ABSTRACT
In William Shakespeare’s time, quotability was easier to achieve than in any other period before electronic copy-pasting. This chapter discusses contemporary praise for the classical references used by ‘honey-tongued Shakespeare’. It provides critical comments that deplore Shakespeare’s irreverent puns and allusive folksiness. The half-annoyed, half-admiring puzzlement that Shakespeare’s verbal ‘flow’ provoked in contemporaries and critics is also recognizable in the onstage reactions he scripted for characters that are confronted with ‘conference’ as ‘flowing’ as his own. Biblical names – as in ‘Adam digged’ – are perhaps the most overt and unequivocal markings for scriptural derivation; Shakespeare again manages to complicate them by including echoes of the scriptural pop culture that had brought Biblical characters to the stage, to the pulpit and into the public sphere. The First Gravedigger names Adam, but quotes his story from a popular song, not from the Bible, and Hamlet himself marks the Old Testament judge Jephthah as a character in a ‘pious chanson’.
