hence resonate with significance beyond the surface denotation in the
scene in which they occur.
1. The Language of Diplomacy
The first deviation from the overall accentual system of the opening is
the language of international diplomacy (a speech genre), expressed
within a formal diplomatic relation (an inserted genre). Returning from
his errand to Norway, Voltemand delivers a twenty-line report c­ oncerning
244
Philip D. Collington
Denmark’s increasingly bellicose neighbors to the north. His language
preserves the iambic pentameter of the opening, but his syntax becomes
more precise and legalistic:
Upon our first, he [i.e., Norway] sent out to suppress
His nephew’s levies, which to him appeared
To be a preparation ‘gainst the Polack;
But, better looked into, he truly found
It was against your highness; whereat grieved
That so his sickness, age, and impotence
Was falsely borne in hand, sends out arrests
On Fortinbras, which he, in brief, obeys,
Receives rebuke from Norway, and, in fine,
Makes vow before his uncle never more
To give th’assay of arms against your majesty . . . (2.2.61–71)
The clarity and concision of Voltemand’s summary contrasts with the sycophantic effusions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Voltemand hands
a written document to Claudius (at line 76), but the diplomat’s formulaic use of conjunctions, pronouns, and adverbs (i.e., whereat, which, herein,
and therein) makes his oral presentation sound as though it, too, were a
carefully worded document, not an extempore summary of recent events.
Indeed, his careful phrasing and legal vocabulary are in keeping with Renaissance preferences for diplomats with formal training in languages,
rhetoric, and law.15 For example, in The Perfect Ambassadour (1652) Francis
Thynne described the ideal diplomat as being “eloquent, of quick capacitie, [and] of ready deliverance”; he must be trained in rhetoric, so that
“by perswading eloquence, in apt words, ready tongue, sweet voyce, and
speedy deliverance . . . [he may] discharge his Message.”16
As historians of early modern diplomacy point out, the main functions of diplomats were social observation and information gathering;
their communications consisted of two formalized genres, the “dispatch,”
and the “relation.” Dispatches consisted of regular written reports sent
under seal from the foreign location to the home country. In dispatches, no
detail was too inconsequential, and many letters resembled a “miscellany
of petty gossip, the backbiting and bickerings of official life, the public
ceremonies and private scandals of the great and near great.”17 Upon his
return home, however, the diplomat was expected to make a more formal
oral presentation (the relation), in which concision and accuracy were the
rule: “The report was a carefully prepared statement of the political situations at the ambassador’s post, filling in the background, with special
attention to the character and motives of the important persons and factions, summarizing recent developments, indicating future expectations,
and sometimes suggesting possible lines of action.”18 Voltemand’s speech
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
245
thus represents an inserted diplomatic relation, one that provides thumbnail sketches of the major Norwegian personalities (impetuous Fortinbras;
his decisive but ailing uncle), pithy accounts of significant developments
(the quashed expedition against Denmark), and predictions about future
relations (peace with Denmark and logistical assistance in Norway’s war
against Poland). Claudius is pleased with the relation, and his use of the
indirect passive construction “It likes us well” (line 80) underscores how
diplomatic language is a speech genre distinct from more personal forms
of communication.19
2. Rhetorical Pedantry
Few verbal transitions in Hamlet are quite so marked as the shift from diplomacy to pedantry, when the ambassador is dismissed so that Polonius
may give his own rambling report on Hamlet’s bizarre behavior:
My liege and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it, for to define true madness,
What is’t but to be nothing else but mad? (2.2.86–94)
Countless critics have commented on Polonius’s excessive rhetorical
flourishes and contrived antithetical pairings (e.g., “That he is mad ’tis
true; ’tis true ’tis pity; / And pity ’tis ’tis true—a foolish figure” [lines
97–98]). Maurice Charney detects in Polonius’s speech such rhetorical
devices as “grandiouse overstatement,” “witty elaboration,” and “epigrammatic amplification.”20 Madeleine Doran refines the list by identifying
in P
­ olonius’s “deprecatory introduction” the rhetorical form of praeteritio,
also known as occultatio—a technique whereby a speaker emphasizes a
point by offering to pass over it.21 Finally, Richard Lanham takes the entire
speech as an instance of macrologia, which he defines as “[l]ong-winded
speech; using more words than necessary” and then subdivides into a
number of “Polonian figures,” including needless repetition (perissologia,
pleonasmus, tautologia), needless overwriting (asianism, bomphiologia,
periergia, poicilogia), and needless circumlocution (periphrasis).22 To the
modern ear, these Greek tags may sound like so many diseases, underscoring the extent to which Polonius’s elocutionary excesses constitute an
acute case of logorrhea—symptoms of which were no doubt apparent (and
comic) to early playgoers and readers steeped in lost rhetorical traditions.
246
Philip D. Collington
Polonius’s speech is presented in iambic pentameter, with much puffery that in a poet less skilled than Shakespeare would be termed filler
words to make up the meter: “For this effect defective comes by cause. /
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus” (2.2.103–04). These are truly execrable lines that function to satirize this stage pedant, and his real-life ilk in
the offstage worlds of English courts, classrooms, churches, and so forth.
Polonius will, later this scene, return to such hair-splitting pedantry in his
prose announcement of the players, “The best actors in the world . . . [for]
pastoral comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comicalhistorical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited” (lines 391–94).
Such passages resemble what Bakhtin identified as “parodic stylizations
of generic, professional and other languages” that are discernible because they are marked by “[s]hifts from common language to parodying
of generic and other languages”; the farther these shifts move from the
“backdrop of the ‘common language,’ of the impersonal, going opinion,”
the greater their comic effect (DN 302). What marks Polonius’s psychological diagnosis and literary categorization as parodic are the bloatedness of
his vocabulary and the obfuscation of his syntax, when contrasted with
the smoother cadences of other characters’ surrounding verse and prose.
3. The Love Letter and English Posy
The next inserted genre to stand apart from the play’s frame discourse is
Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, which Polonius confiscates and reads aloud
to the court. The salutation quickly distinguishes the letter’s ­contents from
what other characters might term common or appropriate discourse:
POLONIUS. [He reads a letter]
“To the celestial, and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia”—
That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase, “beautified” is a vile phrase. But you
shall hear—“these; in her excellent white bosom, these.” (2.2.108–12)
Polonius the father objects to the intimacy that has developed between his
daughter and the prince, who is “out of [her] star” (2.2.140), but Polonius
the would-be rhetorician objects to Hamlet’s effusive prose style, especially his use of the word beautified. Harold Jenkins suggests that Hamlet’s
letter “rather parodies than represents a typical Elizabethan love-address,”
as it uses beautified as a pun on beatified; in effect, calling Ophelia his “celestial . . . soul’s idol” renders the superscription sacrilege, as sacred diction
is debased for profane objectives.23
Indeed, right from the first act, playgoers and readers have been
alerted to the potential double-voicedness of Hamlet’s communications
with Ophelia. For example, Polonius cautions her: “Do not believe his
vows, for they are brokers, / Not of the dye which their investments
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
247
show, / But mere implorators of unholy suits, / Breathing like sanctified
and pious bawds / The better to beguile” (1.3.127–31). Writing with preoccupations of a very different sort (i.e., the constraints of official Stalinist
discourses), Bakhtin likewise came to assume hidden motives in all utterances, a phenomenon he attributes to “the false front of the word,” in
which the true significance of speech remains hidden from view: “what
matters is rather the actual and always self-interested use to which this
meaning is put” (DN 401). If early audiences were familiar with the term
beautified from the Elizabethan homily on matrimony (which was read
from the pulpit annually and which declared that a virtuous wife shall be
“most excellently beautified before God and all his angels and saints”24),
and if they adopted Polonius’s theory that Hamlet uses words to “beguile”
Ophelia, then this use of beautified would have seemed an inappropriate
(or “false-fronted”) use of religious discourse.
Hamlet’s letter then inserts a short poem (to be discussed below)
before concluding with a prose apology for his clumsy versifying and a
reiteration of his devotion: “‘O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. I
have not art to reckon my groans. But that I love thee best, O most best,
believe it. Adieu. Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine
is to him, Hamlet’” (2.2.119–23). This closing is deeply ambiguous: Is it
the self-conscious pose of the Petrarchan lover, wounded by love’s arrow
and suffering from unreciprocated passion? Is it the heartfelt confession
of a grieving prince who elsewhere contemplates suicide? Or is it a letter
contrived with the foreknowledge that it would be read to the court as
evidence of Hamlet’s “antic disposition” (1.5.179)? Indeed, the last theory
seems supported by the letter’s emphasis on “numbers” and “reckoning,”
echoing Polonius and Laertes’s warnings that Hamlet’s vows were mere
“brokers” and false “investments” designed to “beguile” Ophelia out of
her “chaste treasure” (1.3.31). By presenting the letter to the court, Polonius
produces an inserted genre that invites close scrutiny precisely because of
its status as a discourse apart, as a self-contained expression of the prince’s
innermost thoughts. Many editions of Hamlet set the letter apart from the
surrounding text by printing it in italics and by inserting stage directions
like “He reads a letter” (2.2.108).25 In performance, its special status would
be indicated by the stage property of the unsealed paper. Hamlet’s letter
presents a textbook example of an inserted genre according to Bakhtin’s
description: “From the point of view of their structure, all the inserted
genres possessed a certain degree of completeness and self-sufficiency; for
this reason they could easily detach themselves . . . and still maintain their
shape in isolation, as distinct models” (DN 385). That this is true in the case
of the prince’s letter is confirmed by the practice of nineteenth-century
readers who composed “metrical and musical adaptations” in imitation
of Hamlet’s model.26
248
Philip D. Collington
Laertes earlier warns his sister to be wary of Hamlet’s seductive
songs (1.3.30), and while we witness no instance of him singing to her, his
confiscated letter does contain a stanza that displays key features of that
most intimate poetic subgenre, the English posy:
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love. (2.2.115–18)
A close cousin of the device, motto, epigram, and proverb, the posy could
take many forms, most notably as an inscription adorning, or a verse accompanying, such objects as rings, bracelets, handkerchiefs, fruit baskets,
New Year’s gifts, or other tokens of affection.27 The three main characteristics of posies are brevity, sententiousness, and sentimentality; but posies
are limited only by the imagination of the sender and by the physical size
of the object they adorn. The majority of extant posies are quite short inasmuch as they are found inscribed on physical objects—rings, bracelets,
thimbles, and so forth—but a number of print sources preserve longer posies as well. Indeed in its quatrain form with alternating rhymes, doggerel
repetition, and shrill insistence on constancy, Hamlet’s poem resembles
several extant posies transcribed in the popular handbook Loues Garland,
or, Posies for Rings (1624).28 For example, the following posy insisting on
truth and fidelity was sent to accompany “a paire of rich gloues”: “This
for a certaine truth, / true loue approoues / The hearts not where it liues / but
where it loues” (LG 57). Another posy sent by a man to his mistress recalls
Hamlet’s use of doggerel repetition, in this case likewise to stress “the
simplicity and truth of Loue”: “Two hands, two feete, / Two eares, two eyes: /
One tongue, one heart, / Where true Loue lies” (LG 20). Finally, this next posy
was sent embroidered on a scarf and alludes to the opulence of Ophir
(fabled source of Solomon’s wealth)29 to stress the value of sexual fidelity:
“A constant heart / within a womans breast / Is Ophir gold / Within an Iuory
Chest” (LG 8).
Many critics have discounted Hamlet’s verse and love letter qualitatively as “notorious . . . bad poetry,” nestled within “the affected language
of euphuism.”30 According to Marvin Rosenberg, “Naysayers have called
the verse crude doggerel, and the whole a parody of a conventional love
letter, not a true lover’s missive”; and Harold Goddard finds the poem “so
unaccountably below [Hamlet’s] known powers of expression” that the
critic proposes that Polonius forged it to support his theory of ­Hamlet’s
madness.31 Thus this short poem has been variously interpreted as a
parody of conventional Petrarchan discourse by one of England’s most
innovative lyric poets, a heartrending confession by a prince notoriously
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
249
unsure of himself, or a blatant forgery by an ambitious counselor seeking to ingratiate himself to the Danish royal family. (To my knowledge,
no critic has recognized the poem’s affinities with the English posy.) This
lack of critical consensus regarding the poem’s source, intentions, content,
and form contradicts Bakhtin’s blanket assertion of the monologic nature
of lyric poetry, which “presumes nothing beyond the borders of its own
context” (DN 278). Indeed, Robert Bozanich demonstrates that the poem’s
repetition of “doubt” creates semantic ambiguities, as to doubt signifies
both to mistrust (as in Ophelia’s retort to Laertes’s admonition that she
write to him, “Do you doubt that [I will]?” [1.3.4]) and to believe (such as
when Claudius says, “I do doubt the hatch and the disclose [of Hamlet’s
melancholy] / Will be some danger” [3.1.167–68]). Should Ophelia trust
Hamlet’s love and mistrust the sun and stars, or should she mistrust his
love and trust the sun and stars? To Bozanich, this poem and letter are
rather like Hamlet himself—a “Rorschach blot,” “riddled with doublemeanings.”32 Imtiaz Habib goes even further, arguing that this allusive
poem is “built on a system of misreading that subverts meaning in the
very process of its communication,” as Hamlet pens his poem in an attempt “to find an original voice against the burden of a literary tradition,”
just as Shakespeare attempts to write an original revenge tragedy from
within “a burgeoning copycat literary culture.”33 In Bakhtinian terms,
Hamlet attempts to pen an original (i.e., monologic) poem, but is hampered by Petrarchan subtexts (heteroglossia) that intrude even as they are
disavowed, as unintended secondary associations produced by various
apperceptive backgrounds contaminate the purity and intentions of the
original utterance.
The resulting ambiguities are inevitable, for as Bakhtin argues, contexts and receptions envelop each utterance like “an obscuring mist”
where the latter becomes “entangled, shot through with shared thoughts,
points of view, alien value judgments and accents. . . . [in] a dialogically
agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments
and accents” (DN 276). Hamlet inserts a love poem into his letter, and the
result has been “shot through” with alien judgments ever since. Inserted
genres thus highlight the unstable nature of discourse itself, right down to
the level of individual words (beautified, doubt) as they become entangled
in what Bakhtin terms a matrix of “living dialogic threads” (DN 276).
4. The Riddle
Following the intrusive reading of his love letter and poem, Hamlet enters
and Polonius proceeds to interview the prince about his health and state of
mind. Hamlet’s bizarre answers recall the jests and riddles that were popular in Shakespeare’s day. Commonly understood to denote a ­“statement
250
Philip D. Collington
or question that is intentionally worded in a puzzling or misleading way,”
the sixteenth-century riddle and other such conundrums were popular
amusements for adults, rather than just for children (for whom riddles
are generally reserved today).34 For instance, when ­Polonius asks whether
Hamlet recognizes him, the response, “excellent well. You’re a fishmonger”
(2.2.174) can be taken at face value as a class-based insult, deflating the
ambitions of the court counselor. However, an implicit underlying riddle, How is Polonius like a fishmonger? has been answered in a number of
critical glosses: (1) because he would sell Hamlet fish (i.e., his daughter);
(2) because he is a wencher or bawd (i.e., because fish is a pun on flesh);
and (3) because like the proverbial fishmongers of early modern popular
lore, his female kin are “likely to be beautiful, wanton, and prolific.”35 In
other words, like a procurer or trader in human flesh, ­Polonius is about to
“‘loose’ his daughter to the prince.”36 Riddles are amusing because they
challenge the listener to make unexpected connections and to uncover the
hidden bases for humorous analogies. Hamlet’s implied (and garbled)
second riddle, why should Polonius “not [let Ophelia] walk i’th’ sun[?]”
is answered by [the prince’s] strange observation that “the sun breed[s]
maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion” (lines 181–84). By
analogy, exposure to the sun could impregnate Ophelia: “your daughter
may conceive” (line 185). Riddles often have a satiric or corrective purpose,
as when Hamlet says he would Polonius were an honest man, because
“[t]o be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand” (lines 178–79). The hidden basis: Polonius is not honest.
Hamlet’s practice of explaining the bases for his strange comparisons
is in keeping with conventions found in jest books from the period. For
example, the 1598 collection Natural and Moral Questions and Answers. Intermingled with Many Prettie and Pleasant Riddles, and Darke Sentences contains
numerous instances, such as the following riddles premised on natural
observation: “What thing is begotten of a mother and anon the mother
is begotten by it again? / Ise turning to water”; “What is that groweth
with the head downeward, and with the root upward? / An isesickle.”37
Likewise the following riddle illustrates the common technique of using
analogy as the basis for riddling comparisons: “Wherein is an envious man
like unto yron? / Even as yron is consumed with his owne rust, so an envious man pines away by his owne folly” (sig. Biiiir). Many riddles in this
collection display a caustic and moralizing tone similar to that displayed
by Hamlet, such as the answer to the question, In what capacity is woman
most constant? “In her inconstancie” (sig. Aiiiv); or the answer to the question, Why is virtue held in such small account? “Because shee is plaine and
cannot dissemble” (sig. Aviiir). In defense of Polonius’s inability to solve
Hamlet’s riddles, it would be impossible for the auditor of the following
riddle to infer an answer from the question itself:
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
251
QUEST. What is man?
ANS. An example of imbecillity, the spoile of time, an image of inconstancy, a captive of calamitie, a prisoner to paines, a servant to
covetousnesse, and finally a food of wormes. (sig. Aiiiv)
For readers of collections like Natural and Moral Questions, therefore,
­Hamlet’s “pregnant” replies—such as his offer to walk “out of the air”
and “[i]nto my grave,” or his quip that Polonius should be as young as
Hamlet “[i]f, like a crab, [he] could go backward” (2.2.202–08)—would be
easily recognized as inserted genres designed to riddle, and in this case
to insult, the less mentally agile counselor. Indeed, much of Hamlet seems
an elaborate answer to the riddle: What thing in this world is always without
rest? “A guilty conscience” (sig. B1r).
5. The Satiric “Character”
Nestled among Hamlet’s riddles is a brief passage read aloud from his
book, a passage that displays conventions of another popular form of early
modern humor, the satirical character sketch—or “character,” as the genre
was termed during the period.38 In response to Polonius’s query about
what he is reading, Hamlet replies:
Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey
beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber
or plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together
with most weak hams . . . (2.2.196–200)
Originating in the satirical descriptions of personality types by
­Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC), the Renaissance “character” became synonymous with its most notorious practitioner, Sir Thomas Overbury
(1581–1613), whose posthumous Characters (1614) would become a
­seventeenth-century bestseller. The Theophrastian “character” opens with
a definition of a fault, excess, or eccentricity (e.g., tactlessness, jealousy,
greed), then elaborates with “remarkable vivacity and keenness of observation” on what that sort of person would do.39 The result is a short essay
or sketch of the foibles of recognizable social types, like Overbury’s “character” of “An Old Man”:
Old men are to be known blindfolded: for their talk is as terrible as
their resemblance. They praise their own times as vehemently as if
they would sell them. They become wrinkled with frowning and facing youth; they admire their old customs, even to the eating of red
herring. . . . Their hats are brushed, to draw men’s eyes off from their
faces; but above all, their pomanders are worn to most purpose, for
252
Philip D. Collington
their putrefied breath ought not to want either a smell to defend, or a
dog to excuse.40
Whether Hamlet is reading a “character” from his book, or merely inventing one based on his observations of Polonius’s demeanor, the result is
every bit as compressed, exaggerated, and witty as it should be, at least
according to Overbury’s definition of the genre: “it is a picture (real or
personal) quaintly drawn, in various colors, all of them heightened by one
shadowing . . . it is wit’s descant on any plain song.”41 If Hamlet’s description is indeed extemporaneous, then just as Theophrastus and Overbury’s
“characters” provide historians with indispensable satirical portraits of
their contemporaries in Athens and London, respectively, so too does
Hamlet’s inserted sketch provide insights for actors, producers, and directors of Polonius in the theater.
In this scene and elsewhere, Hamlet’s chameleon-like ability to
switch in and out of roles suggests a familiarity with such “characters,”
or social types. For instance, Hamlet’s speechless intrusion into Ophelia’s
bedchamber “with his doublet all unbraced, / No hat upon his head, his
stockings fouled, / Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle, / Pale as
his shirt” (2.1.79–82) recalls extant literary models like Overbury’s young
“Amorist,” who
is never without verses and musk confects, and sighs to the hazard
of his buttons. . . . He fights with passion, and loseth much of his
blood by his weapon; dreams, thence his paleness. His arms are carelessly used, as if their best use were nothing but embracements. He
is untrussed, unbuttoned, and ungartered, not out of carelessness,
but care.42
Those familiar with conventions of this genre likely recognized in­
Hamlet’s reported actions (in 2.1) and speech (in 2.2.) inserted “characters”
depicting the lover and the senex, respectively. Hamlet’s bizarre behavior
and satiric speeches are designed, at least in part, to convince the court that
he is suffering from lovesickness, not contemplating revenge. What better
way to convey the artifice of the ruse than to invoke a satiric genre popular
among England’s contemporary literati?
6. The Proverb
Whereas inserted genres like riddles and “characters” in Hamlet have
been little studied, much more research has been conducted into the frequent insertion of aphorisms, adages, and other proverbial expressions.43
Act 2, scene 2 alone contains nearly twenty distinct expressions found in
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
253
everyday Elizabethan parlance as recorded in M. P. Tilley’s Dictionary of
the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1950) and
Arthur Dent’s Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (1981).44 These
expressions range from Hamlet’s philosophical observation that “there is
nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (2.2.247–48), which
recalls the proverb A man is weal or woe as he himself thinks so,45 to some
half-dozen proverbs inserted into his closing soliloquy, including “murder, though it have no tongue, will speak” (murder will out) and “the devil
hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape” (The Devil can transform himself
into an angel of light) (2.2.582–89).46 Some of these expressions are adapted
or modified to suit the speaking style of individual characters so as to
be almost imperceptibly present; for instance, Polonius uses them so frequently that it is easy to overlook their presence in such asides as “Though
this be madness, yet there is method in’t” (2.2.204–5). In other instances,
like Rosencrantz’s “they say an old man is twice a child,” proverbs are
formally introduced as utterances taken from common parlance (2.2.380,
emphasis added). Finally, Hamlet’s obscure declaration, “I know a hawk
from a handsaw” has, since the first performances of Shakespeare’s popular tragedy, entered the English language as an expression denoting the
ability to discern differences (superceding earlier proverbs like to know a
buzzard from a hawk).47
Moreover, the cadences and moral content of hitherto unidentified
expressions—like “The appurtenance of welcome is fashion and ceremony” (2.2.366–67), or “Use every man after his desert, and who should
scape whipping?” (lines 519–20)—may also have been proverbial at one
time, but instances of their extraliterary usage have escaped compilers
of modern dictionaries and handbooks. I would argue that such expressions are populated with secondary associations, or, as Bakhtin phrases
it, they are “oriented toward the ‘already uttered,’ the ‘already known,’
the ‘common opinion’ and so forth” (DN 279). Our inability to discern
the dialogizing presence of already-spoken speech genres in early modern
literature stems from our historical remoteness from the “conceptual horizon” of ­Shakespeare’s contemporaries (DN 269). Yet as Margreta de Grazia
has recently documented, the typesetters of the second quarto of Hamlet
(1604) inserted quotation marks in the margins of several sententious passages to highlight their “special significance” (and presumably for ease of
future reference).48
7. The Broadside Ballad
One of the more caustic uses of an inserted genre in Hamlet occurs in
the broadside ballad recounting the biblical tale of Jephthah, who, according to Judges 11, made a “rashe vowe” to God that the Israelite
254
Philip D. Collington
commander would sacrifice the first thing he saw upon returning home
from a ­military victory, only to be greeted by his only daughter.49 Hamlet
sings snatches of a popular song recounting this cautionary tale of family
sacrificed for political advancement in order to criticize Polonius’s willingness to turn Ophelia informant against Hamlet. “O Jephthah, judge
of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou,” Hamlet quotes (or sings?) to the
uncomprehending counselor:
POLONIUS. What a treasure had he, my lord?
HAMLET. Why,
“One fair daughter, and no more,
The which he loved passing well.”
POLONIUS. (aside) Still on my daughter. (2.2.397–402)
The street ballad is preserved in Ross W. Duffin’s Shakespeare’s Songbook,
which indicates that versions of the song survive from 1567, 1585, 1620,
and 1675.50 The insertion of the ballad stanza here functions not only to
show how out of touch Polonius is with popular culture (not recognizing
an enduring musical standard) but also his ignorance of well-known biblical exempla that would have been familiar to Elizabethan schoolchildren
or churchgoers. Hamlet realizes that his reference is lost on Polonius, and
directs him to pursue the matter further: “the first row [i.e., stanza] of
the pious chanson will show you more” (2.2.412). There Polonius would
have been reminded of Jephthah’s terrible bargain, to sacrifice his “one fair
daughter” in exchange for military success and promotion (“who should
be chief but he, but he”). The remainder of the song is likewise portentous,
for like the ballad daughter who goes “to wilderness, / There to bewail
[her] virginity” before dying, Ophelia will later drown outdoors in a brook
that “Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death”
(4.7.157–58).51
This inclusion of a popular song shows that what Bakhtin asserts
about reception in prose is also true for drama. “All rhetorical forms,” he
writes, “monologic in their compositional structure, are oriented toward
the listener and his answer” (DN 280). In this way, a straightforward moral
ballad becomes recontextualized as personal satire and a veiled warning
that Hamlet is aware of the counselor’s willingness to use his daughter to
score political points with the king. Hamlet aims his musical barb toward
Polonius’s “apperceptive background of understanding” (DN 281), but
the latter fails to decipher its heteroglot message, with fatal consequences.
This ballad insertion must have generated dramatic irony for those who,
in the Renaissance, recognized the dialogizing undertones of Hamlet’s
song, and the insertion may continue to do so for modern readers who
recover these contexts using critical sources.
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
255
8. Sophomoric Innuendo / Philosophical Musing
No exchange is more representative of interanimating speech genres
in Hamlet than the awkward reunion of the prince with his friends
­Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Finding them evasive about their reasons
for visiting Elsinore, Hamlet elects to speak to them in obscure sentences
that I will term “philosophical musing.” These lines are deliberately
opaque and paradoxical, designed to go over the heads of his less mentally
agile interlocutors. The scene begins, however, with harmless banter and
crude sexual jokes that I will term “sophomoric innuendo,” such as in the
students’ exchange about not being in Fortune’s favor:
GUILDENSTERN. On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button. . . .
HAMLET. Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her
favours?
GUILDENSTERN. Faith, her privates we.
HAMLET. In the secret parts of Fortune? O most true—she is a
­strumpet. (2.2.227–34)
Hamlet is fully capable of matching the misogynous banter of his friends,
quip for quip; but when the prince’s speech shifts to the deliberately provocative statement that “Denmark’s a prison” (line 242), the significance
of his contemptus mundi references goes unnoticed by his friends. Indeed,
just as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy moves from an angry denunciation of “fickle Fortune” and her “clouded, treacherous gaze” to a more
quietist acceptance that all worldly comforts are transitory,52 so Hamlet
reminds his friends that the world itself is a prison with “many confines,
wards, and dungeons” that restrain the soul from its true home in heaven
(2.2.244–45). Denmark simply feels small due to Hamlet’s great ambition, Rosencrantz uncomprehendingly replies, but Hamlet persists in his
paradoxes: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king
of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (lines 252–54). The
friends then follow Hamlet’s lead and attempt to switch speech genres,
from the sophomoric to the philosophical, with garbled results. Clearly
neither was ever visited by Lady Philosophy in his sleep, as their ensuing
speculations about shadows and dreams range from the tautological to
the nonsensical:
GUILDENSTERN. Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
HAMLET. A dream itself is but a shadow.
ROSENCRANTZ. Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a
quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
256
Philip D. Collington
HAMLET. Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows . . . (lines 255–62)
After attempting to sort out the confusion occasioned by this exchange,
G. R. Hibbard simply notes that “[t]hose who still find the passage puzzling are in good company.”53
This pseudophilosophical dialogue was no doubt amusing to play­
goers and readers trained in more rigorous modes of argumentation;
perhaps Hamlet speaks for all when he gives up, saying “by my fay, I
cannot reason” (line 263). Before they break off the discussion entirely,
however, Hamlet utters perhaps the most frequently cited instance of philosophical musing in the tragedy:
What a piece of work is a 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! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though
by your smiling you seem to say so. (lines 301–8)
Once again philosophy is intertwined with the adolescent lewdness of
friends who (Hamlet assumes) take his meaning to be that he delights in
women instead: “Why did you laugh, then, when I said ‘Man delights not
me’?” (lines 311–12). In their defense, Rosencrantz insists he was thinking, not of women, but of the arrival of the itinerant players who will
perform before the Danish court: “my lord, if you delight not in man,
what lenten entertainment [shall] the players . . . receive from you” (lines
313–14). Whatever the case, Hamlet’s musings about the transitory nature
of life become hopelessly entangled in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s
worldly preoccupations with more ephemeral pleasures, whether sex or
dramatic entertainments.
9. Senecan Tragedy
In addition to the shorter literary inserted genres of the English posy, the
broadside ballad, and the satirical “character,” act 2, scene 2 includes a
more substantial inserted genre, the Senecan-style speech whose praise by
Hamlet is quoted in my introduction. Playgoers and readers are alerted
to this insertion of a preexisting literary genre in three ways: (1) Hamlet
introduces it as such; (2) Hamlet begins to recite the passage, but stops
to correct himself, as if one might notice his infidelity to the original; and
(3) the passage exhibits syntactic, stylistic, and thematic idiosyncracies
that mark it as more Senecan than Shakespearean:
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
257
HAMLET. On fine speech in it I chiefly loved. . . . let me see, let me see:
“The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’Hyrcanian beast”—
It is not so. It begins with Pyrrhus—
“The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couchèd in the ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared
With heraldry more dismal. Head to foot
Now is he total gules, horridly tricked
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons . . .” (2.2.437–49)
The First Player then continues in this vein for another fifty lines (lines
459–509). As discussed earlier, what appeals to Hamlet about these lines is
that they represent a degree of generic and rhetorical purity—there are “no
sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury” (line 433)—and apart from
complaining about its length, Polonius shares the prince’s admiration for
the passage: “Fore God, my lord, well spoken, with good accent and good
discretion” (lines 457–58).
Graduates of England’s grammar school system would have instantly
recognized—from the passage’s classical subject (the sack of Troy), its declamatory cadences (“Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide” [line
463]), its arcane vocabulary (“mobled queen” [line 493]), and its emphases
on revenge and “coagulate gore” (line 453)—the Latin closet tragedies of
Roman dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC to AD 65).54 A decade
before Shakespeare’s Hamlet trod the boards, Thomas Nashe was already
complaining about the “seruile imitation” of Seneca by English tragedians, would-be “Alcumists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of
arrogance) thinke to out-braue better pennes with the swelling bombast
of bragging blanke verse.” Clearly Seneca’s form and style were familiar
to playgoers glutted with passages lifted from his plays: “English Seneca
read by Candle-light yeelds many good sentences, as Blood is a begger, and
so forth; and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, hee will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragicall speeches.”55
Indeed, the lurid description of Priam’s slaughter partakes of key conventions employed by Seneca, via the nuntius, to describe off-stage horrors,
as outlined by E. F. Watling: “The speeches of the messengers, usually to
report the culminating atrocity or disaster, fall into a stereotyped pattern—
the description of the place, the horror of the act, the stoical courage of the
sufferer,” and so forth.56
Hamlet’s apparent nostalgia for a genre in which good is unambiguous, evil is spectacularly punished, and cathartic pity remains untinged
by irony (“Look whe’er he has not turned his colour, and has tears in’s
eyes” [lines 510–11]) recalls Bakhtin’s separation of monologic forms like
258
Philip D. Collington
“pure classical drama . . . the ideal extreme of the genre” from more “heteroglot and multi-languaged” subgenres and literary forms (DN 405 note).
Hamlet’s nostalgia proves as misplaced as Bakhtin’s blanket distinction,
however, when one considers how heteroglot the Senecan models themselves likely sounded to readers more immersed in ancient literary culture.
For instance, Seneca represented to discerning eyes and ears a veritable
hodgepodge of reworked dramatic and nondramatic literary sources, topical allusions, political satire, Stoic philosophy, Roman religion, and other
idiosyncrasies.57 As Watling archly notes, Seneca functioned as a great rhetorical “compost-heap [used] to enrich the soil of English dramatic verse,”
and while this view does not do justice to Seneca’s artistry, it does underscore the hybridity or generic “impurity” of his plays.58
Inspired by this oral recitation, Hamlet requests that before their
performance of The Murder of Gonzago (another revenge tragedy in the
Senecan style), the players “study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines
which I would set down and insert in’t” (2.2.529–30). Thus prompted by
one inserted genre (the player’s speech), Hamlet proposes to add another
inserted genre (a poetic accusation of the king? a grief-stricken confession
by the queen?) into a third inserted genre (the play performed at court
in 3.2., and which Hamlet rechristens “The Mousetrap” at 3.2.223). The
new hybrid play, Hamlet insists, should be interpreted “tropically” (i.e.,
rhetorically); but it may also be read topically—referring as it does both to
a recent “murder done in Vienna” (line 224) and to St. Augustine’s image
of the crucifix as a “mousetrap of the devil.”59 Moreover, as “mouse” was
early modern slang for a “fornicator” (as in Lady Capulet’s accusation that
her husband was “a mouse-hunt in [his] time”) as well as for “vagina”
and for “copulation,”60 Hamlet’s hybrid Gonzago / Mousetrap is thus designed to catch the conscience of an adulterer, as well as that of a regicide.
This single word, mousetrap, exemplifies how, as Bakhtin explains, every
word “has its own history of contradictory acts of verbal recognition,” and
how therefore “[o]nly the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and
as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have
escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation” (DN 278–79).
Here heteroglossia is deliberate on Hamlet’s part, for despite his avowed
admiration for monologic discourse, he frequently uses double-voiced
discourse as a tool to further his investigation, to conceal his motives, and
to facilitate his revenge.
10. Hamlet’s “Rogue and Peasant Slave” Soliloquy
Act 2, scene 2 closes with the departure of Polonius, the players, and
Hamlet’s friends, and with the prince’s announcement, “Now I am alone”
(2.2.537). His ensuing soliloquy exhibits signal conventions of the Shakespearean inserted genre par excellence: it is a speech that dominates the
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
259
audience’s attention; it is spoken by a figure alone on stage; it either opens
or (in this case) closes a scene; and it exhibits a high degree of rhetorical “virtuosity,” such as a higher-than-average concentration of tropes,
figures, sonic effects, images, and wordplay.61 In sum, the speech is more
laden with what Elam calls “rhetorical” subcodes62 than the preceding
baseline discourse:
HAMLET. Very well. Follow that lord, and look you mock him not.
Exeunt Polonius and the Players
My good friends, I’ll leave you till night. You are welcome to
Elsinore.
ROSENCRANTZ. Good my lord.
Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
HAMLET. Ay, so. God buy you. Now I am alone.
O what a rogue and peasant slave am I . . . (2.2.532–38)
Thus the soliloquy is set apart from the surrounding characters and their
more prosaic dialogue and preoccupations—not simply by the solitary
presence of the speaker—but by his shift into more self-consciously poetic
language, as signaled by the inverted syntax of line 538.
What follows is an extraordinarily complex display of rhetorical bravura, showcasing such devices as erotesis (a rhetorical question: “Is it not
monstrous that this player here . . . ?” [line 539]), isocolon (repeated phrases
of similar length and structure: “Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect”
[line 543]), antimetabole (inverting the order of repeated words to emphasize or contrast ideas: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba” [line 547]),
hyperbole (extravagant terms used for emphasis: “Had he the motive and
the cue for passion / That I have [,] He would drown the stage with tears”
[lines 549–50]), accumulatio (heaping up praise or accusation to emphasize
a point already made: “Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous,
lecherous, kindless villain!” [lines 568–69]), ecphonesis (an exclamation expressing emotion: “O, vengeance!” [line 570]), and so forth.63 Hamlet even
invents a new word, “unpregnant” (line 556), a practice George Puttenham termed “Fond Affectation,” an “intolerable ill manner of speech” that
Puttenham attributed to students eager to impress: “[This] is the common
fault of young scholars not half well-studied before they come from the
university or schools, and when they come to their friends . . . to coin fine
words . . . and to use newfangled speeches, thereby to show themselves
among the ignorant the better learned.”64
In addition to its rhetorical density, Hamlet’s private speech accomplishes the three primary dramatic functions of the soliloquy—the
expository (of plot), the homiletic (of theme), and the revelatory (of character)—as identified by Lloyd A. Skiffington.65 It is expository inasmuch as it
recaps important narrative events (“This is most brave, / That I, the son of
260
Philip D. Collington
a dear father murdered, / Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, /
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words” [lines 571–74]). It also
announces Hamlet’s own present and imminent role actions (he will abandon his current roles as coward / disloyal son and adopt new roles as play
director / revenger). The soliloquy is homiletic inasmuch as it delivers “a
solemn discourse or reproof, especially on morals or conduct”66—contrasting the “monstrous” affect of the player’s performance (“Tears in his eyes,
distraction in’s aspect, / A broken voice, and his whole function suiting /
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing” [lines 539, 543–45]) with the
craven inaction of Hamlet (“ere this / I should have fatted all the region
kites / With this slave’s offal” [lines 566–68]). The soliloquy also, like a formal sermon, inserts a brief narrative anecdote or exemplum about “guilty
creatures sitting at a play” who have been so struck by the “cunning of
the scene” that they have “proclaimed their malefactions” (lines 577–81)
to drive home an edifying moral: “For murder, though it have no tongue,
will speak / With most miraculous organ” (lines 582–83).67 Finally, the soliloquy is revelatory inasmuch as it reveals Hamlet’s motivations for past
actions (cowardice prevented him from avenging his father’s death), his
intentions regarding future actions (he will observe Claudius’s behavior
during the play, and “If he but blench, / I know my course” [lines 586–87]),
and the perturbations of Hamlet’s present state of mind (“perhaps / Out
of my weakness and my melancholy / . . . [the devil] / Abuses me to damn
me” [lines 589–92]).
As James Hirsh has argued, more than their rhetorical qualities, it
was the revelation of a character’s motives, intentions, and perturbations that made soliloquies instantly recognizable as a form apart from
normal theatrical discourse. Subdividing the soliloquy into three categories—audience-addressed speech, self-addressed speech, and interior
monologue—Hirsh exhaustively documents how the second mode represented the “dominant convention” in Shakespeare’s lifetime.68 In fact, the
self-contained, self-addressed speech depicting a character “in the midst
of a struggle” became one of the most predictable and anticipated inserted
genres in stage plays at the turn of the seventeenth century: “experienced
playgoers became familiar with the device and therefore [did] not have
to have its operation spelled out in each instance.”69 Hamlet needn’t have
introduced his soliloquy with “Now I am alone”; audiences would have
recognized it as such—without prompting. Hirsh’s focus on the conditions
of reception, combined with Skiffington’s focus on the mode of expression,
brings together Bakhtin’s understanding of the reader’s crucial role in the
generation of literary meaning:
In the actual life of speech, every concrete act of understanding is active: it assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
261
system filled with specific objects and emotional expressions, and is
indissolubly merged with the response. . . . [P]rimacy belongs to the
response, as the activating principle . . . it prepares the ground for an
active and engaged understanding. (DN 282)
In other words, what makes an inserted genre or a speech genre function
is the audience’s or reader’s recognition of them qua conspicuous insertions, as well as their participation in the coproduction of new meanings.
If response is the “activating principle” for dialogic communication, then
the multivalent riches of Hamlet act 2, scene 2 depend upon readers and
playgoers to recognize interpolations (like Hamlet’s soliloquy) and merge
these within their own “conceptual systems.”
Thus when Hamlet scolds Polonius for interrupting the player’s
speech—“He’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps” (line 491)—the
prince objects not only to the counselor’s more plebeian taste in cultural
forms, but also to his refusal to play along, to generate greater valences
out of the horrific tale of slaughtered Priam than simply to comment on
its length (“This is too long” [line 489]) or unusual vocabulary (“‘mobled
queen’ is good” [line 495]). In other words, Polonius not only fails to connect the dots analogically linking Priam’s slaughter and the unexplained
demise of Hamlet Sr., but also refuses to admit new forms into his conceptual system, one which remains, as Bakhtin might describe it, inert,
calcified, static, or “finite” (DN 344). For a responsive reader, on the other
hand, the discourse of another “is not so much interpreted by us as it is
further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions;
it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. . . . [and] in
each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal
ever newer ways to mean” (DN 345–46). Polonius dismisses Hamlet’s love
letter as “vile,” his riddles as “mad,” and the player’s speech as “too long”;
the counselor clings to passive understanding within the prison house of
an uncomprehending monologism, refusing to admit the political implications and semantic reverberations of supplementary formal, generic, and
linguistic registers.
Conclusion: Discourse in the Drama
The overall effect of Hamlet 2.2 is something of a discursive variety show or
generic three-ring circus, with something to please every palate, from the
satiric “character” to the sentimental posy.70 The scene achieves broad appeal by including lowbrow forms like street ballads and riddles to please
“the million” (2.2.428), as well as highbrow passages of social satire and
stoic philosophy for those with more refined “judgements in such matters” (line 430). Pace Hamlet’s stated preference for pure or “wholesome”
262
Philip D. Collington
dramatic language, Shakespeare uses speech and inserted genres (“sallets
in the lines”) for a variety of purposes—especially regarding characterization. Inserted genres underscore the superior mental agility of a prince
conversant in many literary forms, as well as the inferior education of an
ambitious counselor unable to keep up with Hamlet’s allusive sarcasm.
Likewise, speech genres convey the essence of character role functions,
from the oily-smooth political cadences of Claudius (the villainous king)
to the diplomatic precision of Voltemand (the diplomatic messenger) to
the fake camaraderie of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (the false friends).
And while there are no flat characters in Hamlet 2.2, their relative roundness, or three-dimensionality, seems directly related to their ability to
discern secondary meanings in utterances. Perhaps because of Hamlet’s
travels, his love of books, and his taste for popular cultural forms, the
play’s most intertextual and allusive speaker also proves to be its most
complex character.
More than any other character, Hamlet appreciates the overpopulation of words with secondary meanings, cultural associations, and hidden
intentions. As Bakhtin observes,
[L]anguage, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline
between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates
it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the
word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. . . .
Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into
the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—
overpopulated—with the intentions of others. (DN 293–94)
At times Hamlet uses his awareness of plurivocality to his own advantage;
at times he chafes, as others use words (including his own) against him.
For example, in greeting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet adopts
their ingratiating verbal mannerisms:
GUILDENSTERN. My honoured lord!
ROSENCRANTZ. My most dear lord!
HAMLET. My excellent good friends! (2.2.221–23)
Shortly after, Hamlet appropriates their effusive declarations of friendship:
“But let me conjure you by the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of
our youth, by the obligation of our ever-preserved love . . . be even an direct
with me” (lines 281–85, emphasis added). That Hamlet is being sarcastic
is confirmed in his aside, “Nay then, I have an eye of you” (line 288). Such
passages demonstrate Bakhtin’s insight that we don’t get each word we
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
263
speak from a dictionary so much as from “other people’s mouths, [from]
other people’s contexts”; and that from these other contexts we “must
take the word and make it [our] own” (DN 294). Hamlet takes seemingly
friendly terms like fellowship, consonancy, and love and repopulates these
with anger at his friends’ betrayal of his trust. These voices and words
were placed there by a single author (Shakespeare); yet none of these
voices or words need be considered single-voiced or authorial.
Hamlet 2.2 underscores the fact that Bakhtinians can learn as much
from Shakespeare as Shakespeareans can learn from Bakhtin. Bakhtinian
concepts such as carnival, chronotope, and polyphony have made significant
inroads into early modern scholarship over the past decades; but the insights published in “Discourse in the Novel” have yet to be fully exploited.71
As a result, Bakhtin’s essay figures more prominently in theoretical studies
of intertextuality 72 than it does in intertextual studies of Shakespeare.73
One notable exception is James R. Siemon, whose Word against Word:
Shakespearean Utterance remains a rare sustained dialogic interpretation of
a Shakespearean play (Richard II).74 Concepts like speech genres and inserted genres are especially liberating for critics engaged in intertextual or
source studies; for these need no longer identify specific cultural antecedents that replicate word for word Shakespearean phrases to posit the kinds
of secondary meanings, associations, and dialogic reverberations that the
playwright seems intent on evoking in his playgoers and readers.75 If I
have identified specific texts, like the ballad Jepha [sic], Judge of Israel, this
is simply to illustrate the conventions of the genre inserted at 2.2.398–411
using a cultural precedent. That no specific text has been identified for the
strange echo effect of Hamlet’s leave-taking from Polonius, “You cannot,
sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except
my life, except my life, except my life” (2.2.214–16, emphasis added), does not
mean that it did not at one time evoke part of an unrecognized inserted
genre, such as a ballad refrain (like “welladay, welladay, welladay” or “I’d
rather lye alone,” or “I care not how ere the world goe”)76—or indeed some
other cultural form available to the Elizabethan apperceptive background
but lost to us today.
To Bakhtin, decontextualized reading amounts to a kind of totalitarian violence against literature, as monoglossia (prompted by laziness,
ignorance, or worse) imposes singular meanings on heteroglot works. The
failure to recognize the latent heteroglossia in literary works leaves the
original author and work in a kind of semantic limbo or prison; and it is
our job as critics, as he argues in a late essay, to recover as many of these
lost semantic contexts as possible:
The semantic treasures Shakespeare embedded in his works were created and collected through the centuries and even millennia: they lay
264
Philip D. Collington
hidden in the language, and not only in the literary language, but also
in those strata of the popular language that before Shakespeare’s time
had not entered literature, in the diverse genres and forms of speech
communication. . . . The author is captive of his epoch, of his own
present. Subsequent times liberate him from this captivity, and literary scholarship is called upon to assist in this liberation.77
This same passage hints at the presence of heteroglossia in Shakespeare’s
plays, inasmuch as he, “like any artist, constructed his works not out of
inanimate elements, not out of bricks, but out of forms that were already
heavily laden with meaning, filled with it” (RQNM 5). However, the “more
distant the work to be analyzed is from contemporary consciousness,” the
more difficult it is to perceive its heteroglossia (DN 418). “In such cases,”
Bakhtin notes, “the entire language—as a consequence of our distance
from it—seems to lie on one and the same plane; we cannot sense in it
any three-dimensionality or any distinction between levels and distances”
(DN 417). Bakhtin’s observation may well apply to his own reading of
Shakespearean drama. The cultural, historical, linguistic, and geographical distances from Shakespeare’s England proved insurmountable, and the
plays ultimately seemed to him flat, mononologic, or two-dimensional.
In short, that Bakhtin did not better recognize parodic stylizations
at work in Shakespeare may stem from the fact the Russian critic did not
have sufficient access to contextualizing research found in glossaries,
handbooks, and annotated editions of the plays. For example, recent publications in the Athlone Shakespeare Dictionary series, such as Chris R.
Hassel’s Shakespeare’s Religious Language, Stuart Gillespie’s Shakespeare’s
Books, Charles Edelman’s Military Language in Shakespeare, and B. J. ­Sokol
and Mary Sokol’s Shakespeare’s Legal Language, all attest to the scope and
complexity of inserted literary genres and social speech genres in his
plays. This critical apparatus enables modern readers to recover topicalities, subtexts, and layers of meaning in Shakespeare—a “whole series of
phenomena,” as Bakhtin would term it, “beyond [our normal] conceptual
horizon” (DN 269). One detects a hint of personal frustration in Bakhtin’s
assertions that each reader perceives a work “from a tiny island limited
in time and space,” and that because of this isolation “we have lost forever the background of heteroglot words and meanings against which
these [works] sounded and with which they dialogically interacted” (DN
374–75). This last statement may have been true for a Russian critic exiled
for six years in remote northern Kazakhstan in the 1930s, but it is much
less the case for readers of Shakespeare with access to the wealth of print
and electronic resources available today.78 These resources assist in a kind
of semantic recovery operation, or “re-accentuation” as Bakthin calls the
search for forms of dialogism enabled by lost apperceptive backgrounds
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
265
(DN 419). However isolated Bakhtin was from these contexts, “Discourse
in the Novel” furnishes indispensable tools for those engaged in the historicization and contextualized explication of Shakespeare.
Regarding my assertion that Bakhtinians can learn from Shakespeare,
the slow adoption of Bakhtinian methodologies in Shakespeare studies
may stem from Bakhtin’s vocal ambivalence toward dramatic forms. Late
in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin reiterates his exclusion of drama from
heteroglossia: “Pure drama strives toward a unitary language, one that is
individualized merely through dramatic personae who speak it” (DN 405).
But now the statement is couched in qualifiers. He writes, “To a certain extent comedy is an exception to this.” A footnote further retreats from the
generalization: “We are speaking, to be sure, of pure classical drama as
expressing the extreme of the genre. Contemporary realistic social drama
may, of course, be heteroglot and multi-languaged” (DN 405 note). Indeed, as we have seen in the case of Hamlet’s nostalgic mis-­recognition
of Senecan drama as “pure,” it is easy to mistake distant literary forms
for monologic ones.79 As with Seneca, Hamlet is comprised of a complex
amalgam of verbal styles, historical topicalities, literary allusions, and cultural insertions set against a baseline discourse that renders it a textbook
example of heteroglossia at its most dazzling and dizzying.
To be fair, Bakhtin did occasionally glimpse the dialogizing presence
of unofficial dialects and discourses in Shakespeare; for instance, in his
essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” he mentions
the entwining of death, laughter, drinking, and coarse sexuality in “the
Falstaff scenes, the cheerful grave-diggers in Hamlet, [and] the cheerful
drunk porter in Macbeth.” These, he acknowledges, partake of “the unity
of the epoch and [of] the shared nature of sources and traditions”; 80 but
the critic does not consider how the three scenes and their subversive
characters differ in their speech from the baseline discourse and speaking
styles of dominant characters in their respective plays. In short, Bakhtin
celebrates early modern popular traditions without making the logical
connection: when these traditions are inserted into plays depicting power
struggles among the English, Danish, and Scottish nobilities, the resulting
juxtaposition of aristocratic and plebian cultural forms creates enormous
dialogizing energies.81
In another essay, Bakhtin cites Shakespeare among those partaking
of “parodic-travestying” traditions of inserting “comic intermedia,” performed by clowns and fools, to create a “doubling effect of laughter” in
his comedies and tragedies.82 But again, the critic ignores the logical extension of this observation, that these doubling insertions dialogize scenes
depicting social elites with whom comic fools and clowns are invariably
juxtaposed—verbally, generically, thematically, and so forth. Bakhtin does
acknowledge Shakespeare’s plurivocality in his “Response to a Question
266
Philip D. Collington
from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” but there he seems most concerned
with how reception generates meanings not present to the author: “In the
process of their posthumous life they [the plays] are enriched with new
meanings, new significance: it is as though these works outgrow what
they were in the epoch of their creation” (RQNM 4). To Bakhtin, the plays
thus mean more than was ever intended by their author or appreciated by
his contemporaries: “neither Shakespeare himself nor his contemporaries
knew that ‘great Shakespeare’ whom we know now” (RQNM 4). Such is
the freedom accorded by heteroglossia, as each utterance generates unlimited associations for future readers in new contexts.
My own project has been much more limited in scope in that it seeks
to identify in a single scene dialogic interanimations that could plausibly
have been available to playgoers and readers in Shakespeare’s time. My
own purpose is not to limit the semantic free play of dialogizing associations among future readers of “great Shakespeare” as envisioned by
Bakhtin, but simply to underscore two important points; namely, that we
have in no way exhausted the search and recovery of historicized heteroglossia or lost elements of the Elizabethan apperceptive background, and
that two key heuristic devices that can facilitate this re-accentuation of
Shakespeare’s language—speech genres and inserted genres—are in no
way exclusive purviews of the novel.
Niagara University
Lewiston, New York
NOTES
A short version of this paper was presented at the Thirteenth International
Mikhail Bakhtin Conference (University of Western Ontario) in July 2008. The
author would like to acknowledge ongoing assistance from Tara L. Collington
(University of Waterloo) and the useful suggestions from the editors and anonymous readers at TSLL. The author would also like to acknowledge travel funding
provided by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Niagara University,
and generous financial support from the NU Research Council.
1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard, Oxford ed. (1987; repr., Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 2.2.432–36. All citations are taken from this edition and are
noted parenthetically in the text.
2. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:
U of Texas P, 1992), 259–422, hereafter cited parenthetically as DN. Italics are preserved from the original.
3. For a more detailed outline of “Discourse in the Novel” and its implications
for literary studies, see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), chapter 4; and Sue Vice, Introducing
Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997), chapters 1–3.
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
267
  4. On Bakhtin’s prejudice against drama, see Marvin Carlson, “Theater and
Dialogism,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R.
Roach (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992), 313–23; and Jennifer Wise, “Marginalizing Drama: Bakhtin’s Theory of Genre,” Essays in Theatre 8 (1989): 15–22.
  5. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl
­Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 186.
  6. Sue Vice attributes Bakhtin’s “notorious” statement “that poetry cannot be
dialogic” to the “common error” of reading poems biographically as “the univocal utterance of a single subject . . . [the] identification of the poet’s language with
the [author’s] unified poetic self”; Vice, Introducing Bakhtin, 74–75. On plurivocality in drama, Bakhtin is disconcertingly specific: “to speak of a fully formed and
deliberate polyphonic quality in Shakespeare’s dramas is in our opinion simply
impossible,” in part because a play contains “only one fully valid voice, the voice
of the hero, while polyphony presumes a plurality of fully valid voices within the
limits of a single work”; Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 34.
  7. Frank Kermode, invoking T. S. Eliot’s praise of “transparent” language, in
Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2000), 97 and sources cited
there.
  8. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980; repr., London: Routledge, 1988), 40.
  9. Keir Elam, “Language in the Theater,” SubStance 6 (1977): 139–61, quotations
on 148, 152, and sources cited there.
10. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 40–46.
11. Elam, “Language in the Theater,” 153, 151, italics in original.
12. Elam, “Language in the Theater,” 151.
13. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 59.
14. Cited in Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, Oxford ed., 199 (note to 2.1.62 and sources
cited there).
15. M. S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London: Longman, 1993), 26.
16. F[rancis] T[hynne], The Perfect Ambassadour (London, 1652), 13–14, 18–19.
British Library copy, accessed through EEBO, http://eebo.chadwyck.com,
July 2008.
17. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955),
110–14, quotation on 111.
18. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 112.
19. The use of the impersonal passive construction is noted in Horace Howard
Furness, ed., Hamlet, New Variorum ed., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,
1877), 1.135 (note to 2.2.80). This stilted construction contrasts with the king’s less
formal statements, such as “we much did long to see you” (2.2.2), and “Thanks,
Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern” (line 33).
20. Maurice Charney, Style in Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), 246.
21. Madeleine Doran, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language (Madison: U of Wisconsin
P, 1976), 34. Cf. Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. ­(Berkeley:
U of California P, 1991), 104 (s.v. “occultatio”).
22. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 96–97 (s.v. “macrologia”), 36 (s.v.
“circumlocution”).
268
Philip D. Collington
23. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1987), 462–63
(longer notes to 2.2.109–23 and 2.2.110).
24. See An Homily of the State of Matrimony, in Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches in the Time of the Late Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1844),
446–58, quotation on 451; cf. Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden 2nd ed., 463 (longer note
to 2.2.110).
25. For example, Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden 2nd ed., 2.2.109–23. The letter and
inserted poem are both italicized in the 1623 Folio, with a centered heading: “The
Letter”; see The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, ed. Charlton Hinman
(London: Paul Hamlyn, 1968), 769 (through lines 1136–52).
26. See, for example, the lines “Composed for and dedicated to Miss Abrams
by Michael Kelly,” circa 1800, “My mind no skill in these fond numbers owns, /
Yet these declare I love thee best, most best, / And though no Muses reckon up
my Groans, / These lines may shelter in thy snowy breast”; cited in Furness, ed.,
Hamlet, New Variorum ed., 1.138 (note to 2.2.109 and sources cited there).
27. The best critical assessment of this neglected genre remains Joan Evans’s
introduction to the catalogue English Posies and Posy Rings (London: Oxford UP,
1931), xi–xxvii.
28. Anon., Loues Garland, or, Posies for Rings, Handkerchers, and Gloues and Such
Pretty Tokens That Louers Sent Their Loues (London, 1624), Bodleian Library copy,
accessed through EEBO, http://eebo.chadwyck.com, June 2008; hereafter cited
parenthetically as LG, italics in original.
29. David Lyle Jeffrey, ed., A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), 577, s.v. “Ophir.”
30. M. L. Stapleton, “Making the Woman of Him: Shakespeare’s Man Right Fair
as Sonnet Lady,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46 (2004): 271–95, quotation on 276; Furness, ed., Hamlet, New Variorum ed., 1.139 (note to 2.2.123 and
sources cited there).
31. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992),
382; Harold C. Goddard, “Hamlet to Ophelia,” College English 16 (1955), 403–15,
quotation on 413.
32. Robert Bozanich, “The Eye of the Beholder: Hamlet to Ophelia, II.ii.109–24,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1980), 90–93.
33. Imtiaz Habib, “‘Never Doubt I Love’: Misreading Hamlet,” College Literature
21.2 (June 1994): 19–32, quotations on 29.
34. Tony Augarde, “Riddle,” in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed.
Tom McArthur and Feri McArthur (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 870.
35. Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, Oxford ed., 212 (note to 2.2.174 and sources cited there).
36. Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden 2nd ed., 464–66 (long note to 2.2.174), quotation
on 465.
37. A. P., Natural and Moral Questions and Answers. Intermingled with Many Prettie
and Pleasant Riddles, and Darke Sentences (London, 1598), sigs. Aiiiv, Aiiiir. Harvard
University Library copy, accessed through EEBO, http://eebo.chadwyck.com,
June 2008. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
38. To avoid confusion, I will place “character” in quotation marks when speaking of the satiric portrait or character sketch, as opposed to character in the sense
of “dramatic personage.”
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
269
39. See “Theophrastus,” unsigned entry in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. Sir Paul Harvey (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 426.
40. Taken from Sir Thomas Overbury, Characters, 9th ed. (London, 1616), excerpted in Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, ed. Alexander M. Witherspoon and
Frank J. Warnke, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 196–203,
quotation on 198.
41. Overbury, Characters, 203.
42. Overbury, Characters, 198.
43. See, for example, Larry S. Champion, “‘A Springe to Catch Woodcocks’:
Proverbs, Characterization, and Political Ideology in Hamlet,” Hamlet Studies 14
(1993): 24–39; and David Summers, “‘—The Proverb Is Something Musty’: The
Commonplace and Epistemic Crisis in Hamlet,” Hamlet Studies 20 (1998): 9–34.
44. Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, Oxford ed., 203–36 (notes to 2.2, passim).
45. The expression is Tilley M254, cited in Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, Oxford ed., 216
(note to 2.2.247–48).
46. The expressions are Tilley M1315 and D231, as cited in Hibbard, ed., Hamlet,
Oxford ed., 236 (notes to 2.2.582–83, 2.2.588–89).
47. Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden 2nd ed., 473–74, and sources cited there ­(longer note
to 2.2.375). Several post-seventeenth-century instances of the expression are cited in
G. L. Apperson, ed., The Wordsworth Dictionary of Proverbs (Ware, UK: Wordsworth,
1993), s.v. “Hawk,” 290–91 (definition 9, and sources cited there), alongside other longforgotten analogues like to know A from the gable-end, and to know B from a battledore.
48. These include sententiae like Laertes’s admonition to Ophelia, “The chariest
maid is prodigal enough / If she unmask her beauty to the moon” (1.3.36–37); see
Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007),
110–11 and figure 7.
49. The phrase “rashe vowe” is from the marginal gloss to Judges 11.30 in The
Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Peabody, MA:
­Hendrickson, 2007), 114v.
50. See anon., Jepha [sic], Judge of Israel, in Shakespeare’s Songbook, ed. Ross W.
Duffin (New York: Norton, 2004), 226–29.
51. Anon., Jepha, Judge of Israel, stanzas 1, 7.
52. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. and ed. P. G. Walsh (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1999), poem to chapter 1 (p. 3).
53. Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, Oxford ed., 216–17 (note to 2.2.261–62).
54. Playgoers may also have been reminded of Aeneas’s moving account of the
sack of Troy in Dido Queen of Carthage (2.1) a decade earlier, though the degree of
Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Marlowe remains a matter of dispute; see Stuart
Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sources (London: Continuum, 2004), 327–28 and sources cited there.
55. Thomas Nashe, preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), in The Works
of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 4 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966),
3.300–25, quotations on 311, 315.
56. E. F. Watling, introduction to Seneca: Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. and
ed. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1966), 7–26, quotation on 23.
57. On Seneca’s indebtedness to antecedent tragedies, and his “readiness
to incorporate material from non-dramatic sources,” see R. J. Tarrant, “Greek
270
Philip D. Collington
and Roman in Seneca’s Tragedies,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97
(1995): 215–30, quotation on 224. See also Scott Magelssen’s examination of
Seneca’s extraliterary insertions in “Bloody Spectacle or Religious Commentary? Divination by Entrails in Seneca’s Oedipus,” Journal of Religion and Theatre 1
(2002): 57–69.
58. Watling, introduction to Seneca: Four Tragedies and Octavia, 25–26.
59. Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden 2nd ed., 302 (note to 3.2.332).
60. Romeo and Juliet, ed. Jill L. Levenson, Oxford ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000),
4.4.11 and note; Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in
Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London: Athlone, 1994), 2.916–18, s.v.
“mouse.”
61. Lloyd A. Skiffington, The History of English Soliloquy: Aeschylus to Shakespeare
(Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1985), ix, 74, 104–7.
62. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 58.
63. See the definitions in Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 71, 93, 14, 86,
1, 61 (s.v.).
64. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589), ed. Frank Whigham and
Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2007), 337–38. The OED cites this as
the first recorded usage of unpregnant (see Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, Oxford ed., 234
[note to 2.2.556]).
65. Skiffington, The History of English Soliloquy, 71–95.
66. Funk and Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary (Toronto: Fitzhenry and White­
side, 1974), s.v. “homily.”
67. The inclusion of this anecdote enables Hamlet to evoke the dual function
of homiletic “explication and application”—better understanding (knowing), and
putting into practice (doing), the lesson at hand; see Walter R. Davis, “Homily and
Poem: Doctrine and Form,” Notre Dame English Journal 12 (1980): 101–22, 105–6,
and sources cited there.
68. James Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2003), 13–34, quotation on 25.
69. Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, 15, 24.
70. On the evolution of playgoer preferences for generic “medleys” or “hybrid
plays,” see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1996), chapter 5 (quotations on 119–20).
71. On carnival, see Michael D. Bristol’s pioneering study, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (1985;
rpt., New York: Routledge, 1989), as well as the essays collected in Ronald
Knowles, ed., Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin (New York: St. Martin’s P,
1998). On the chronotope, see Michael D. Bristol, “In Search of the Bear: Spatio­
temporal Form and the Heterogeneity of Economies in The Winter’s Tale,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 145–67; and G. G. Heyworth, “Missing and Mending: Romeo and Juliet at Play in the Romance Chronotope,” The Yearbook of English
Studies 30 (2000), 5–20. On polyphony, see Paola Pugliatti, “The Strange Tongues
of Henry V,” The Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 235–53; and David Martin
Smith, “The Polyphonic Shakespeare: Bakhtin and the Problem of Drama,” diss.,
U of Denver, 1998.
Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2
271
72. See, for example, Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2002),
14–30; Donald Bruce, De l’intertextualité à l’interdiscursivité: Histoire d’une double
émergence (Toronto: Paratexte, 1995), 97–122; and Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates
and Contexts (Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 2003), 20–59 passim. As early as the
mid-1980s, Bakhtinian dialogism was being hailed as one of the most important
innovations in literary theory since Aristotle; for example, see Don H. Bialostosky,
“Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism,” Publications of the Modern
Language Association 101 (1986): 788–97.
73. In Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 2000), Douglas Bruster merely cites “Discourse in the Novel” to refute
Bakhtin’s limiting caveats, noting that “[in] contrast to Bakhtin, I believe ‘polyphony’ accurately describes the heteroglossic structures of Shakespeare’s plays and
early modern drama generally” (228, note 36). In “The Rhetoric of Politeness and
Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 391–401, A. Lynne Magnusson briefly
mentions DN and its insights into how “concrete utterances [are] products of s­ ocial
intercourse” (394). Finally, Richard Hillman’s Intertextuality and Romance in Renaissance Drama: The Staging of Nostalgia (London: Macmillan, 1992) also briefly cites
DN to recommend more “critical openness to heteroglossia as an inescapable,
omni­present discursive mode” (23–24). Bakhtin is not mentioned in Stephen J.
Lynch, Shakespearean Intertextuality: Studies in Selected Sources and Plays (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1998).
74. James R. Siemon, Word against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 2002).
75. Cf. Robert S. Miola’s excellent classifications in “Seven Types of Intertextuality,” in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2004), 13–25. The relationships I posit correspond to Miola’s type 6
(generic affinities without quotation) and type 7 (paralogues, or “texts that illuminate the intellectual, social, theological, or political meanings in other texts”
without direct “verbal echo”) (21–23).
76. These sample ballad refrains can be found in William Chappell and J. W.
­Ebsworth, eds., The Roxburghe Ballads, 8 vols. (1871–99; rpt., New York: AMS P,
1966), vol. 1, 154–58, 418–21, 475–78, italics in original.
77. M. M. Bakhtin, “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff”
(1970), in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1996), 1–9, quotation on 5;
hereafter cited parenthetically as RQNM.
78. On Bakhtin’s internal exile, and on the challenges of securing research materials during this time, see Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard UP, 1984), 253–74.
79. Bakhtin praises the purity of Shakespeare’s drama alongside that of his classical precursors, as when he writes in his notes, “This representation of the hero to
all humanity, to all the world, is similar to classical tragedy (and to Shakespeare)”;
“From Notes Made in 1970–71,” in Emerson and Holquist, eds., Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays, 132–53, quotation on 152. The most pronounced attribution of an
almost oracular monologism to Shakespeare occurs in a note appended to Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where Bakhtin declares, “From time to time prophets appear
272
Philip D. Collington
who divine and utter this integral word. Shakespeare was a prophet sent by God to
proclaim to us the mysteries of man and the human soul” (100, note 2).
80. M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes
toward a Historical Poetics,” in Holquist, ed., The Dialogic Imagination, 84–258, quotations on 199.
81. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin likewise acknowledges “embryonic rudiments, early buddings” of polyphony in Shakespeare’s plays, but then
reiterates his entrenched position that in drama “a fully formed and deliberate
polyphonic quality . . . is in our opinion simply impossible” because plays “cannot
contain multiple worlds; [they permit] only one, and not several, systems of measurement” (33–34). In other words, plays are simply too monologic.
82. M. M. Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in Holquist,
ed., The Dialogic Imagination, 41–83, quotation on 79.