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How shall we approach Hamlet? The hero tells us how: by considering the names of things. When Claudius asks the name of the play within the play, Hamlet calls it “The Mousetrap.” “Marry, how? Tropically. This play,” he says, “is the very image of a murder done in Vienna.…” Hamlet tells us how to read Hamlet: through the tropes, the images, looking not just for plays within plays but for plays within words, for wordplays. Much of this wordplay constitutes what I call metaphor-as-microdrama and takes the form of verbal clusters re-enacting in small compass larger or macrodramatic configurations of symbolic action.
A large portion of the deeper meaning of the play gets expressed in one such microdrama, a single, simple, innocuous-looking line:
I will speak daggers to her, but use none.
Hamlet utters it as though by way of reminding himself of the ghost's caution:
… nor let thy soul contriveAgainst thy mother aught; leave her to heaven,And to those thorns that in her bosom lodgeTo prick and sting her.
Hamlet's line about speaking daggers occurs within the context of his soliloquy ending:
Soft, now to my mother.