Abstract
The discourse pronouns thou and you have been much discussed and analysed in literature of earlier periods in English, especially in the genres of poetry and drama. However, there has been very little stylistic interest in the first-person pronoun, although its rhetorical function is well known in poetry and children’s fiction. In this chapter, I focus on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and within that play specifically on the scenes in Act 1 between Hamlet and the Ghost. I argue that Shakespeare’s use highlights the play’s theme of claims to identity and manipulates contemporary schemas of ghost discourse and ontology, as well as acting as a means of plot suspense. As a result, conventional views of the pronoun I in general and its semiotic functions can be re-assessed.
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Notes
- 1.
It must also be noted that within the play the Ghost is played by another actor , the Player King, Act III, ii, in the embedded mime or dumbshow of The Mousetrap. The Ghost’s unwillingness to speak until the third scene of Act I can be seen to anticipate this.
- 2.
All quotations from Hamlet are taken from the Signet Classic edition (1963), based on the Second Quarto and the First Folio. Quotations from other Shakespeare plays are taken from the Cambridge Text of John Dover Wilson (1987). The italics of pronouns and noun phrases are my own and are intended to highlight significant vacillations of identity.
- 3.
In Shakespeare’s time , it spreads his [sic] arms would have been grammatically correct, since his was an archaic form of the ‘neuter’ possessive. See further Adamson (2001: 214–215).
- 4.
Bate and Rasmussen (2008: 189–193) have a section on staging the Ghost which could be further developed from the perspective of the phonetics of performance in different productions. For example, in one production in 1965 the ghost resembled a “Dalek” (p. 191), but no notes are provided on the voice quality, disappointingly. In a 2004 production the Ghost’s mouth was “contorted into a silent scream”; and he “hawks up his speeches in an agonised vomit of vengefulness” (p. 193).
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Wales, K. (2018). “I Am Thy Father’s Spirit”: The First-Person Pronoun and the Rhetoric of Identity in Hamlet . In: Gibbons, A., Macrae, A. (eds) Pronouns in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95317-2_2
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