ABSTRACT
At the end of Chapter 3, I presented a diagram of a re-reading cycle. What I hope you got from that was that any part of a literary work can only be properly understood in the light of the whole, and that each turn of the cycle enriches your reading experience. In the last chapter you saw how this works with the single word, ‘green’, which meant different things depending on how we related it to the larger structure of Hamlet. That is, the semantic context of ‘green’ was profoundly affected by the thematic contexts that we placed it in, each of which altered the tenor of the metaphor and thus the metaphor itself. This could be the court’s fresh sense of grief; Claudius’ knowledge of his inner jealously and guilt; or the play’s, and in particular Hamlet’s, harping on corruption. ‘Green’, then, formed what I called a crux. But the fuller meaning of the word – its ambiguities and possibilities – only become apparent once we have a sure sense of the play and the ways in which the play develops. My hope is that such an ambiguity brings with it a richer enjoyment of the language of the play; that complexity is, in itself, something that gives you as a reader pleasure – all the more so when you are equipped with the tools to unlock it.
