Puns In Shakespeare's Plays

Throughout Shakespeare’s work, more famously in “Hamlet”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Othello”, and “Merchant of Venice”, there are cleverly placed puns in the poems, plays, and some sonnets. A pun is a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words that sound alike but have different meanings. These puns are either overlooked, unrecognized, or not credited well enough. The puns that Shakespeare utilizes in each of his works can have either an erotic, humorous, or an ironic purpose to give a deeper, more effective meaning to the stories. Before one can go into detail about the puns that Shakespeare used to create a humorous result, there are different factors that come in to play as to why he wrote them.
(I.iii.284-5)
Conveyance has a second definition from Elizabethan times, which means “trickery” or “deceitfulness”. A person cannot both be truthful and honest but hold some sort of trick to play at the right time. To quote Ewbank who can condense all the points before mentioned into one brief statement: ‘Shakespeare’s interest in the arts of language is as practical, as much directed towards function, as that of rhetoricians. His ultimate interest, after all, is to persuade us, the audience, of the human realities of thought and feeling in his plays’. The kinds of puns used throughout Shakespeare can be categorized into four different groups. The first two are Antanaclasis (the repetition of a word that can be used for two different meanings), Dilogy (using an ambiguous word or expression). Then we have Paronomasia (the play on words that sound alike), and Paronymy (when a word is derived from another or from the same root and then combined with a cognate or a derivative form within the same sentence). For Antanacalsis there are a few examples. The first example is in Hamlet when Polonius approaches Hamlet whilst he is reading: Pol: What do you read, my lord? Ham: Words, words,
With thy sharpe teeth this knot intrinsicate Of life at once untie (V.ii.302-305)
Explained by Mahood ‘intrinsicate is not just ‘intrincate’, Shakespeare is bringing together half a dozen meanings form intrinsic and intrinse; ‘familiar‘, ‘intimate’, ‘secret’, ‘private‘, ‘innermost’, ‘essential’, ‘that which constitutes the very nature and being of a thing’ --all the medical and philosophic meanings of his time as well as ‘intrincate’ and ‘involved’. Thirdly, there is the category Paronomasia, which to one’s surprise only a couple of examples were easily found. Paris’ line in Romeo and Juliet is a prime example with the use of ‘woe’ (distress or great sorrow) and ‘woo’ (to gain the love of someone): ‘These times of woe afford no time to woo’ (III.iv.8). Another example of this is in Hamlet (I.ii.65) ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’. Finally, there is Paronymy, which is sometimes a challenge to find if one does not know the root of words. The most apparent example is in Polonius’ speech to Queen Gertrude: … and now remains That we find out the cause of this