Shakespeare's love of Puns

This semester I am taking a course on Shakespeare and we will read nine of his plays throughout the course.  We are on the fourth play now, As You Like It, and as I read his plays and am becoming more familiar with Shakespearean style I have noticed his strong use of Rhetoric through puns.  I have found his use of homonyms and figures of speech as an interesting and effective way to engage the audience on more than one level of intellectual pleasure, reveal key plot themes and characterization, and of course provide humor.

In the Taming of the Shrew, Gremio, Petruchio's servant, speculates the courting between a forceful and witty Petruchio and Kate the loud, obnoxious and witty shrew.  He says, "I'll tell you what sir, and she stand him but a little, he will throw a figure in her face and so disfigure her with that she shall have no more eyes to see withal than cat" (Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.111-115). Gremio employs a figure of speech and plays on the words "figure" and "disfigure" to create humor and reveal elements of character of the recently introduced courtier Petruchio.  In this instance the word "figure" means a figure of speech or pun or insult that Petruchio will present Kate with when courting.  The word "disfigure" creates symmetry in the sentence and plays on the word figure by using it in a physical sense. He uses disfigure meaning that Petruchio's speech will cause her face to become distorted in confusion, disgust, or anger.  Gremio's pun is only noticed by the attentive and educated listener, and creates another level of comedy in the play for them.  It also reveals information about the main characters and their future interactions in the play.

Shakespeare loved puns so much that they often speckle his histories, romances, and even tragedies. Because his plays were performed in a oral style, he utilized the effects of homonyms to create humor and reveal plot. In Richard III Shakespeare employs the use of homonyms in the first two lines of Richard's opening soliloquy: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York" (Richard III).  The homonym used here is "son" and "sun". The parallel structure of the line creates a powerful image in the listener's mind of winter yielding to summer, just as Lancaster yields to York in the play.  Just as the sun brings an end to winter, the son of York brought an end to the discontent by bringing peace.

Many of Shakespeare's puns can create bawdy humor when uncovered in his plays, and perhaps I'll focus a future blog on this aspect of Shakespeare's use of puns. However, in this blog I displayed Shakespeare love of puns by means of word play.  Classic rhetorers valued the artistic style of the written and spoken word just as much, if not more than its content.  Shakespeare's use of puns and word play make it clear that he held these same values.  However, his puns often served as another level of intellectual enjoyment for educated members of the audience, and revealed key plot and character developments in the play.  Shakespeare's love of puns displays one aspect of his love of rhetoric, and his ability to employ rhetoric to serve many purposes in his plays makes him one of the greatest writers of all time.