Shakespeare is no Blake

From an online source:

"Specialists in Shakespeare's bawdy language are fond of noting that "nunnery" was common Elizabethan slang for "brothel," and that therefore Hamlet's command is ironic and even more despairing than it seems. The pun would accord with the paradoxical nature of the prince's speech, but there is little evidence elsewhere in the scene that Hamlet intends a double entendre."


This reminds me of Grice's ONLY analysis of 'literary' ambiguity:

----

It is Blake:


Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
Ah! she did depart!

Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveler came by,
Silently, invisibly
He took her with a sigh.


----

Grice notes that

"Love that never told can be"

flouts the maxim,

"avoid ambiguity"

He notes that this must be intentional because Blake is a 'sophisticated' poet.

-----

He compares this with Shakespeare, Sonnet 20



1 A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
2 Hast thou the master mistress of my passion,
3 A woman's gentle heart but not acquainted
4 With shifting change as is false women's fashion,
5 An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling:
6 Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth,
7 A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
8 Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
9 And for a woman wert thou first created,
10 Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
11 And by addition me of thee defeated,
12 By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
13 But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
14 Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

Grice quotes from lines 13 and 14

"But since she" --- surely "Nature", Grice notes,

"pricked thee", 'thee being the recipient of the poem -- a woman, except that he is referred somewhere else as bearing a 'goatee beard' -- implicating that he was perhaps a man -- H. Wriothesley --.

"out for women's pleasure"

Grice is interested in the ambiguity

love (NOT POLYEMOUS):

I)

---------- "a state or emotion".
---------- (b) "an object of emotion".

---

back in Blake's line, "love that never told can be" --

II)

--- Is Blake meaning, "love that cannot be told", or
-------- "love that, IF told, cannot continue to exist"?

He thinks Blake is possibly sophisticated enough to mean both (via implicature -- only implicature allows these things -- 'senses' cannot be held in contradictory disjunction like that).

He then compares that with the use of the same ambiguity (at least relating I) in Shakespeare's last two lines of the Sonnet 20 then,

-- which Grice glosses:

"But since she", viz. Nature, "pricked thee [whoever he or she is] out for women's pleasure,"

"14 --- Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure."

"Thy love be mine"

And

"Let thy love's use BE their treasure"

--- with 'their' meaning 'women', obviously.

----

"This is very difficult to formalise".

The presence of the imperative mode (and subjunctive) -- "Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be"; "mine be thy love, and thy's love use their treasure" --

Grice glosses the thing in the indicative:

"To avoid the compliations introduced by the presence
of the indicative [mode], I shall consider the
related sentence,"

-- also varying "Thou" for "I" and "thy" for 'my': rendering -- in the preterite that Grice found more perspicuous:

"I sought to tell my love, love that never told can be".

He notes that the implicture subsists -- unchallenged.

In the case of Shakespeare,

"But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure."

that Grice quotes (WoW:34) he notes that

an extensive analysis of this couplet
would diverge the present course of the
William James philosophical lectures
aimed at a reconsideration of Strawson's
bold comments about formal logic being
unable to reflect ordinary language

into such a tangent
that it would hurt

---- and would mean that Grice would have had to stay in Harvard for more than the appointed two weeks. (He had a cricket match to attend back in the North Oxford Cricket Club -- which he was presiding at the time).