All Pun Intended

Samantha Garapati
Period 4: English
Date: 30th May 2010

“Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down”(1.4.28); it doesn’t take the mind of a rocket scientist or a teenage boy to figure out the innuendo behind that quote. That’s precisely Shakespeare’s genius; people can enjoy his plays, whether they have the intellectually tuned minds of inventors or the less stimulated minds of cottars. Puns are one of the tools with which he accomplishes this popularity in all spectrums. Not only does he use puns to add rude humour to scenes with bawdy jokes to enhance the enjoyment of the public, he also uses it to indirectly characterize, adding dimension to characters. Finally, he also uses it to foreshadow approaching events, creating anticipation and tension in audiences.

William Shakespeare’s primary use of pun is to add humour to scenes with bawdy jokes, thus providing audiences and readers comic relief and dissolving some of the tension of the previous and following scenes [T]. In the following quote, Shakespeare manages to both create the sexual imagery concerning virgins in readers’ minds and suggest that the best kind of wit is wit that is able to mould itself and accommodate many levels of meaning. Applying this to a larger subject, Shakespeare is suggesting that the best way to live life is to live on every level, base or intellectual. Our perception of life is essentially our personality, and our perspective is limited or broadened by our experiences, so in order to understand ourselves and others fully, we have to do all that we can and experience all type of emotion [M]. Reading the quote at first makes us laugh, amused, reading into it however, makes us more thoughtful and open to the ideas presented in the play [E]. “O here's a wit of cheveril, that stretches from an/ inch narrow to an ell broad!” (2.4.86-87). Another example of