A Sample Research Paper: 
With Works Cited

(Note: You can also see an Outline and a Graphic Organizer for this paper.)

Sample of a Title Page

    When Polonius asks Hamlet, “What do you read, my lord "(2.2.219)?  Hamlet’s response could not be more meaningful: “Words, words, words" (2.2.210).  What makes his response so “pregnant,” to us, despite its puzzling Polonius?  The disinterest and boredom with which Hamlet responds reflect his inner turmoil, a turmoil that Hamlet cannot appease with action, as he knows he should, but can only appease with words. On the surface, he appears to be responding to Polonius insolently, but the reality is that Hamlet is feeling the meaninglessness of life, as meaningless as the words are to him on the page.  His reply implies the extent of his despair.

Hamlet’s inner turmoil results from the news of his father’s wrongful death and of his mother’s hasty marriage to his father’s murderer: his brother and Hamlet’s uncle.  Thus, Hamlet becomes disgusted with humanity and its purpose in the world.  Quite fittingly, the “words, words, words” Shakespeare uses in Hamlet reflect his internal dilemma, contributing greatly to the complexity of Hamlet’s character:

The wrong suffered by Hamlet is not a mere tarnish that may be
                wiped from his scutcheon.  It is something he feels as an ineradicable  
                corruption in the nature of life itself.  Before the Ghost reveals to  
                Hamlet a crime which cries out for retribution, Hamlet has himself  
                discovered through his mother’s conduct a guilt which makes retribution  
                 impossible because [it is] irrelevant.  Nothing can be done, and Hamlet  
                does nothing. (Mahood 112)

Neither can he pretend that everything is normal, that nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.

    Hamlet is an excellent example of the importance of language in this particular Shakespearean drama because he relies more on thought and language than most any other of Shakespeare’s tragic characters.  He cannot act, he is unable to—Hamlet knows how to wound only with words.  Hence, Hamlet’s inner turmoil is conveyed to us not only through voice and gesture, but more importantly, also through word choice, wordplay, and unusual choices in syntax.  
    Jane Donawerth, in Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language, asserts that “the study of language in the sixteenth century shows a great increase in the role assigned to man.  Language reflects man’s history, and his rational and irrational powers; one studies language to know oneself”(6).  Donawerth continues by saying “Elizabethans found language to be a medium in its very nature expressive of the human condition.  In the fleeting sounds of the human voice they noted the effect of the transience of all human life” (7).  The character of Hamlet is an excellent example of these Elizabethan ideas about language.  Hamlet is unable to act because his pondering of the human condition reinforces his perception of the absurdity of the human condition: Do we not kill ourselves to relieve our suffering only because we do not know what awaits us in the afterlife?  The only way that Hamlet can see a way out of his suffering is to “shuffle off [his] mortal coil,” but in doing so, he would be shirking his duty to revenge his father’s murder.  Consequently, Hamlet feels completely helpless and powerless, illuminating for him both  the fleeting nature of life and the futility of humans’ place in it.

M. M. Mayhood in Shakespeare’s Wordplay examines Shakespeare’s wordplay in Hamlet “to show how it contributes to the dramatic realization of a psychological conflict: the conflict between the demands of an accepted ethical code and Hamlet’s particular vision of evil” (113).    Mahood points out that in the very first lines of the play a major theme is insinuated:

Horatio fears that the [appearance of the] apparition ‘bodes some  
strange eruption to our state’.  Ostensibly this means an outbreak of  
violence in the life of the country, but the pathological sense of  
eruption (…) and the possibility of state referring to the individual’s  
state of health as well as to the body politic prepare us for the disease  
imagery of later parts in the play; (113)

particularly the diseased state of Denmark and Hamlet’s diseased psychological and moral state as a result of his uncle’s and mother’s crimes.  

    Moreover, “Ideas about language…mark the stages by which Hamlet comes to terms with his world and, so, the nature of the task events thrust upon him” (Donawerth 245). One of the first ways that Hamlet must deal with his duty to revenge his father’s death is to realize that he has been greatly deceived; therefore, he must deceive as well.  His mistrust of himself and of others becomes apparent in his soliloquies and in his conversations with other characters by the language that Shakespeare chooses for him to use.  Hamlet realizes that he must be an actor now in the fiction world of Denmark and the fiction that he must create to protect himself: his antic disposition.  Because so many people have been deceived by Claudius’ and Gertrude’s actions, in a sense, they are all actors in a play, living fiction instead of reality. Hamlet must assume a fictitious role to remedy this charade.

Language emphasizes the fiction in which they are all playing.  At the outset, Claudius’ articulated grief to the general assembly of the court is not sincere, and he quickly tries to discourage the court from any outward displays of grief for the good of the state. Furthermore, Shakespeare exaggerates the characteristics of his subordinate, easy-flowing syntax to achieve a special effect (Hussey 90). His opening speech, “with the subordination and parentheses of its syntax, reveals, he is a master of circumlocution too:

                                    Therefore our sometime sister, now our Queen, 
                                    Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state, 
                                    Have we, as ‘twere with a defeated joy, 
                                    With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
                                    With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, 
                                    In equal scale weighing delight and dole, 
                                    Taken to wife.

                                                                                    (1.2.8-14; Hussey 90)

In addition, Gertrude reinforces their fictional world by trying to discourage Hamlet from showing his grief any longer.  She pleads with him to “…let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.  / Do not forever with thy vailed lids / Seek for thy noble father in the dust” (1.2.69-71). Notice that Gertrude asks that he “look like” a friend, not “be” a friend to his uncle (Donawerth 248).  Furthermore, Mahood points out that here “vailed means not only ‘lowered’ (as a flag is vailed), but also avaled, having the beaver down ready for combat. His reply takes up the meaning of veiled as ‘disguised’ and hints that his grief is not simulated” (114).  Hamlet’s response to his mother’s “Why seems [your grief] so particular with thee?” is that he is sincere, not overly dramatic:

                                    Seems madam? nay, it is,  
                                                I know not “seems.” 
                                                ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, 
                                                Nor customary suits of solemn black, 
                                                Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, 
                                                No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, 
                                                Nor the dejected havior of the visage, 
                                                Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, 
                                                That can denote me truly.  These indeed seem, 
                                                For they are actions a man might play, 
                                                But I have within me which passes show, 
                                                These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

                                                                                                                                                (1.2.75-86)

Here Hamlet admits that grief can be “played” in clothing, words, imagination, and facial expression, but insists that he is sincere.  However, he makes it clear that his do not “seem” but are outward signs of his true inner grief (Donawerth 249).  Hamlet will not grant his mother and Claudius’ request that he disguise his emotions, and pretend that everything is normal.

Here Willbern asserts that:

Hamlet suggests a more problematic relation.  Forms and actions  
                can after all be played, or imitated as in a play. (Theater, for instance,  
                consists largely of “actions that a man might play.”)  Such external  
                signs are modes of denoting, marking down, and are, Hamlet claims,  
                ultimately inadequate as true representations of substance.   His inner  
                state surpasses show.  Taken literally, what Hamlet’s words are here  
                claiming about Hamlet’s character is that the latter cannot be truly  
                performed. (2)

Willbern’s point is that the extent of Hamlet’s grief is so deep, that it could not possibly ever completely be “played.”  Hence, Hamlet reinforces the absurdity of Gertrude’s request and his own place in Denmark.

            Examination of the syntax of Hamlet’s first soliloquy gives the reader insight into his confusion and despair. The following is Hamlet’s response to this initial conversation with Claudius and Gertrude mentioned above.  Why must he pretend?  Why must he endure this horrible reality of his father’s death?  Why had his mother married Claudius, and so soon?

                                                                                    That it should come to this! 
                                                But two months dead—nay not so much, not two—

                                                ….

                                                                                                                And yet within a month— 
                                                 Let me not think on’t.  Frailty, thy name is woman. 
                                                 A little month, or e’er 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. 137-8,145-53; italics Hussey’s)

S. S. Hussey explains in The Literary Language of Shakespeare:

The exclamations and curses of the first simply show Hamlet’s  
                anger and disgust, but what it is that disgusts him emerges gradually  
                through the repetition: ‘But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two  
                ….within a month…A little month….Within a month.’  The parentheses,  
                on the other hand, both reveal his habit of generalization and, more  
                important, show the confused thoughts bubbling to the surface of his
             mind, thus giving the illusion of natural, disordered mental activity,  
                especially under stress; (191)

John Porter Houston, in Shakespearean Sentences, claims Hamlet’s first soliloquy (here above) to be perhaps Shakespeare’s

most surprising display of syntax adjusted to a turbulent inner  
                monologue….Cast in formal normal syntax, Hamlet’s words would  
                have been ‘but two months dead, so excellent a king.’  The dislocation  
                of sentence elements that Shakespeare makes is very small, but it  
                suffices to create quite another mode of expression.  The fragile  
                unity of the nominal sentence is impaired by the addition of ‘nay not  
                so much, not two,’ and what results has more the movement of free  
                association that that of an accepted and accustomed minor sentence
                form.  (97-8)

This “free association” is more reflective of actual thought, not correct grammar, and thus it more authentically reflects Hamlet’s inner conflict.

Once Hamlet hears the Ghost’s request, Hamlet is even further baffled:

How is he to rid the state of Denmark of an usurping murderer when  
                the state of all humanity is so deeply polluted, when, …existence itself  
                is the prime offense?  It is useless for the Ghost to say:

                                                                Taint not thy minde, nor let thy soule contriue  
                                                                Against thy mother ought, leaue her to heauen,

                                                                                                                                (1.5.85-86)

once Hamlet’s mind is already tainted as his flesh is sullied, and his  
                soliloquy which follows the Ghost’s departure shows that he is as much  
                obsessed with his mother’s guilt as with his uncle’s crime: ‘O most  
                pernicious woman’….He knows that the law of nature and of nations  
                would justify his killing Claudius.  He knows also that evil is not so  
                easily rooted out of society; the unweeded garden has run to seed  
                and no amount of weeding can prevent the growth of what has already  
                seeded.  No action that Hamlet can take will restore his mother’s  
                innocence.” ( Mahood 118)

Because this is the way that Hamlet feels about his situation and the condition of Man, he, intellectually, recognizes any action as futile, which is what makes him so complex, so tragic and which is what makes him rely so heavily on language.         

Hamlet’s response to his Ghost/father’s request plunges him further into questioning the human condition, and the way in which Shakespeare crafts Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy is even more complex.  According to Houston, a more extensive technique of syntactic manipulation occurs in ‘To be or not to be,’:

                                    To be or not to be, that is the question:  
                                                Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer  
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,  
                                                Or to take arms against a sea of troubles  
                                                And by opposing end them.  To die—to sleep,  
                                                No more; and by a sleep to say we end  
                                                The heart-ache ad the thousand natural shocks  
                                                That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation  
                                                Devoutly to be wished.  To die, to sleep;  
                                                To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.

                                                                                                                                (3.1.56-65)

    The many ambiguities of grammatical functions such as infinitive as subject, placing certain constructions in apposition, disjunctive new syntactic starts (such as that is, ‘tis, and there’s), and the clarity of the final punctuation—all of these give the “effect of repetition of words, both semantic and morphological, which tends to suggest a sublogical reverie” (Houston 99-100).  Hamlet is, in fact, in a deep philosophical dream world as he thinks to us aloud, and the way the soliloquy is constructed allows us to glimpse his thought processes and his wild imaginings.

    One other way that Shakespeare reinforces the idea of Hamlet coming to terms with his situation and the human condition can be seen in his choice of words.  Hussey argues that Shakespeare added many words to the English language to enhance and diversify it, because prior to his time, English was thought of as an inferior language, especially to Latin and the Romance languages, and conditions set by the Renaissance were demanding that writers make English smoother, more polished, more eloquent (10).  One way Shakespeare added to the English lexicon was by borrowing words from other languages.  A good example of his borrowing that enhances the idea in the play is again in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy at the point when Hamlet considers the consequences of suicide.  He asks who would endure the trials and tribulations of life  “When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin (3.1.75-76).  Quietus is a technical word from accounting; it is similar to audit.  “And this Latin loan in Hamlet achieves something not only of the mystery but also of the finality of death: the red line is ruled across the page and the account is closed” (Hussey 22).  No wonder Hamlet is so afraid of the consequences of his actions.  Perhaps without such a word choice, the sense of finality would be lost,  nor would the extremity of his inner turmoil be realized.

Once Hamlet’s plan of revealing Claudius’ guilt is a success, Hamlet finally takes some action, and to begin, he decides he must punish his mother, “…but in words, not in violent acts” (Donawerth 257) when he says:

                                    Let me be cruel, not unnatural;  
                                                I will speak daggers to her, but use none.  
                                                My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites—  
                                                How in my words somever she be shent,  
                                                To give them seals never my soul consent!

                                                                                                                                (3.2.395-9)

Instead of harming or killing Gertrude, Hamlet “turns his anger and disgust into a sermon to ‘wring’ [her] ‘heart’ (3.4.35) and to force on her a feeling of horror at her wrongs” (Donawerth 257-8).  As a result of violently chastising his mother, Gertrude responds: “These words like daggers enter in my ears. / No more, sweet Hamlet!” (3.4.95-96). “The image suggests the ability of words to pierce the ear and pain the heart of the listener: Gertrude has been moved to see her faults and feel guilty for them” (Donawerth 258).  More importantly, however, Hamlet’s words are finally full of action and intent, instead of melancholy and philosophy.  They are finally doing something.

Donawerth makes a compelling point when she asserts that

The graveyard scene is a turning point in Hamlet’s response to  
                changing human passions.  As he reflects upon the insignificance  
                of human action that the skulls represent, Hamlet extends his  
                observation to speech: ‘That skull had a tongue in it, and could
                sing once’ (5.1.75-6)….In the mirror of human speech, Hamlet,  
                like many other Renaissance men, sees not so much human  
                reason as the transience of all human powers. (261)

When speaking to Yorick’s skull, Hamlet contemplates mortality and comes to realize that  “The whirlwind of passions, whether turned into words or actions, will end” (Donawerth 261):

                                                                                    This councellor  
                                                Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,  
                                                Who was in his life a foolish prating knave

                                                                                                                                (3.4.213-15)

Yorick was the king’s jester and one of Hamlet’s favorite childhood companions, though ‘foolish’  and ‘prating.’  The pun on the word ‘grave’ shows Hamlet’s realization that no matter what kind of life we lead, of words or of actions, it always comes to the same end.  What happens after death is ‘still’ and ‘secret.’  “The graveyard scene universalizes the epitaph and prepares Hamlet for his own, ‘the rest is silence’” (Donawerth 261).  Hamlet’s contemplation here firmly sets his resolve.

            When Hamlet is dying, after finally revenging his father’s murder, his last words to Horatio are to rectify the state of Denmark by saying, “Fortinbras has my dying voice” (l. 356).  Horatio is the only character who knows Hamlet’s entire story, and Hamlet entrusts him with it to tell Fortinbras and Denmark of the immorality and depravity that have occurred.  Thus Fortinbras will be able to restore Denmark to the esteem it once held.   With Hamlet’s “the rest is silence” (l. 358), the play has come full circle (Donawerth 263).  Hamlet no longer has to speak, and he will not know the future of Denmark, but he will rest knowing that the truth is known and the fiction is over.  “The final transformation is not after all from speech to silence, but from the destructiveness of human passions to the truth in the story of them” (Donawerth 264). He has silenced the charade.

            Words, words, words are what carry Hamlet through the dark prison of his mind to us, the anxious readers or audience. Without Shakespeare’s brilliant wordplay and style, the complexity of Hamlet would not be as deeply moving and rich, and the tragedy would suffer for it.   “Through Hamlet’s experience we may come to understand that speech is a human instrument reflecting the limitations as well as the transcendence of the human spirit”                   ( Donawerth 264).  Willbern says it best when he comments:

                        What then denotes Hamlet truly? …the dilating associations of  
                                connotation: the play of language.  Hamlet is caught in his language;  
                                he is found in it, caught in it, rapt in it, lost in it—as we are….Words  
                                are Hamlet’s and Shakespeare’s matter, but words freed from their  
                                dramatic denotations and opened into connotations, so that ‘inky cloak’  
                                points to the character’s textual status, and ‘trappings’ and ‘suits’ become  
                                puns that predict his plots (the Mousetrap) and petitions (the Ghost’s to  
                                him, his to Ophelia and Gertrude) long before the character can know or  
                                intend these meanings.  If Hamlet’s enacted character, the role he plays  
                                or that actors play on his behalf, cannot disclose the ‘that within,”  perhaps  
                                Shakespeare’s language can…. The writing is all.  Shakespeare is in the  
                                details. (2)

 WORKS CITED

Donawerth, Jane. Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language. Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 

1984. Print.

Houston, John Porter. Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax. Baton Rouge: Louisianna State 

University Press, 1988. Print.

Hussey, S. S. The Literary Language of Shakespeare. New York: Longman, Inc., 1982. Print.

Mahood, M. M. Shakespeare's Wordplay. London: Methuen & Co. LTD, 1968. Print.

Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language. Philadelphia: University

            of  Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Print.

[Research Manual Homepage ][ Introduction ] [ Research Process ] [ Dewey Decimal ] [ Search Strategies ] [ Evaluating Resources ] [ Bibliography Cards ] [ Avoiding Plagiarism ] [ Note Cards ] [ Works Cited ] [ Parenthetical Citations ] [ Science Writing ] [ Documenting Science ] [ Outlining ] [ Sample Outline ] [ Graphic Organizers ] [ Sample Paper/Works Cited ] [ Primary Sources ] [ Glossary ] [ Useful Links ] [ citations ]

Virtual Library Home Page