1.2. Shakesperean Puns
Importante
"Puns are the highest form of literature."
Alfred Hitchcock
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Puns are jokes that use different meanings of the same or similar sounding words. English spelling allows different words with the same sound to be spelled differently, so there is more opportunity in English for puns. Puns are very difficult to understand unless you know both meanings of the words.For example:
When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
The pun here is on the words seconds and four/for. Seconds has two meanings: a measure of time (60 seconds in 1 minute), and a second helping or serving of food. For example, if you are eating at home and your spouse asks you if you want "seconds," s/he means "Do you want another serving of the food you just ate?" Four is a number (4), and for is a preposition. To go back for seconds means to go get more food. To go back four seconds means the clock reverses in time four seconds. So this is a "double pun," in that we are "punning" on the words seconds and four.
Do you understand the following jokes based on puns?
A woman was driving in her car on a narrow road. She was knitting at the same time, so she was driving very slowly.
A man came up from behind and he wanted to pass her. He opened the window and yelled, "Pull over! Pull over!"
The lady yelled back, "No, it's a scarf!"
A man wanting to borrow another man's newspaper asks, "Are you finished?"
The other man replies, "No, I'm Norwegian."
In London, one man to another:
A: "You know, my daughter has married an Irishman"
B: "Oh, really?"
A: "No, O'Reilly"
Two friends meet and one of them says:"I've taught my dog how to speak English!"
"That's impossible", says the other man."Dogs don't speak!"
"It's true! I'll show you." He turns to his dog, "How's the situation in England?"
The dog answers: "Rough, rough."
Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn't much, but the reception was brilliant!
A boiled egg every morning is hard to beat.
Without geometry, life is pointless.
Did you hear about the red boat that collided with the blue boat?
Both crews were marooned.
Past, present and future walk into a bar. It was tense.
Future asks the other two what they will be having. Past says he's had enough, and Present says he's OK at the moment.
This atom walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "I think I lost an electron here last night." The bartender says, "Are you positive?"
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Puns in literature
A pun can achieve certain effects. In literature a pun can:
- Make you laugh
- Make you think
- Increase clarity when we're trying to discern the meaning of a text
- Introduce ambiguity
Perhaps no writer is greater known for his use of the pun than William Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson claims that puns are to Shakespeare what "luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire." Some of his puns were relatively simple plays on words, such as "it is the unkindest tied that ever any man tied." or "Tis no mean happiness to be seated in the mean."
One of the cleverest and most morbid puns comes as a joke from a fatally-stabbed Mercutio, who stops joking to explain that "tomorrow ... you shall find me a grave man." Grave means serious, but here it also alludes to his imminent death.
In Julius Caesar, there is a cobbler. When asked what he does, he replies, I am a mender of men's soles (souls).
In the opening lines of Richard III, the title character says:
"Now is the winter of our discontent
ade glorious summer by this sun of York;"
The pun is based on the two meanings of the spoken word sun (son and sun). Gloucester refers to Richard both as the son of the Duke of York and also a bright sun which would chase away their wintry blues. We talked about it in section 5 of lesson 2 in unit 2: My Kingdom for a Horse. There you could watch the beginning of the film Richard III, where William Shakespeare's classic play is brought into the present with the setting as Great Britian in the 1930s. Civil war has erupted with the House of Lancaster on one side, claiming the right to the British throne and hoping to bring freedom to the country. Opposing is the House of York, commanded by the infamous Richard who rules over a fascist government and hopes to install himself as a dictator monarch.
Objetivos
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Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums chang’d to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visag’d war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;
And now,–instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,–
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I,–that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;–
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore,–since I cannot prove a lover,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, ...
Here you have a modern English translation of the sololoquy.
Objetivos
School children across the land may be heard to accuse Shakespeare of writing comedies that are not funny and poems that do not rhyme. But it appears the fault does not lie with the Bard's creative skills, but a simple problem of miscommunication. It has been argued that the key to enjoying Shakespeare's finest work is to understand how it would have been pronounced in his day, with a guide revealing a host of puns, jokes and rhymes that readers previously would have missed. Read more about it here.