Hamlet: Analytical Essay About Style

Hamlet has style. Hamlet as in the play, not the character, and style not in terms of fashion and knowing how to dress, but as in the combination of different literary elements in order to capture that certain elegance in one’s writing. Shakespeare implements these various literary devices for the purpose of enhancing his writing, typically to emphasize a specific point or to set a certain mood for a scene. In passages that are important in the play there are usually an abundance of these devices. Ones that are more easily detectable and obvious, then there are also ones that are more subtle and sophisticated. Soliloquies are often places where emphasis is needed and thus a majority of the time they are full of literary devices. A particular passage in which there are an assortment of different devices that fit together well and reinforce his rage at his mother being with his uncle, starts in Act 3, Scene 4, Line 53 with Hamlet’s soliloquy, stating the difference between his father, Hamlet, and his uncle, Claudius, to Gertrude.

Perhaps the most obvious literary devices that Shakespeare draws upon to illustrate Hamlet’s anger towards his mother’s new marriage comes in the two forms of repetition and hyperbolic clauses. Hamlet is dumbfounded by the fact that his mother who was married to such a respected, skilled man, would marry such a disliked, untalented man. He is still acting crazy and goes off into a rant about the contrasting aspects of the two men. Hamlet believes that his father, Hamlet is so clearly above Claudius in every way. The repetition of “Have you eyes?” draws your attention to the fact that Hamlet has worked himself into fury and doesn’t care that he is being disrespectful to his mother by asking her a qu...

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...e 4, line 93, “Nay, but to live /In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, /Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love /Over the nasty sty.” One of the most used sounds in this sentence was the “s” in “sweat”, “enseamèd”, “stewed”, and “sty.” All of these words along with the “d” sounds create a mood that portrays Hamlet as in a rage and disgusted by his mother’s actions.

The style of the writing creates a particular connotation that the author couldn’t have captured otherwise. Shakespeare implements innumerous literary devices throughout the whole play and especially concentrates them in soliloquys as they tend to emphasize the importance of the passage and help us feel the tone of the scene. All of the literally devices that were scattered amongst Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 4 enabled us to get a full sense of his anger and truly observe his disgust.