The Usage And Affects Of Comedy

Simone Zuidema
AP Literature
Mrs. Kigar
March 20, 2023
The Usage and Affects of Comedy in Hamlet
Comedy has the power to surpass poetic language in the sense that it establishes a connection between the speaker and the audience. While powerful flowing speech may be uncomfortably sentimental, jokes penetrate the viewer and deliver a morsel of truth to be digested. In Shakespeare’s tragic play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the brooding Prince delivers a myriad of witty, sarcastic, and funny lines that aid in Hamlet’s development of his “madman” persona. His clever asides also expose the personalities of those around him, often showing their lack of wit or their propriety. Hamlet’s first lines in the play are a witty play on words that come at

His use of the phrase “country matters” could mean either primitive matters, but more likely the first syllable of these words was overemphasized - leading the audience to other conclusions. When Ophelia delivers the line “I thinking nothing, my lord” this brings back her naivety and her reflex to be led by men (3.2.120-127). Hamlet on the other hand twists the word “nothing” and implies the anatomical differences between men and women (Limon 2018). Hamlet is being overly clever to contrast Ophelia’s dippy personality, which has been molded by her father and anyone without a “nothing” telling her what to do. His innuendos are less sly over time; he takes Ophelia’s use of the word “keen” from describing his wittiness to outwardly stating it would take her “a groaning to take off mine edge” (3.2.273). This double entendre which he makes outwardly to Ophelia shows a certain brashness in an ungentlemanly manner that undoubtedly makes her uncomfortable. He’s teasing her because he knows she cannot respond to his remarks in a way that would reveal she understands the actions he is referring to. By flaunting his quick wit to Ophelia who cannot respond, either because she really is not as quick as him, or because she chooses not to out of obedience to the societal convention of female propriety, Hamlet controls their conversations with one-sided banter.

He rhymes and word-plays to the confusion of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The king is a thing-” (4.3.27). ‘or he may refer to the legal theory of the “king’s two bodies”’… Hamlet’s syllogism about regal bodies and nothingness does indeed refer to political theology … in calling the king a ‘thing of nothing’ Hamlet is also passing judgement on the ghostly soul of his father” (Davies 2020). He recites pieces of legal doctrine that give power to the King, and bind people’s taxes to the position of the king, and not the dead or alive monarch. Concealing the body with another set of riddles, he tells the King his consultant is at supper, the worms' supper, and that he will soon eat Polonius through a fish that has consumed a worm that has feasted upon the late Polonius. He’s nearly gleeful in these lines, deriving joy from messing with his father’s victim by messing with his victim's