ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ways to engage classical rhetoric in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. So often the preserve of political oratory or literary study, rhetoric can be a powerful tool to unlock both conscious and unconscious impulses in the rehearsal room. Focusing on the operation of epizeuxis, which is defined as the “fastening together” of identical words or phrases with no others in between and with no obvious alteration of sense – “Buzz, buzz,” as Hamlet says to the pompous Polonius – we observe how this obsessively repetitive figure captures a kind of anti-rhetorical rhetoric marking the emergence of the language of turbulent thinking in Shakespeare’s later tragedies. In prose passages, the antic Prince performs a studied early modern conception of madness that renders epizeuxis an erratic, self-consciously modern figure. In contrast, Hamlet’s familial interactions, in verse passages as psychologically stressed as they are metrically insistent, impose a compulsive rhythm, a disturbing tic of mental distraction. Nothing in early modern writing on melancholy quite captures this notion of insistent repetition as the expression of traumatic memory. Yet Hamlet’s manic repetitiveness expresses something of that “intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible,” that T.S. Eliot imagines lying just beyond Shakespeare’s – and perhaps our – comprehension.
