Page 45 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xxxviii HAMLE T

But though the detection of poetic conceit or veiled
metaphor is often of great help to an editor seeking to
determine a reading or to elucidate a meaning, a con-
scious perception of them is not in most passages essential
to appreciation. So much had the use of double meaning
become a second nature with Shakespeare, that in all
probability it was generally involuntary on his part; and
that a reader should feel a connexion without being able
to distinguish the separate links in the chain very often
adds much to the pregnancy of the verse. Moreover, it
must be remembered that Shakespeare wrote not for
readers but for auditors, who would have no time- to
consider his linked metaphors too curiously. As a final
example may be taken the following scrap of dialogue
from the Bedroom-scene:

Queen. O Hamlet, speak no more.
Thou turn'st my eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and graine'd spots
As will not leave their tinct.
Hamlet. Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseame'd bed
Stewed in corruption, honeying, and making love
Over the nasty sty.
It is one of the most passionate passages in the most
passionate scene of the play; and yet it is threaded on
a string of images almost banal in character.. For
'graine'd' and 'tinct,' being terms of wool-dyeing, have
suggested 'enseamed,' another technical word from the
woollen industry meaning 'loaded with grease,' and that
in turn, because the 'seam' employed in the greasing
process was hog's-lard, has suggested the 'nasty sty.' It
is very unlikely that Shakespeare himself was aware of
this train of ideas; the son of the wool merchant of
Stratford was unwittingly drawing from the well of early
memories, that is all. It is even more unlikely that any
reader or spectator would be aware of it,, and in this
instance the associations are probably too remote to