The Player’s Speech in Hamlet

Abstract

There are two extreme views about this speech. According to one, Shakespeare quoted it from some play, or composed it for the occasion, simply and solely in order to ridicule, through it, the bombastic style of dramatists contemporary with himself or slightly older; just as he ridicules in 2 Henry IV. Tamburlaine’s rant about the kings who draw his chariot, or puts fragments of similar bombast into the mouth of Pistol. According to Coleridge, on the other hand, this idea is ‘below criticism’. No sort of ridicule was intended. ‘The lines, as epic narrative, are superb.’ It is true that the language is ‘too poetical — the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama’; but this is due to the fact that Shakespeare had to distinguish the style of the speech from that of his own dramatic dialogue.