What Does an Allusion Do?

Shakespeare’s plays are packed with allusions, many of them allusions to classical literature since the classical Latin authors were what young boys studied in grammar school as part of mastering speaking and writing in Latin and in English. Hamlet’s first soliloquy provides an excellent place to engage students in answering the questions, “What is this allusion” “What does this allusion mean” and “What does this allusion do or what can it be made to do” Here is a short segment of Hamlet’s soliloquy that offers two allusions whose import students can work out with the help of the notes:

A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father’s body Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she— O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourned longer—married with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules—(1.2.147-53) Hamlet describes his mother at the funeral of King Hamlet as being “Like Niobe, all tears” before expressing his incomprehension as to how she could not only have ceased to mourn her incomparable husband but then married his bestial younger brother (working out the significance of “Hyperion to a satyr” will establish this second point). The note provided by Philip Edwards in his edition of Hamlet informs us that Niobe is “[t]he mythical mother whose fourteen children were slain by the gods because she boasted about them. She wept until she was turned to stone— and still the tears flowed”. Hamlet, that is, believes his mother should have continued to mourn her late husband and weep even after her metaphoric petrification.

The first act of Hamlet forms a coherent unit, both in action and temporally, covering 36 hours and reaching a climax with Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost and his response to that encounter. His soliloquy is an opportunity for students to explore how he struggles to regain control of his understanding of the universe, which has been shattered yet confirmed by the revelations of the Ghost. And his exchanges with Horatio and Marcellus also offer opportunities for working out crucial staging choices as he refuses to reveal yet reveals something of how his encounter with the Ghost has transformed him. After they perform, listen to, or watch a performance of this scene, I ask, “What three decisions does Hamlet make after the exit of the Ghost”
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