Page 44 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

I N T R O D U C T I O N

'food and diet' in the next line and 'stomach' in the line
following.
At the other extreme we have at 4. 7. 116-22 seven
lines of elaborate quibbling upon the word 'plurisy.'
A sixteenth-century spelling of 'pleurisy,' which is
rightly the inflammation of the pleura, i.e. the coverings
01 the lungs, it came to mean figuratively 'superabun-
dance,' or 'excess,' through a mistaken etymological
connexion with 'plus.' Hence we get
For goodness, growing to a plurisy,
Dies in his own too-muchj
and again
And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing,
which describes the pain in the chest and the difficult
breathing caused by pleurisy. Once the full connotation
of 'plurisy' in Elizabethan English is grasped it is not
difficult to follow the course of Shakespeare's thought.
But as often as not, especially in his later plays, the key-
image is suppressed altogether. When, for example,
Hamlet sums up Osric and his like in the words—
Thus has he—and many more of the same bevy that
I know the drossy age dotes on—only got the tune of the
time and, out of an habit of encounter, a kind of yeasty
collection, which carries them through and through the
most profound and winnowed opinions, and do but blow
them to their trial, the bubbles are out—
we understand them much better if we catch the hidden
picture of the fermentation of barley in a vat which un-
derlies them. Or again, the restored text of the opening
lines of the first soliloquy—
O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew—
ought not to trouble anyone who can see an image of
thawing snow behind the word 'sullied.'