SOURCE: Champion, Larry S. “‘A Springe to Catch Woodcocks’: Proverbs, Characterization, and Political Ideology in Hamlet.” Hamlet Studies 15, nos. 1/2 (summer/winter 1993): 24-39.

[In the following essay, Champion remarks on the numerous proverbs that appear in Hamlet, suggesting that they are used not only to delineate the characters, but also to highlight the political tensions surrounding the aging Elizabeth I and the lack of an heir to her throne.]

Proverbs so fascinated sixteenth-century England that they accomplished the unlikely journey from the edge of folklore to the core of academic learning. Those who collected them or who acclimatized foreign proverbs to English soil were “hailed as benefactors who enriched the ‘copy’ of their native tongue” (Wilson, “Shakespeare” 186).¹ In the first two forms of the grammar school the proverb came to be regarded as an invaluable aid in the teaching of translation, the purpose being both to “help the child to his Latins by known precepts culled from the spoken idiom” and to “inculcate in the stripling a suitable moral sentiment” (Orkin 79).² Such materials readily available to the Elizabethan pupil included John Withal's A Dictionary in English and Latin Deuised for the capacitye of Children and young beginners, Richard Tavener's Proverbs or Adagies gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus, Nicholas Udall's Flours of Terence, and Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique, which ran through six editions between 1553 and 1598. While not prescribed in the grammar schools, John Heywood's A Dialogue of Proverbs also was printed six times between 1546 and 1598.

Elizabethans, in other words, became “not merely proverb-loving but proverb-conscious” (Heseltine xiii), and these folk sayings abound in a variety of works ranging from “simple manuals for the young to some of the chief expressions of literary art” (Habenicht 17). Not surprisingly, they are ubiquitous in the drama of the period, their familiarity and simplistic nature often a source of comedy. Just as euphuism can easily become a parody of itself, the difference between persuasion and banal sententiousness is measured in relatively small degrees. And the playwright is quick to capitalize on rhetorical pretension and abuse. Captain Bobadil in Ben Jonson's Every Man In His Humor, for example, scorns Squire Downright as an insufferable boor: “He ha's not so much as a good phrase in his belly, but all old iron, and rustie proverbs! a good commoditie for some smith, to make hob-nailes of” (1.5.95-98). Perhaps the most notorious example is Nicholas, a servant in Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abingdon who is mockingly called Proverbs because of his overfondness for “old said sooth.” (1.2.228) Typical of his speech is his comment that he will not stir a foot to participate in an impending fight:

No, indeed; even as they brew so let them bake. I will not thrust my hand into the flame, an I need not; 'tis not good to have an oar in another man's boat; little said is soon amended, and in little meddling cometh great rest; 'tis good sleeping in a whole skin; so a man might come home by Weeping-Cross; no, by lady, a friend is not so soon gotten as lost; blessed are the peace-makers; they that strike with the sword, shall be bitten with the scabbard.

(3.2.430-38)

In a later passage (4.3.122 ff). he strings together fifty proverbs in fifty-three lines. His companions brand him a “whoreson proverb-book bound up in folio” (2.1.438-39): “speak men when they can to him, he'll answer with some rhyme-rotten sentence or old saying” (395-96).

Shakespeare also uses proverbs for comic purposes throughout his plays. In Henry V, for example, in response to the Dauphin's proverb-mongering about his great bravery and his anticipation of victory over the English at Agincourt, the Constable cautions that the French should use no “proverb so little kin to the purpose (3.7.68); and later he and Orleans privately mock the arrogant prince with a shower of proverbs such as “Give the devil his due,” “A pox of the devil” and “A fool's bolt is soon shot” (116-17, 119-20, 122). Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona employs proverbs like “Blessing of your heart, you brew good ale” (3.1.304-05) to catalogue the virtues of the milkmaid who has stolen his heart, and his counterpart Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice spouts proverbs in defense of his decision to leave Shylock's service.³ Proverbs color the insults exchanged by Dromio of Ephesus and Luce on either side of the door to Antipholus' house (The Comedy of Errors 3.1.51 ff.); Puck, while by trickery separating the quarrelsome young Athenians, recites a trite proverb to assure the spectators that eventually the lovers will be properly paired; Ford defends his fear of cuckoldry through a spate of proverbs in The Merry Wives of Windsor (3.5.141-52), and the Host of the Garter Inn describes Parson Hugh Evans as one who in his sermons provides “the proverbs and the no-verbs” (3.1.105); the Bastard uses proverbs to mock Austria's vaunted claims of bravery in King John (2.1.134 ff), and in 1 Henry IV Hal through proverbs comically assures Poins that the devil will have Falstaff's soul. (1.2.117-19)

Comedy, however, reflects only one aspect of the significance of proverbs in dramatic literature of the period. Obviously, expressions that carry the weight of traditional wisdom and sound authoritative can, if cleverly utilized, be an effective strategy for dealing with surrounding figures, what Hardin Craig has described as a “disarming rhetorical aid to the individual who seeks to influence his auditors for good or evil” (249). Because of their “interactional and semiotic features” (Norrick 5), proverbs are sufficiently ambiguous to take root in a given social situation (Whiting 298).⁴ In drama, more specifically, proverbs can enhance the credibility of a character by lending him an air of experience while at the same time drawing the spectator closer to him by creating a sense of shared intimacy, affability, and openness, breaking down psychological defense mechanisms that serve as barriers to trust in personal communication. In Othello, for instance, Shakespeare uses proverbs to enhance a bonding, if uncomfortable, familiarity between the spectator and Iago, who delivers 66 of the 152 proverbs found in the play, 27 of 39 in the four opening scenes in which he is laying out his scheme against Othello and 16 of 25 in the critical scene (3.3) in which he lures the Moor into his trap. And Shakespeare uses such a verbal pattern as part of the strategy for prompting a strong, vicarious relationship between viewer and protagonist in Hamlet, a play in which seventeen characters speak a total of 212 proverbs⁵ with Hamlet himself delivering more than half (107).

Shakespeare's use of the proverb in Hamlet, more precisely, forms the focus of this paper. The aim is not to identify heretofore unnoticed maxims in the play but to examine certain dramaturgical functions concerning those that have already been catalogued by Dent, Tilley, F. P. Wilson, and others⁶—specifically, how the proverb serves as a conscious rhetorical strategy both to develop and enhance characterization and also to lend emotional and intellectual credibility to an ideological leitmotif that foregrounds political issues of concern to the Elizabethan spectator. Obviously proverbs cannot in themselves carry a theme or plot line, but they can be used to reinforce and energize an issue by rendering the audience more responsive to the character and his/her ideas.

Most noticeably, Shakespeare employs proverbs as a method of establishing character individuation. Polonius, for instance, who delivers twenty-two proverbs in two of the eight scenes in which he appears, is much like Nicholas Proverb in Porter's play. In context, the proverbs he spouts have a cumulatively comic effect; trite and cliché-ridden, they accentuate an approaching senility in the sometimes doddering old man.⁷ His moral precepts spoken to Laertes, more specifically, are not in themselves humorous; but audiences—and, as often played, Laertes and Ophelia themselves—rarely fail to be amused as saw piles upon saw to create a virtual parody of sound moral advice: “Give thy thoughts no tongue” (59) (A wise man hath his mouth in his heart while a fool has his heart in his mouth—T219); “Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar” (61) (Familiarity breeds contempt—F741), Test the “adoption” of “those friends thou hast” (62) (Try before you trust—T595); “Grapple [your true friends] unto thy soul with hoops of steel” (62-63) (Keep well thy friends when thou hast gotten them—F752); “Do not dull thy palm with entertainment” (64) (Give not your right hand to every man—H68); “Give every man thy ear but few thy voice” (68) (Hear much but speak little—M1277); “Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment” (69) (A man should hear all parts ere he judge any—M299); “Costly thy habit [but]not gaudy” (70-71) (Apparel oft proclaims the man—A283, or Clothes make the man—C541); “Loan oft loses both itself and friend” (76) (Who loans to a friend loses double—F725). In similar terms, Polonius warns Ophelia that Hamlet's amorous advances are merely ploys to capture her virginity, “springes to catch woodcocks” (115; S788). He admonishes her not to take Hamlet's pledge of love seriously: “These blazes … you must not take for fire” (117, 120) (The bavin burns bright, but it is just a blaze—B107).

Such a use of proverbs also taints the rest of Polonius' immediate family with a degree of vacuousness. As Doris Falk has observed, Laertes and Ophelia “share a destiny compounded of truism and truth, of absurdity and justice” (36). Laertes, for example, sounds much like his father in warning his sister that Hamlet, in taking a wife, cannot “carve for himself” (1.3.20; C110). It, he adds, “fits [her] wisdom so far to believe it [and to] give his saying deed” (25, 27) (Saying and doing are two different things—S119). She must keep herself “out of the shot and danger of desire” (35) (Out of gunshot—G482) since “Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes” (38) (Envy shoots at the fairest mark—E175) and the canker too often “galls the infants of the spring” (39) (The canker soonest eats the fairest rose—C56). In stark contrast to Hamlet's markedly intellectual reaction to the death of his father, Laertes' immediate and unmeditated response to Polonius' death is “let come what comes” (4.5.136; C529). A proverb leaps to his lips again when he mourns for Ophelia, that “rose of May” (158) (As fresh as May flowers—F389). At one moment he excuses his tears for his dead sister as the custom of nature (4.7.187) (Custom makes sin no sin—C934); at another he proclaims that his grief is strong enough to “o'ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head / of blue Olympus” (5.1.253-54) (To heap Ossa upon Pelion—081). Even at the moment of his fatal wounding with the rapier he himself has tipped with poison, he echoes a variation of the proverb his father used earlier in observing that death is “a woodcock to mine own springe” (5.2.306) (The fowler is caught in his own net—F626, S788).

Ophelia, likewise, is never lost for a proverb. Her father's admonitions about Hamlet are “in [her] memory lock'd” (1.3.85) (To keep the key—K24.1); and she cautions Laertes, concerning his own advice, to “Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me … heaven [while yourself treading] the primrose path of dalliance” (47-49) (Practice what you preach—P537a). When Hamlet appears in her closet, he is as “pale as his shirt” (2.1.78) (As pale as a clout—C446). In his distraction he, “like sweet bells jangled out of tune” (3.1.158; T598.1), is no longer the “glass of fashion, and the mould of form” (153) (Like king like people—K470). Later in her madness she implies that she is a “baker's daughter [strumpet]” (4.5.43; B54.1); and, calling both Polonius' shroud and his hair as white “as the mountain snow” (36, cf. 195; S591), she trusts that he “made a good end” (186; E133.1).

The pattern is similar, then, for each member of Polonius' family. Whether it be in their overly pious and moralistic tone, the simplistic manner in which they are frequently spoken on stage, or the fact that on numerous occasions they tend to transform a highly dramatic situation into near-ludicrous melodrama by reducing a complex personal moment into generic formula, proverbs in the mouths of Polonius, Laertes, and Ophelia reflect an intellectual shallowness that both serves as a foil to Hamlet's mental agility and ultimately contributes to their destruction in the intrigue ridden Danish court.

Claudius' proverbs in his first scene on stage, in which surrounded by courtiers and councilors, he attempts to justify his marriage to the Queen within weeks of the elder Hamlet's death, also help to establish his character for the spectators. The oxymoronic iteration and the overly unctuous and justificatory tone, coupled with a virtual preemption of dialogue with surrounding figures, suggest something sinister and Machiavellian about this newly self-proclaimed king and what Madeleine Doran has branded his “politician's speech” (265). The publicly acknowledged grief is carefully controlled by use of the royal “we” and by the immediate suggestion that self-interest mandates it be brief: “We with wisest sorrow think on him” (1.2.6) (He is not wise that is not wise for himself—W532) since “with remembrance of ourselves” (7) (We should remember ourselves—R72.1) and “with an auspicious, and a dropping eye” (11) (To cry with one eye and laugh with the other—E248) we must “Throw to the earth / This unprevailing woe” (106-07) (Past cure, past care—C921).

In regard to characterization proverbs function most significantly in the delineation of Hamlet himself; whereas those spoken by other figures point to particular dominant traits and tend to establish a consistent personality, Hamlet's reveal something of the complexity of the man, like his soliloquies reflecting diverse, even polarized, aspects of his total characterization. They function, in effect, as a device for complication rather than for clarity, since with Hamlet the decision or the mind-set of one moment is forgotten or ignored in the next. One minute, for instance, he is witty and sarcastically enigmatic, muttering to Claudius that he is “A little more than kin, and less than kind” (1.2.65) (The nearer in kin the less in kindness—K38) and, in response to the King's request that he not return to Wittenberg, pointedly quipping, “I shall in all my best obey you, madam” (120) (Yours to command in the way of honesty—W155). Later, observing the bones tossed up by the gravedigger, he observes that those now dead were “sheeps and calves [to] seek assurance in” legal documents (5.1.116-17) (As simple as a sheep—S295.1; As wise as a calf—C16.1), and he speaks of being undone unless he can converse with the gravedigger “by the card” (138; C75.1). He is cruelly sarcastic in telling Polonius that, were he honest, he would, “as this world goes” (2.2.178) (Thus goes the world—W884.1), “be one man pick'd out of ten thousand” (179) (A man among a thousand—M271). He calls Polonius a fishmonger “not out of his swaddling-clouts” (383; S1021.1) who should “play the fool nowhere but in's own house” (3.1.132; A67). He carps to Ophelia that “wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them” (138) (A cuckold is a beast—C876.2), that it would “cost [her] a groaning to take off [his] edge” (3.2.250-51; E57.1), and that she “mistake [s her] husbands” (252) (A man must take a wife for better or for worse—M65). The death he administers to Polonius is, for fat king or lean beggar, “variable service, two dishes, but to one table” (4.3.23-24) (Death is the great leveler—D143); and of Osric's “duty” he quips that “A does well to commend it himself, there are no tongues else for's turn” (5.2.183-84) (He must praise himself since no man else will—P545.1).

Wit, however, is but one aspect of Hamlet; elsewhere proverbs reflect his impetuosity and vengefulness. He proclaims that he will move against Claudius “with wings as swift / As meditation” (1.5.29-30) (As swift as thought—T240). Furious that his uncle murdered his father without benefit of confession, with “crimes … as flush as May” (3.3.81) (As fresh as May—M763, F389), he desires to “trip [Claudius], that his heels may kick at heaven” (93) (To kick up one's heels—H392) so that his soul “may be damn'd and black / As hell” (94-95; H397). In his mother's bedchamber he hears a “rat” behind the arras (3.4.24) (The rat destroyed itself with its own noise—R31, R30.1), and he observes concerning the dead Polonius that “to be too busy is some danger” (33; B759.1).

At other times Hamlet's proverbs reflect a moralist with a quick conscience. He would gladly, for instance, make his own “quietus” (3.1.74; Q16), but the “rub” (64; R196) is that one would rather “bear those ills [he has], / Than fly to others that he knows not of” (80-81) (Better the harm I know than that I know not—H166). He will “speak daggers” (3.2.396; D8.1) to his mother in her bedchamber and wring her heart “if custom has not brass'd it” (3.4.37) (As hard as brass—B605.1), since “monster custom” (161) (Custom makes sin no sin—C934) “can almost change the stamp of nature” (168) (Custom is a tyrant—C932). Unless she repents, virtue will “melt in her own fire” (85) (Fry in her own grease—G433), and “This bad [beginning will have] worse remain [ing] behind” (179) (An ill beginning has as ill ending—B261, W918).

At other moments he is deeply suspicious or charged with grief and despair. His “I doubt some foul play” (1.2.155), “Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak” (2.2.593) (Murder will out—M1315), and “O my prophetic soul!” (1.5.40; S666.2) harden into “break my heart for I must hold my tongue” (1.2.159) (Grief pent up will break the heart—G449), “I do not set my life at a pin's fee” (1.4.65) (My life is not worth a pin—P334), and his lament that the “time is out of joint” (1.5.188; J74) and that he has been “born to set it right” (189) (Alas that ever I was born—B140.1). This tone echoes again in later acts in his relativistic pronouncement that “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (2.2.249-50) (A man is weal or woe as he thinks himself so—M254), in “my thanks are too dear a halfpenny” (273-74) (Not worth a halfpenny—H50.1), in his “tak[ing] arms against a sea of troubles” (3.1.58; S177.1), and in his branding himself as one who is “pigeon-liver'd, and lack[ing in] gall” (2.2.577) (Doves have no gall—D574).

In a word, Hamlet is a man of varied, even contradictory emotions who but slenderly knows himself. In moving from proverb to proverb his convictions and dispositions appear to change drastically, as if they were a kaleidoscope of diverse faces rather than projections of the same fundamental personality. So, too, proverbial comments about Hamlet from surrounding figures compound this complexity. Polonius, for instance, is convinced the prince's “still harping on my daughter” (2.2.187-88) (To harp on one string—S396) is evidence of a problem of unrequited love “whose violent property foredoes itself” (2.1.100; N321). Gertrude's “O Hamlet, speak no more! / Thou turnest my eyes into my very soul” (3.4.88-89; B546.1) in the closet scene suggests a moral absolutist. At other points her proverbs question his basic sanity; if her comment that her son is “Mad as the sea and wind when both contend / which is the mightier” (4.1.7-8; S170) is conceivably a ploy to protect him, there is no such explanation for her remark during his altercation with Laertes at Ophelia's grave: “This is mere madness, / And thus a while the fit will work on him; / Anon, as patient as the female dove” (5.1.284-86; D573). Ophelia's earlier remarks that Hamlet appeared to her “Pale as a shirt, his knees knocking at each other” (2.1.78; C446) and that his words were “Like sweet bells jangled out of tune, and harsh” (3.1.158; T598.1) have a similar unsettling effect upon the spectator, despite Hamlet's claim that he is “but mad north-northwest” and that he “know[s] a hawk from a handsaw” (2.2.378-79; H226).⁸ Claudius' comment “these words are not mine” (3.2.97) (While the word is in your mouth it is your own; when it is spoken it is another's—W776), when he is unable to understand Hamlet's remarks just prior to the play-within-the-play, further suggests the possibility of genuine rather than “antic” madness.

There is obviously no single face for the protagonist that the pieces of the first four acts can be made to fit without distortion and oversimplification. Indeed, much of the power of the tragedy lies in the ambiguous “biases and indirection of thought” (Donawerth 33) created in part through the use of proverbs that, in a “variety of idioms” (Ewbank 90), provide flickering insights into a complex and profoundly human personality. Moreover, while proverbs reflect his continuing mystery prior to his sea change, they also signal a kind of insight following his return to the Danish court, a sense of consistency and conviction even during his participation in actions that will leave a trail of human carnage from Gertrude's bedchamber to the great hall of the castle. Hamlet's conviction that “There's a divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10) (Man proposes, God disposes—M298), that “a man's life's no more than to say ‘one’” (74; 050.1), that “to know a man well were to know himself” (139) (know thyself—K175), and that all is subject to “this fell sergeant, Death” (336) (Death is the great leveler—D142.2)⁹ points (whatever the spectator may think of it) to a protagonist who has arrived at a kind of faith, whether through Christian conviction, the assumption that “there are no invariable criteria to appeal to outside of a given political context” (Asher 141), or the realization that he can confirm no “final and coherent constructions of reality” (Warner 274).

While Shakespeare uses proverbs as a method of enriching the characterization in the play, he also employs them to emotionalize a plot line that interrogates traditional political assumptions in his society. For one thing, he sprinkles the dialogue of the first gravedigger with proverbs to add a folksy and humorous quality to (and thus to deflect) a passage of pointed social criticism. As Michael Cohen has recently observed, “The clowns see the suborned coroner and priest as agents of an upper-class conspiracy to make sure the rich and privileged are treated with class distinctions even after death.” (80) Complaining that Ophelia is allowed a Christian burial only because she is a gentlewoman and that it is “the more pity” that “great folk” are so privileged, the gravedigger mitigates the effect upon aristocratic ears of his assertion that a commoner (gravedigger) is worth more (builds stronger) by surrounding it with proverbs: “Confess thyself” (5.1.39) (Confess and be hanged—C587) and “Your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating” (57) (A dull ass must have a sharp spur—A348.1).

More importantly, Shakespeare through a series of proverbs forces the spectators' attention to political issues that underlie the major action. Obviously, the surface issues of the tragedy deal with the moral dimensions of murder. Hamlet grapples with philosophic questions concerning the nature of man and the universe in which he lives, questions of right and wrong, of justice and law, of the meaning of death, of maternal love perverted by sin and corruption, of the nature of vengeance and an individual's right to pursue it. At the same time, however, the murder victim in the narrative was a king, the assassin has become a king, the revenger apparently anticipated election to the throne at his father's death, and the closure results in a power vacuum at the very heart of monarchic government. Moreover, there are at least four specific references to Hamlet's political ambitions spaced throughout the play—Claudius' comment that he is “the most immediate to our throne” (1.2.109); Rosencrantz's probing observation that, if Denmark is like a prison, “Why then your ambition makes it one” (2.2.251); Rosencrantz's assurance that he has “the voice of the king himself for [his] succession in Denmark” (3.2.241-42); and Hamlet's concern in act 5 that Claudius has “Popp'd in between th' election and [his] hopes” (5.2.65). Issues of tyranny, usurpation, legitimacy, succession, and court sycophancy could never be far from the thoughts of Englishmen at the turn of the seventeenth century, with Elizabeth old, an heir unnamed, legitimacy a question to which Elizabeth a few years earlier had given a political response through the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Essex's rebellion and attempted usurpation literally occurring in the probable year of the play's composition, inflation increasing at an alarming rate, and charges of favoritism at court almost routine.

To tap that interest Shakespeare develops a pattern of proverbs that foreground and emotionally reinforce political concerns marginalized by the narrative. Rosencrantz, for example, acting as Claudius' agent, attempts to pry information out of Hamlet with the maxim “You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty if you deny your griefs to a friend” (3.2.338-39) (Grief is lessened when imparted to others—G447). And Polonius' proverbs reveal this high courtier to be fundamentally devious and sycophantic. In sending Reynaldo to spy on his own son, for instance, he explains that “Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth” (2.1.60) and that he “By indirections [will] find directions out” (63) both variations on To tell a lie and find the truth—L237. The moment he discovers what he believes to be the cause of Hamlet's distraction, his only thought is to seek out the king to explain this “ecstasy of love / Whose violent property foredoes itself” (99-100) (Nothing violent can be permanent—N321) and thus ingratiate himself further with the ruler. His obsequious deference is reflected in his promise to be brief since “Brevity is the soul of wit” (2.2.90) (Greatest wit consists in fewest words—B652), his offhanded comment during his report “But let that go” (95) (Truth hath no need of rhetoric—T575), and in his assurance to Claudius that Ophelia realizes she is not of royal stock and thus has no designs upon the prince: “Lord Hamlet is a prince out of [her] star; / This must not be” (141-42) (To be out of one's element—E107).

It is through Hamlet's proverbs that the spectators are most consistently and forcefully reminded of the power struggle underlying the narrative. For one thing, his own political ambitions are implied throughout the play, whether through his aphorism about being “a little more than kin” (1.2.65; K38); or about living in the secret parts of strumpet fortune (Fortune is a strumpet—F603.1); or about his fortune's having “turn[ed] Turk” (3.2.276) (To go bad—T609); or about eating “promise-crammed” air (possibly a homonymic pun on “heir”) (3.2.93; M226); or his pointedly unfinished remark to Rosencrantz, “While the grass grows” (343) (While the grass grows, the seed starves—G423); or his comment to Horatio, “The cat will mew, and dog will have his day” (5.1.292) (Every dog has his day—D464). His disguise of innocence is almost shorn away during the play-within-the-play with his observation that “the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge” (254) (The croaking raven bodes misfortune—R33). He later informs his mother that he will take delight in trapping the king's agents Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their own net, like the “engineer / Hoist on his own petar” (3.4.206-07) (The fowler is caught in his own net—F626, To beat one at his own weapon—W204, P243.1).¹⁰

It is on the question of legitimacy that Hamlet's proverbs essentially focus. Claudius' integrity is directly impugned in the comment that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (1.5.108; F16). And his corruptions are manifest. He fails to bridle himself as a sound ruler must; his propensity for alcohol leads him, in having canons announce his every drink, to a “custom more honor'd in the breach than the observance” (1.4.15-16) (A bad custom is like a good cake, A bad custom is better broken than kept—C931) and has contributed to a disastrous national reputation since other nations “clip us drunkards, and with swinish phrase / Soil our addition” (19-20) (As drunk as a swine—S1042). He manipulates others to his own purposes; Rosencrantz, for instance, is merely a spunge to be tolerated so long as he is useful, “first mouth'd, to be last swallow'd” (4.2.18-19; N363).¹¹ He surrounds himself with corrupt officials; the Danish court is an “unweeded garden / That grows to seed [and is filled with] things rank and gross in nature” (1.2.135-36) (Weeds come forth on the fattest field if it is untilled—W241). Indeed, the kingdom itself is corrupted by the figure at the center: “The dram of ev'1 / Doth all the noble substance of a doubt / To his own scandal” (1.4.36-38) (One ill condition mars all the good—C585).

Hamlet is convinced, however, that the tyrant cannot maintain his composure. With the play at court he will “tent him to the quick” (2.2.597; Q13). Prior to the performance he ironically assures Claudius that those with clear consciences need fear nothing: “Let the gall'd jade wince” (3.2.243-44) (Touch a galled horse on his back, and he will wince—H700). When the king rises to leave, mid-performance, Hamlet quips, “What, frighted with false fire?” (266; F40.1), and he observes, concerning the hasty departure, “let the strooken deer go weep” (271) (As the stricken deer withdraws himself to die—D189) and “some must watch while some must sleep” (273) (Thus goes the world—W884.1).

At one point Hamlet's comments seem pointedly to justify political action. He notes that the Poles and the Norwegians “Will not debate the question of this straw” (4.4.26) (Not worth a straw—S198) but will fight to the death “Even for an egg-shell” (53) (Not worth an eggshell—E95). And he proclaims that it is right for them (and by analogy him and others) to kill, to “Go to their graves like beds” (62) (To accept danger without question—B192.1) “when honor's at the stake” (55) (To have one's honor [reputation] at the stake [on the line]—S813.2).

Shakespeare, in a word, uses proverbs not only as a verbal device for character individuation and development but also to lend emotional coloration to the political dimensions of a narrative that, while centered on personal revenge, he created “in the aftermath of a failed rebellion (for whose leader he had once thought to intercede), on the threshold of a new regime (whose character was not yet imaginable), for a theater perceived at the time as powerful social practice” (Patterson 101). In such a manner he is able to generate a high degree of interest in oppositional politics by depicting diverse ideologies that compete both on stage in recreated Denmark and in the minds of the English spectators. It would be dangerously presumptuous—and irrelevant—to infer anything about Shakespeare's politics from this dramatic strategy. And it would be equally dangerous—and inaccurate—to infer any kind of unanimity in the spectators' responses. The Elizabethan audience was composed of heterogeneous classes and of individuals with strikingly different political agendas. The theater was the “site of a clash of discourses determined by class affiliation” (Weimann 36); and, once a play made its way past the barriers of censorship, it had to hold the attention of a broad public drawn both from the aristocratic and the artisan and working class. While the playwright was not free to create on stage an arrant subversion of authority (and in many instances probably had no desire to do so), what he could do was to develop strategies to explore critically the sources of authority (Dollimore 4).

Proverbs form an important part of such a rhetorical strategy through which Shakespeare creates a political internal dialectic. If he employs them in a context that consistently strengthens the appeal of those who oppose autocratic power, he does so in all likelihood for the sake of effective dramaturgy in the face of a socially and politically mixed audience, to equalize interest in the familiar and dominant monarchic absolutism and the politically marginal concept of decentralized government.¹² The effectiveness of this balance is less readily apparent today not only because of the erosion of the rhetorical power of proverbs but also because of fundamental differences in political perspective.

Notes

1. Henry Peacham in 1593 described the proverb as a locution “grounded vpon the strong foundation of experiences confirmed by all times, allowed in all places, and subscribed to by all men” (86-87); three centuries later Disraeli characterized them as containing a “parsimony of words prodigal of sense” (1: 425). More recently, they have been called “situational formulas” (Zimmer 38) bringing us “close to man and often near to wisdom” (Whiting et al. 83).

2. Proverbs were considered “the properties, the proofes, the purities, the elegances” (Florio 49), “caueats … both profitable and delightful” (Camden 271), the means by which one knows those things “nedefull or expediente to bee dooen” (Erasmus 4), a method of displaying “the contraries of things, perferring always the best: declaring thereby both the profits of vertue, and the inconveniences of vices, that we, considering both, may embrace the good and eschew the evil” (Baldwin 21). As Thomas Wilson observed, “In praising or dispraising, we must be well stored ever with such good sentences, as are often used in this our life, the which through art being increased, help much to persuasion” (116).

3. Tilley argues that many of the unexplained jests in the dialogue result from proverbs whose contexts are obscure (“Pun and Proverb” 495). As Hilda M. Hulme observes, the challenge in understanding proverbs is “to find a way of entering into the particular kind of proverb games which characterized the speech community in which Shakespeare lived” (40).

4. The power of the proverb is readily demonstrated. It, for example, is the “most popular folklore item used by Madison Avenue, … awakening positive traditional feelings in the consumer” (Mieder and Mieder 309). On the use of proverbial language to emotionalize contemporary speeches and addresses, see Mieder 14-22 and Miller and Villarreal 151-55.

5. This number is surpassed only in two of Shakespeare's most highly rhetorical works—Romeo and Juliet with 248 and Love's Labor's Lost with 223.

6. The basis for my discussion is Dent, who—by building upon Tilley (Dictionary), Whiting and Whiting, and F. P. Wilson (Oxford)—has identified 4,451 proverbs in Shakespeare: 1609 in the comedies (an average of 123 per play), 1280 in the tragedies (128), 1183 in the histories (118), and 379 in the romances (75). Each of the proverbs cited in Hamlet is coded to Appendix A in Dent; in second citations and in those instances in which Shakespeare's wording is sufficiently similar for the meaning to be clear, only code references are indicated in the text.

7. Polonius is a “foolish prattling knave” (Bennett 3) whose use of “quibbling and plurisignation” (Clayton 60) signals a “love of sleuthing on a trail of policy” (Mahood 119).

8. This proverb appears to operate at the level of a triple pun, the comparison of two workmen's tools (Anderson 200), of two birds (handsaw as a variant of heronshaw—Drew 495), or of two utterly incongruous objects.

9. Critics have suggested various sources for Shakespeare's use of this proverb—Sylvester's Du Bartas (Leishman 196-97), the pictorial and literary tradition of the Dance of Death (Pecheux 75), the tradition in the morality plays of depicting Death as a “sergeant-at-arms with his mace” (Viswanathan 85), a general currency reflected in earlier manuscripts (Pitts 488).

10. Warren V. Shepherd notes that this is a recurring motif in the play, with Hamlet constantly hoisting others with their own petards such as words, players, sailing craft, legal documents, fencing foils and poison (282).

11. Hamlet, who—according to John Hunt—is in such anatomical references “methodically deconstructing the body” (30), must ultimately come to terms with his contempt for the physical.

12. Taylor may well be correct that an individual proverb by nature adheres to the “middle way,” that it “will not champion martyrdom or villainy” (141). Demonstrably, however, Shakespeare's cumulative use of proverbs provides rhetorical support for those who oppose an absolutist government. The political balance was readjusted by the social realities of monarchic government for those who viewed the initial performances.

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