“Sallets in the Lines to Make the Matter Savoury”: Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in <i>Hamlet</i> 2.2

Abstract

“Sallets in the Lines to Make the Matter Savoury”: Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2 Philip D. Collington In a conversation with the players visiting Elsinor, Shakespeare’s Hamlet requests a performance of Aeneas’s speech to Dido about the fall of Troy. “I remember one said there were no sallets [i.e., herbs or spices] in the lines to make the matter savoury,” Hamlet recalls, “nor no matter in the phrase that might indict the author of affectation, but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet.”1 In addition to its rhetorical purity, Hamlet appreciates the exclusivity of a speech that “pleased not the million” but received approbation by “others whose judgements in such matters cried in the top of mine” (2.2.428–30). In his sensitivity to the way literary utterances can be affected by stylistic interpolations (“sallets”), semantic insertions (“matter”), and audience responses (“’twas caviare to the general. But it was—as I received it . . . an excellent play” [lines 428–31]), Hamlet evokes signal concerns of Russian cultural philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. In his essay “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35), Bakhtin outlined how cultural contexts and individual responses prove as important in determining meaning as authorial intention or the language’s denotative content.2 Anticipating by a half-century such approaches as intertextual, new-historical, and reader-response criticism, Bakhtin posited a triangular hermeneutic whereby the author’s voice, sociohistorical contexts, and audience responses intersect and “interanimate” discourses whose words are already stratified with semantic layers (DN 296). The intersection of semantic elements renders each utterance a “hybrid construction” whereby the speech of one becomes the speech of many: many styles, many speech manners, many “semantic and axiological belief systems” (DN 304–5). To Bakhtin, the novel exemplifies such hybridity because there stylistic and semantic interpolations coexist within a higher artistic unity. In the novel, centrifugal energies of heteroglossia (the existence of a “diversity of individual voices” [DN 262]) are harnessed by centripetal energies of [End Page 237] monologism (the organizing presence of the author’s or narrator’s voice [DN 272]). A novelist is therefore less an originator than an “orchestrator” (DN 366) of languages yoked together by the “superstructure” of this most encompassing literary form (DN 409).3 One factor that has discouraged the application of such insights to Shakespeare’s plays is Bakhtin’s insistence that drama is precluded from dialogism because plays lack a centralized controlling presence: “the system of languages in drama is organized on completely different principles, and therefore its languages sound utterly different than do the languages of the novel. There is no all-encompassing language, dialogically oriented to separate languages” (DN 266). Drama is purely centrifugal, a cacophony of characters and voices with no organizing principle.4 This present study will argue the contrary; that the plurivocality of drama can generate the lively dialogic interanimations that Bakhtin limited to novelistic discourse. Using as a test case a single scene from Hamlet (act 2, scene 2), I will outline how Shakespeare incorporates what Bakhtin terms social “speech genres” and literary “inserted genres,” ranging from Voltemand’s language of diplomacy, Polonius’s hair-splitting pedantry, and Hamlet’s sentimental letter and poem to Ophelia; to Hamlet’s bizarre riddles, philosophical musing, and sophomoric gossip with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There are also a street ballad, a satirical character sketch, an excerpt of Senecan bombast, and a soliloquy by the prince. Each social speech genre and literary inserted genre is set against more naturalistic exchanges of dialogue (whether in prose or in verse), exchanges that advance plot and characterization without being encoded with identifiable literary or social subgenres. These framing passages do not represent an authorial presence or voice (as they might in the novel); instead, they provide an unobtrusive linguistic baseline against which the embedded forms and styles contrast markedly. Rather than simply juxtapose disparate linguistic styles and forms, Hamlet creates what Bakhtin terms “dialogic reverberations” (DN 284) when interpolated styles and forms overlap and interanimate one another, creating multiple layers of meaning—such as when individual characters appropriate the speech genres of others (e.g., Rozencrantz attempts to debate philosophy with the more erudite...