Words of Diverse Significations: Hamlet’s Puns, Amphibology, and Allegorical Hermeneutics

Abstract

This essay contends that Hamlet’s incessant and often complex punning is not simply a foible, but an engagement with late sixteenth-century ideas about the verbal structures of the Bible. Reformation hermeneutics, disseminated through sermons and commentaries that sought to teach proper modes of interpretation, extensively addressed the implications of biblical words to hold multiple meanings. The literary fashion for puns and the hermeneutic interest in amphibology, arising in large part from debates about biblical allegory, were not merely co-incidental, but present different facets of the larger cultural interest in, and anxieties about, plurisignificance. Thus while Hamlet’s puns often convey philosophical, ontological, and psychological depth, his speech habit also takes a current literary and hermeneutical fashion and pushes it to extremes. Shakespeare’s Protestant character seems wryly and uneasily preoccupied with the incapacity of language to represent just one sense; his puns exemplify, but also test the boundaries, of multivalent literalism.