would love to read more about the hendiadys you mention here. I think Russ Macdonald delved into them a bit in his book on Shakespeare's language, but i might be misremembering how much. might just be it was the first time i read about them. if you're still keen to do a deep dive on it you'll have at least one keen reader. wondering now if there were any other rhetorical devices he used that came more to the fore in a similar way later in his career
oh i'm annoying and wrong. i thought hendiadys was discussed in Arts of Language, by Russ Mcdonald, but i've just done a search and it's not mentioned at all. suppose it must have been Shakespeare's Language, Kermode, though could've sworn i'd read about them elsewhere, too. apologies
oh i see. from the (typo-riddled) transcript, around 37:33:
"Have I something new or challenging or interesting to share about Shakespeare? What, off the top of my head? Or, like, I don't have anything new to say in terms of the weight of scholarship. I don't think. Well, do I? Ha, ha, ha. One of my favorite papers about Shakespeare, which I haven't written about,
and I probably will write about it, but not on the blog, so... I'll say it here where it's not permanent, is all about hendiades in Hamlet, which I think I was talking about earlier, the idea that hen diades is when you have, instead of saying the furious sound, you say the sound and the fury.
And you can see immediately that furious sound is a kind of dim-witted expression that Shakespeare wouldn't use and makes you sound like an idiot. But the sound and the fury is an intriguing expression because they're not quite separate. When we say cats and dogs, we know that we mean two separate things.
They exist in parallel on either side of the conjunction. Handiardi says, no, they're kind of tied together, they're kind of integrated. And Hamlet has by far the most Handiardis in any of the Shakespeare plays, way, way more than any of the others. And so it's interesting to think about Hamlet as a play of doubles,
which obviously like every critic ever has pointed out. But the rhetorical use of Hendiades in Hamlet is a way of manifesting that doubleness in Hamlet's speech and in himself and I think it possibly remains underexplored unless I just haven't seen the work because Shakespeare is obviously a very good user of rhetoric."
I’m so glad this was recorded!
Nice surprise
would love to read more about the hendiadys you mention here. I think Russ Macdonald delved into them a bit in his book on Shakespeare's language, but i might be misremembering how much. might just be it was the first time i read about them. if you're still keen to do a deep dive on it you'll have at least one keen reader. wondering now if there were any other rhetorical devices he used that came more to the fore in a similar way later in his career
Which book was it about
oh i'm annoying and wrong. i thought hendiadys was discussed in Arts of Language, by Russ Mcdonald, but i've just done a search and it's not mentioned at all. suppose it must have been Shakespeare's Language, Kermode, though could've sworn i'd read about them elsewhere, too. apologies
but what was I talking about?
oh i see. from the (typo-riddled) transcript, around 37:33:
"Have I something new or challenging or interesting to share about Shakespeare? What, off the top of my head? Or, like, I don't have anything new to say in terms of the weight of scholarship. I don't think. Well, do I? Ha, ha, ha. One of my favorite papers about Shakespeare, which I haven't written about,
and I probably will write about it, but not on the blog, so... I'll say it here where it's not permanent, is all about hendiades in Hamlet, which I think I was talking about earlier, the idea that hen diades is when you have, instead of saying the furious sound, you say the sound and the fury.
And you can see immediately that furious sound is a kind of dim-witted expression that Shakespeare wouldn't use and makes you sound like an idiot. But the sound and the fury is an intriguing expression because they're not quite separate. When we say cats and dogs, we know that we mean two separate things.
They exist in parallel on either side of the conjunction. Handiardi says, no, they're kind of tied together, they're kind of integrated. And Hamlet has by far the most Handiardis in any of the Shakespeare plays, way, way more than any of the others. And so it's interesting to think about Hamlet as a play of doubles,
which obviously like every critic ever has pointed out. But the rhetorical use of Hendiades in Hamlet is a way of manifesting that doubleness in Hamlet's speech and in himself and I think it possibly remains underexplored unless I just haven't seen the work because Shakespeare is obviously a very good user of rhetoric."
kermode mentions that paper, yes, in his Hamlet chapter, but the whole paper is worth reading
i'll seek it out, cheers (tho if you can ever remember the name of it that'd be ace)