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Hendiadys and Hamlet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

George T. Wright*
Affiliation:
University of MinnesotaMinneapolis

Abstract

In all his plays Shakespeare uses the Vergilian figure hendiadys some three hundred times, most frequently in his middle plays and most of all in Hamlet. Rare in English speech or other English poetry, hendiadys joins nouns, or sometimes adjectives, in a false or specious union (e.g., “sound and fury” for “furious sound”). Its effect in Hamlet, where it appears perhaps sixty-six times, is often to elevate, estrange, and baffle; and this stylistic use of conjoined terms that are neither parallel nor complementary mirrors the play's deepest themes—especially the suspect character of personal unions and metaphysical connections. Once aware that Shakespeare frequently combines terms this way, we can understand better many puzzling phrases, including some celebrated ones. Three appendixes list instances of hendiadys in Hamlet, tabulate its incidence in all the plays, and discuss some misleading definitions in the OED.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 2 , March 1981 , pp. 168 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

Note 1 See, e.g., Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Hafner, 1947), pp. 61–62, 298–99; and Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: A Guide for Students of English Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p. 53. Brian Vickers never mentions hendiadys in his otherwise admirable Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1970) or in his essay “Shakespeare's Use of Rhetoric,” in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 83–98. The linguist Geoffrey N. Leech, impatient with those scholars of rhetoric for whom “the identification, classification, and labelling of specimens of given stylistic devices becomes an end in itself,” pounces on hendiadys as an egregiously ridiculous instance of this obsession. He scoffs at “the survival in modern textbooks of figures like hendiadys, which we can value only as curiosities. … It is so rare that I have found no certain instance of it in English literature” (A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry [London: Longmans, 1969], p. 4).

Note 2 Throughout, emphasis has been added in quotations to stress examples of hendiadys.

Note 3 See E. Adelaide Hahn, “Hendiadys: Is There Such a Thing?” Classical Weekly, 8 May 1922, pp. 193–97; Charles Gordon Cooper, Journey to Hesperia (London: Macmillan, 1959), pp. 128–32; and Kenneth Quinn, Virgil's Aeneid: A Critical Description (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 423–28. Both Hahn and Cooper call the term hendiadys a “misnomer.” Quinn includes the figure among the many devices that show Vergil's preference for coordinating structures over subordinating ones; the poet's conscious purpose is to enforce “the constant assertion” (p. 424) of the narrative, the insistent forward movement of the living past. Wherever possible, therefore, Vergil places the elements of a situation in coordinate syntax and expects his readers to recognize “the differing flavour of his words in the two arms of the parataxis” (p. 426).

Note 4 Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944), ii, 43. I have relied also on Joseph Xavier Brennan's doctoral dissertation, “The Epitome Troporum ac Schematum of Joannes Susenbrotus: Text, Translation, and Commentary,” Diss. Univ. of Illinois 1953.

Susenbrotus cited as sources of his own work the earlier lists of tropes and figures compiled by Man-cinellus (Carmen de Floribus, 1489) and by Mosellanus (Tabulae de Schematibus et Tropis, 1529), both of whom briefly mention hendiadys, but his account of hendiadys is fuller and clearer than theirs and indicates that he had evidently also looked closely at Servius. Richard Sherry, who relied largely on Mosellanus (see Baldwin, ii, 35–37), omits any mention of hendiadys in his A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London, 1550). It was Susenbrotus' treatment of hendiadys, available only from 1562 on, that was taught in the schools, that Puttenham and Day must have consulted, and that must have caught Shakespeare's eye.

Note 5 In his single paragraph on the subject, Susenbrotus, evidently puzzled, defines his puzzling figure three times: “an adjective is turned into a noun … one idea [unum] is explained through two … for poetic effect one idea [res una] is divided into two by an intervening conjunction, whether the other of those words signifying that idea be an adjective or a noun” (Brennan's trans.). The first two brief phrases are adapted from earlier writers, beginning with Mancinellus in 1489; the last comes directly from Servius (Servii Grammatici, ed. Georgius Thilo [Leipzig: B. G. Terbneri, 1878], I, 36), but its crucial concluding clause is original with Susenbrotus: “sive alteram è vocibus rem illam significantibus, adiec-tivum, sive utrumque substantivum fuerit” 'whether the second of the words signifying that (single) idea be an adjective or a noun.' This comment suggests that there are two patterns: in one a phrase consisting of a noun and adjective (say, patens aureis 'golden cups') is split into two substantives (pateris et auro 'cups and gold'); in the other a phrase consisting of a noun and a dependent genitive noun (molem altorum montium 'a heap of high mountains') is split into two substantives (molemque et montes … altos 'a heap and high mountains'). (Servius and Susenbrotus cite both these examples from Vergil.) If Shakespeare worked from Susenbrotus, the playwright's normal procedure may well have been either to break open relatively bland adjectival phrases like furious sound or horrible image (both discussed below) into striking coordinate phrases (“sound and fury,” “image and horror”) or to work from genitive constructions, from law of heraldry to “law and heraldry” (Hamlet i.i.87). In English, the force is largely the same whether the phrasing is “law of heraldry” or “heraldic law,” and Shakespeare may have started from either phrase as a base from which to begin his hendiadic transformations. Shakespeare's hendiadys, however, often appears to originate in, and to be translatable by, more complex phrasing: for example, morning freshness (or fresh morning) seems to be first transformed, by metaphor, into morning dew (or dewy morning) and thence, by hendiadys (and amplification), into “the morn and liquid dew of youth” (Hamlet i.iii.41). By contrast, in Milton, who may also have learned hendiadys at school from Susenbrotus, the figure almost always seems to follow one of the two types described above. (I am grateful to my colleague Calvin B. Kendall for helping me to fix more precisely the perceptions described in this note. )

Almost all quotations and line numbers from Shakespeare are based on G. B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare: The Complete Works (New York: Harcourt, 1968), but numerous other editions have been consulted, including David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Foresman, 1980); Sylvan Barnet, gen. ed., The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt, 1972); G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton, 1974); George Lyman Kittredge, ed. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Boston: Ginn, 1939); George Rylands, ed., Hamlet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947); R. C. Bald, ed., Hamlet (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1946); Hardin Craig, ed., An Introduction to Shakespeare (New York: Scott, Foresman, 1952); and Horace Howard Furness, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (1877; rpt. New York: American Scholar, 1965), esp. the two vols, devoted to Hamlet.

Note 6 Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1932), p. 185.

Note 7 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Menston, Eng.: Scolar, 1968), p. 142.

Note 8 Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark and Other Poems and Verses (New York: Harper, 1903), p. 21; Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock m.158,8; The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random, 1977), pp. 203, 235, 241, 258; and Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random, 1976), p. 224.

Note 9 Fowler, Modern English Usage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), p. 607. Hendiadys is treated under “Technical terms of rhetoric….”

Note 10 Smith, Words and Idioms: Studies in the English Language (Boston: Houghton, 1925), p. 173. Smith's lists of doublets are on pp. 173–75.

Note 11 One exception is the familiar construction in which we link a person with something that belongs to the person: “I wanted to talk with you about Susie and her grades”—i.e., about Susie's grades. Or: “Do you have any comment on your opponent and the charges he has brought against you?”—i.e., your opponent's charges. Not all such constructions are reducible to one noun phrase, but many are. The speech of Laertes that I analyze at length below begins in the same manner: “For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor,” which means “As for the trifling of Hamlet's favor.” Having recognized only very late that this construction is sometimes a form of hendiadys (thanks again to my colleague Calvin B. Kendall), I may have missed a few instances of this form in my count of hendiadys in Shakespeare's plays. But examples are often problematical. Brutus is using hendiadys when he says, “You know that I held Epicurus strong, / And his opinion” (Julius Caesar v.i.77–78); but Joan La Pucelle, though she is echoing a phrase of Plutarch's (and possibly of Caesar's), has two distinct ideas in mind when she compares herself to “that proud insulting ship / Which Caesar and his fortune bare at once” (Henry VI, Part I i.ii.138–39).

Note 12 The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1971), pp. 142, 112.

Note 13 From Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) and Religio Medici (1642), in The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman Endicott (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 97 and 47. I am grateful to my colleague Gordon W. O'Brien for calling my attention to Browne's use of hendiadys and for helping me read some Shakespearean phrases more accurately.

“See Paradise Lost 1.233–34, 771, 786; n.67, 69, 80, 346; iii.417; iv.562; v.349; X.345–46, 956; Paradise Regained 1.457; ii.29; iv.439; Samson Agonistes, 11. 34, 1654. These seem likely instances, 17 in 14,393 lines, or 1 in every 847 lines.

Note 15 See, e.g., Maurice Charney, Style in Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969). In Renaissance lists of rhetorical schemes, hendiadys is treated as a figure, not as a trope, for its point lies in its peculiar syntax, not in the alteration of meaning that is usually felt to be the mark of a trope, whether the alteration occurs in a single word, as often in metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and so on, or proceeds from a governing design, as in allegory or a sustained ironic structure. But to find in the figure such extensive meanings as the present essay proposes is, in effect, to suggest that hendiadys has the force of a trope and helps in some measure to organize the meanings of the play.

Note 16 Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946), i, 169–70.

Note 17 Editors frequently gloss this phrase in a way that confirms my reading of hendiadys. Harrison hears indued as “endowed; i.e., a creature whose natural home is the water (element).” Other editors offer such readings for indued as “adapted by nature” (Kittredge and Bevington), “in harmony with” (Signet), “belonging to” (Rylands), “habituated” (Evans), or “accustomed” (Bald). C. T. Onions' A Shakespeare Glossary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919) suggests “endowed with qualities fitting her for living in water.” None of these has any warrant from the OED, but that work's fourth meaning for the word (“To lead on; to bring up, educate, instruct”) is probably the one Shakespeare had mainly in mind. Ophelia seems a creature native to the water and brought up in it—two distinct ideas and hence not hendiadys, except that, since the historical confusion between indued (or endued) and endowed existed in the Renaissance, Shakespeare and his audience may well have heard not only the meaning just proposed but also, perhaps a little loosely, “natively endowed.”

Note 18 Cf. Pyrrhus, in the heroic extract Hamlet begins and the First Player continues:

So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood

And like a neutral to his will and matter,

Did nothing. (ii.ii.502–04)

That “Did nothing” constitutes the whole of 1. 504 emphasizes the blankness of Pyrrhus' stance and state of mind.

Note 19 Cf. “youth and liberty” (ii.i.24) and “youth and havior” or “humour” (n.ii.12), which work the same way, and, in All's Well That Ends Well, “youth and ignorance” (ii.iii.171). Such phrases contrast sharply with those that join parallel terms—e.g., “youth and nobleness of birth” (Two Gentlemen of Verona i.iii.33).

Note 20 “In form and moving how express and admirablel” Hamlet has earlier exclaimed about man (ii.ii.316–17). Although the two nouns could be taken separately, they seem more effective in combination: “in his form, and in the movements of that form.” It would seem more appropriate to describe the movements of the body as “express” than to speak so of the body at rest. The word moving sets the idea of form in motion.

Most editors have felt some anxiety about express. Several gloss it as “exact,” one as “well-devised,” another as “well-framed(?).” Rylands suggests “active, purposeful, or well-modelled (Lat. exprimere, to portray).” Kittredge offers “precisely adapted to its purpose—like a delicately adjusted piece of mechanism.” (He does not say what mechanism—a Swiss watch? the 3:18 to Stratford?—Shakespeare may have had in mind.) But most of the OED's meanings for express emphasize the idea of distinctness: clearly outlined, sharp, definite, explicit. So “how express and admirable” probably means “how admirably distinct, how wonderfully clear and sharp in the articulation of its form.”

Note 21 App. iii shows that the OED sometimes misreads words in Shakespeare because of misconceptions about his coordinate phrases.

Note 1 The First Folio and First Quarto read “abstracts.” Most editors prefer abstract and, in failing to gloss it, imply that it is an adjective, although Kittredge (after Clark and Wright) notes, “Always a noun in Shakespeare.” The plural form fits better with chronicles. The singular form offers the modern reader a pleasing elusiveness—what is an abstract chronicle, exactly? But I take Shakespeare to have meant that the players (in concert, in what they perform together) are abstracts of the time, i.e., they summarize the time, extract its essence, in the form of brief chronicles.

Note 2 The form of example 57 (“Poor Ophelia / Divided from herself and her fair judgment”) is not analyzed in my list of deviations; it seems too anomalous. Still, Shakespeare frequently writes phrases that join a self with a part or a possession of the self or that join what seem to be two different kinds or parts of the self. Antony and Cleopatra has several such phrases: “I and my sword” (iii.xiii.175), “Mine honesty and I” (iii.xiii.41), “My resolution and my hands” (iv.xv.49). Cf. Lady Macbeth's “Your constancy / Hath left you unattended” (ii.ii.68—69); or “Virtue and she / Is her own dower” (All's Well That Ends Well ii.iii. 150–51). Such phrases show a kind of schizophrenic division in the self that is not unusual in Shakespeare. But if Laertes, in the speech discussed earlier in this essay, sees Ophelia as dual, this phrase of Claudius' seems to divide her into three. What part of her can be “Divided from herself,” except another self? And both are to be understood as distinct from her judgment. But this strange situation forced on us by the syntax dissolves if we see that the last five words amount to hendiadys for “her own fair judgment.”