What's in a Word?
"The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back."
--Karl Krauss
Choose a single word to analyze in Hamlet. Write a 1-2 page (typed and double spaced) response paper about the significance of that word in terms of specific and central issues in the play. To help you nuance your argument in terms of the significance of your word, I want you to use the Oxford English Dictionary to get a sense of the early meanings of the word in circulation around 1600 (see below for more on this and for information on citing the OED in your papers). Be careful to structure an argument around the word you select (rather than simply defining the term and pointing out where and when it surfaces in the play).
I. Thinking About Your Word
Why is the word you selected significant, or rather, how does the play call attention to the significance of the word? Some questions to help you begin to consider this might include: Where is the word placed within a sentence, a speech, a scene or act ("who" for example, is the very first word of Hamlet, a play riddled with questions about identity)? How might it be significant in the context of a particular speech? a particular character? or the trajectory of the plot itself? Does the meaning of the word change or become more complex as the play develops? What is the etymology of the word (you can check this through the OED)? Is the complexity of the meaning of the word in any way tied into the thematic issues at stake in the play? What part(s) of speech is your word (verb? noun? adjective? preposition? dangling participle?) Is this--according to the OED--the first known use of the word in English? Why might that matter? (Just an aside: note how many new words in English are first located in Hamlet. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was a time when the English language was rapidly expanding. If you find some words in Renaissance drama estranging, alienating, or confusing, it may well be that many early modern men and women did too...that is, that they encountered a lot of words for the very first time in the Renaissance theater).
II. Defining Your Term
While the meanings of words differ according to where they are placed in a sentence, a speech, or a play, they also differ according to their place in time, in history. The Oxford English Dictionary will offer nuanced and historically specific definitions of words--and as such, is an invaluable tool for any analysis of words in Shakespeare. This dictionary will enable you to trace the etymologies of words and will give you a sense (through specific quotations from texts of different historical periods) of which meanings were in circulation at a particular time. The words we read in early modern texts can often seem deceptively familiar and the OED can help to complicate a close textual analysis. Whereas the word "individual," for example, now signifies, according to the Webster Dictionary, "existing as an indivisible whole," if you search the word in the OED, you will see an entry that looks quite a bit different. Go to the OED and search "individual." As you will see, in the Renaissance, "individual" meant both "That [which] cannot be separated; inseparable" AND "Existing as a separate indivisible entity; numerically one, single." Paradoxically, individual suggests BOTH a condition of autonomy (the self as separate fro others) and dependence (the self as part of others). Along these lines, for fun you may want to have a look at the early modern meanings for terms such as "character," "person," "authenticity," etc.
III. Citing the Oxford English Dictionary
For those concerned about citing the Oxford English Dictionary, here is a handout a friend of mine drew up (you'll need to use the online OED to look up these examples: "home" and "individual").
The Oxford English Dictionary is so well known that you can simply cite it as "OED, 2nd ed." A definition for an individual word can be cited from the OED with the abbreviation "s.v.," for the Latin sub verbo, "under the word." You will frequently want to cite an individual "sense" for a word, which is given with arabic numerals. Suppose, for instance, you're interested in the fact that in the nineteenth century the word "home" could mean "the usual contents of a house; a houseful" (take a look at the Oxford definition of "home" to see how this works; page down until you see sense 2c). Then you might write a sentence like this in your paper:
The word "home" could also mean "the usual contents of a house; a houseful" (OED, 2nd ed., s.v. "home," 2c).
For a simpler dictionary with short entries, you can probably get away with just the dictionary name and "s.v." For instance,
The primary meaning of "glamour" is "a magic spell"(Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. "glamour").
The beauty of the OED is that it provides quotation paragraphs with examples of uses of the word at various times. On occasion, you may wish to quote such passages. It might look something like the following (note how in this example we've dispensed with "s.v." since it's obvious from the context where we got the definition):
According to the OED, Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, coined the word "phlizz" in 1889 to mean "a fruit or flower that has no real substance." They suggest that the word connotes "anything without meaning of value, a mere name." The OED provides an example as late as 1926: In Galsworthy's novel, The Silver Spoon, it is asked, "What was his image of her but a phlizz, but a fraud?"
Again, for another example from the OED, you may be interested in conceptions of the individual in the Renaissance (take a look at the Oxford definition of "individual" to see how this works; scroll down until you see sense 3A), noting something like:
Jacob Burckhardt famously argued that the Renaissance was a period defined by the "rise of the individual." But in the Renaissance, the very concept of individuality was more complicated than Burckhardt's argument suggests. In the Renaissance, the very word "individual," for example, meant both "That [which] cannot be separated; inseparable" (OED, 2nd ed. s.v. "individual," 2) and that which exists "as a separate indivisible entity; numerically one, single" (3A).
This particular move was made by a well known scholar, Peter Stallybrass, in an essay called "Shakespeare, the Individual and the Text." If any of you are interested in this particular idea and the use of the OED in current scholarship, you can find his article in a volume called Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Greenberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Again, if your source is implicit in your sentence, you need not include the OED or s.v. in your citation. For example, Renaissance conceptions of the word "individual," according to The Oxford English Dictionary, include not only the that which "cannot be separated; inseparable" (2), but that which "exist[s] as a separate indivisible entity" (3A).
For the curious, bold and the brave: you may also want to look into some early dictionaries to see what you find on your particular word. Click on the following link:
Early Modern English Dictionary
IV. Quoting Shakespeare
To quote a line from Shakespeare, follow your quotation with the following notation for act, scene, and line numbers: (I.ii.45-6) or (1.2.45-6). Use either form of numeration, just be consistent. To signify line breaks in a passage that you cite, put the following mark (/) between lines as below:
Titus, linking the capacity to "passionate" one's grief with the expressive gestures of the hand, is not just disempowered as a politician, but as an actor, orator, and communicator as well: "Thy niece and I, poor creatures, want our hands / And cannot passionate our tenfold grief / With folded arms" (II.ii.6-8).
If the passage that you cite is over three lines, you may want to simply separate the quote from the main body of your text (in this case, no quotation marks are needed):
Titus, linking the capacity to "passionate" one's grief with the expressive gestures of the hand, is not just disempowered as a politician, but as an actor, orator, and communicator as well:
Thy niece and I, poor creatures, want our hands
And cannot passionate our tenfold grief
With folded arms. This poor right hand of mine
Is left to tyrranize upon my breast,
Who, when my heart, all mad with misery,
Beats in this hollow prison of my flesh,
Then thus I thump it down. (II.ii.6-10)
For those interested in Titus Andronicus, "passionate" might be an interesting word to track down in the OED.
V. Assignment Tools
Here are links to the Oxford English Dictionary and (for those who would like to search Hamlet for all occurances of your word) Word-Searchable Shakespeare.
Three Tips on Writing: For This and All Other Assignments
1. ANALYZE: Analyze, don't describe. If you find yourself writing in descriptive prose for more than two sentences, sit back and ask yourself why those sentences matter, then build the response into the sentence itself. Also, avoid generalizations that you can't back up. If you want to allude to a historical issue about "the Renaissance," get a source and cite it. Starting your essay with a strong focus will keep you fromovergeneralizing. Working always with textual specifics to ground your argument is part of the project of this assignment.
2. TRANSITIONS: Try to work to foreground the logic of your transitions from paragraph to paragraph. In each paragraph (usually at the beginning) signal your conceptual transition from idea to idea; this will sharpen your argument and enable your reader to follow the progression of your thinking.
3. PAPER TITLES: Titles (on shorter and longer assignments) should be "snappy" to the extent that they encode the central concern of your essay. They are the first words of your composition, so use them to set the tone and announce the subject. To take an example from Titus Andronicus, rather than a title that reads "Revenge in Titus Andronicus," or "A Study of Titus Andronicus," select something that will foreground your central idea and frame of reference. A Title such as, "Animating Corpses: Revenge and the Classical Past in Titus Andronicus" would compel readers to read on to see how these ideas are related and developed in your argument. You can see how composing a title is itself an analytic exercise, pushing you to think about what's really at stake in your paper.
Enjoy!