“Word-play — a dangerous sport”? Elizabethan punning wit

Abstract

In the paper an intensive lexical and sound repetition, one of the stylistic devices permanently in use with Shakespeare, is considered. The device often results in a pun that stands as a manifestation of thought or feeling as yet insufficiently ripe to be fully grasped or expressed. In the history play Richard II this device has a special importance as the play comes out at the moment when Shakespeare was testing various poetic manners with an aim to renovate dramatic speech in Elizabethan drama. In Richard II one of the major styles marks a definite birth of metaphysical poetry, soon to become a trend heralded by John Donne but first introduced in Shakespeare’s play. Most vividly metaphysics is represented in Richard’s soliloquies, growing in tension through the final three acts, when the hero has to face a new situation fraught for him with a loss of personal identity which leads him to problematize his predicament. His thought, vague and stumbling, is involved in “lexical ambiguity” (Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas) as it is in Act III, sc. 3 when, invited to meet the usurper in the lower room, Richard sets on the wordplay with the idea of being low, down and humiliated.