Page "Hamlet" Paragraph 68

An unusual rhetorical device, hendiadys, appears in several places in the play.

Examples are found in Ophelia's speech at the end of the nunnery scene: " Thexpectancy and rose of the fair state "; " And I, of ladies most deject and wretched ".

Many scholars have found it odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly arbitrarily, use this rhetorical form throughout the play.

One explanation may be that Hamlet was written later in Shakespeare's life, when he was adept at matching rhetorical devices to characters and the plot.

Linguist George T. Wright suggests that hendiadys had been used deliberately to heighten the play's sense of duality and dislocation.

Pauline Kiernan argues that Shakespeare changed English drama forever in Hamlet because he " showed how a character's language can often be saying several things at once, and contradictory meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and disturbed feelings.

" She gives the example of Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, " get thee to a nunnery ", which is simultaneously a reference to a place of chastity and a slang term for a brothel, reflecting Hamlet's confused feelings about female sexuality.