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Shakespeare’s plays are packed with allusions , many of them allusions to classical literature since the classical Latin authors were what young boys studied in grammar school as part of mastering speaking and writing in Latin and in English. Hamlet’s first soliloquy provides an excellent place to engage students in answering the questions, “What is this allusion” “What does this allusion mean” and “What does this allusion do or what can it be made to do” Here is a short segment of Hamlet’s soliloquy that offers two allusions whose import students can work out with the help of the notes:


A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father’s body Like Niobe , all tears, why she, even she鈥?O God , a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourned longer arried with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules鈥?1.2.147-53) Hamlet describes his mother at the funeral of King Hamlet as being “Like Niobe , all tears” before expressing his incomprehension as to how she could not only have ceased to mourn her incomparable husband but then married his bestial younger brother (working out the significance of “Hyperion to a satyr” will establish this second point). The note provided by Philip Edwards in his edition of Hamlet informs us that Niobe is “[t]he mythical mother whose fourteen children were slain by the gods because she boasted about them. She wept until she was turned to stone鈥?and still the tears flowed”. Hamlet, that is, believes his mother should have continued to mourn her late husband and weep even after her metaphoric petrification.