| “In the most high and palmy state of Rome,A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted deadDid squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.” | allusion |
| “with us to watch.””Therefore I have entreated him along,With us to watch the minutes of this night.” | alliteration |
| “And let us once again assail your ears” | consonance |
| “This bodes some strange eruption to our state.” | imagery |
| “Doth make the night joint laborer with the day?” | metaphor |
| “Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there” | metaphor |
| “Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes” | metaphor |
| “But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.” | personification |
| “Let me not think on’t—Frailty, thy name is woman!”…she follow’d my poor father’s bodyLike Niobe, all tears.” | allusion |
| “Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s deathThat we with wisest sorrow think on him.” | alliteration |
| “Frailty, thy name is woman!—” | apostrophe (calling out to a dead person or abstract idea) |
| “My father’s spirit—in arms! All is not well,I doubt some foul play. Would the night were come!” | aside |
| “Therefore our sometimes sister” | consonance |
| “Though yet of Hamlet our late brother’s deathThe memory be green” | contradiction |
| “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?”, he says, “I am too much in the sun.” | pun |
| “My father’s spirit—in arms! All is not well” | foreshadow |
| “Tis an unweeded gardenThat grows to seed. | metaphor |
| “with mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage” | oxymoron |
| Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” | synecdoche |
| “Too oft before their buttons be disclos’d” (40)”Where of he is the head. Then if he says he lovesIt fits your wisdom so far to believe it.” | alliteration of b and h |
| “Be wary then, best safety lies in fear:Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.” | heroic couplet |
| “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.” | metonymy (a word for a thing with which it is generally associated) |
| “Give thy thoughts no tonguenor way unproportional thoughts his act.” | personification |
| Show me the steep and thorny way to heavenWhiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine | simile |
| Remember thee! | anadiplosis |
Hamlet Act 1 Literary Devices
July 28, 2019