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William Shakespeare's play Hamlet has contributed many phrases to common English, from the famous "To be, or not to be" to a few less known, but still in everyday English. Some also occur elsewhere (e.g. in the Bible) or are proverbial. All quotations are second quarto except as noted:
The Gravediggers (or Clowns) are examples of Shakespearean fools (also known as clowns or jesters), a recurring type of character in Shakespeare's plays. Like most Shakespearean fools, the Gravediggers are peasants or commoners that use their great wit and intellect to get the better of their superiors, other people of higher social status, and each other.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, A Tragic Episode, in Three Tabloids is a short play by W. S. Gilbert that parodies William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The main characters in Gilbert's play are King Claudius and Queen Gertrude of Denmark, their son Prince Hamlet , the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , and Ophelia .
Hamlet is the play that Nostradamus sees in the future as Shakespeare's biggest play, but instead of 'Hamlet', he misinterprets it to be called 'Omelette'. [12] Richard Nathan's A Night In Elsinore is a parody of Hamlet, if it had been performed by classic film comedians, such as The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and The Three Stooges.
The term was popularized from Shakespeare's Hamlet (1599-1601). [11]The earliest ancestor of "willy-nilly" is the Old English, "sam we willan sam we nyllan" ('whether we wish to or wish not to'), found in King Ælfred's translation of De Consolatione Philosophiæ in 888 AD. [12]
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
While in Hamlet, Shakespeare uses discordant second person pronouns to express Hamlet's antagonism towards his mother. Queen Gertrude: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended. [she means King Claudius, Hamlet's uncle and stepfather] Hamlet: Mother, you have my father much offended. [he means King Hamlet, his late father]
A colloquialism-in-verse test places it after Hamlet and before Twelfth Night. Metrical analysis places it after Hamlet and Twelfth Night but before Measure for Measure and Othello . This all suggests a date of composition of somewhere between 1600 and 1602, but the exact order in which Hamlet , Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida were ...