‘A LITTLE MORE THAN KIN AND LESS THAN KIND’: WORD-GHOSTS AND GHOST-WORDS IN HAMLET
‘A LITTLE MORE THAN KIN AND LESS THAN KIND’: WORD-GHOSTS AND GHOST-WORDS IN HAMLET

Summary/Abstract: This paper concentrates on taking into consideration some linguistic and stylistic aspects of this great Shakespearean tragedy in order to develop a poetic analysis meant to highlight the irreversible movement of meanings that finally leads to a tragic change of the whole world of the play. Repetitions that bring about new and disturbing layers of meaning, accumulations of dark energies, violent semantic eruptions, double meanings – all these give birth not only to a ghost that is made up of words, but, more interestingly, to words that behave like ghosts or even to words that are haunted by puzzling ghosts of their own. The comparisons with the semantic mechanisms from the comedies and with other great tragedies help us strengthen and better illustrate our demonstration.

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